What's in a seed? The smallest is as tiny as 0.05 millimetres, almost imperceptible to the naked eye. Its hard coat is packed with nutrients and protects a tiny embryoA fertilised egg that is developing into a foetus..

It is dormantThe word comes from the Latin word for sleep. at first, but water and warmth nurture it to life. It germinates, its shell cracking open. A courageous green shoot fights up through the soil towards the light, and strong roots burrow deep into the earth.

For Dr Vandana Shiva, seeds are a symbol of everything beautiful in life. They represent sovereigntyThe authority of a state to govern itself, or sometimes another state., courage, survival, and biodiversity. For five decades, Shiva has fought for the cause of environmental justice in India and beyond, inspired by the humble seed.

Shiva was born in 1952 in the forests in Uttarakhand, a mountainous state in northern India. "The forests were my identity and from an early age the laws of nature captivated me," she told The Guardian.¹

Her parents were equally captivated. Her father was a forest conservator and her mother was a farmer who nourished her daughter's love of the natural world. Both of her parents were progressive and supported her education; Shiva was raised without a doubt that she was equal to men.

She started out as a brilliant quantum physicist who moved to Canada to complete her PhD. But when she moved back to India, she became inspired by the Chipko movement, when protesters hugged trees to prevent them from being harvested by loggers.

Chipko - the Hindu word for "to hug" - was led by women who threatened to die to protect their forests. Shiva says it opened her eyes to the ways in which landscapes, and poor local people, were being devastated by new technologies.

Her first research foundation had humble beginnings: it started in her mother's cow shed in Dehradun, the winter capital of Uttarakhand. But Shiva was driven by a passionate commitment to finding out where agriculture had gone wrong in India.

Her research looked at rural India's "green revolution" of the 1960s, which was started to drive up crop yields for fear of famine. She identified a number of faults in the system it left behind: soil depletion, water scarcity, and monoculture farming which had led to huge losses in biodiversity. She criticised the large multinational corporations which had profited from upending traditional Indian agriculture.²

In 1987, Shiva founded Navdanya, which translates to "nine seeds" in Hindi. This began her focus on "seed freedom", fighting the corporate control of seeds. She has campaigned for decades for the protection of traditional seed varieties, resistance to corporate patent laws allowing corporations to take ownership of seed genetics, and genetically modified organisms - GMOs.

"Food is the place, seed is the place where we have to reclaim our democracy... We have a short window of time to reclaim both our bread and our freedom, otherwise we will have neither bread nor freedom", Shiva said in one 2014 speech.³

With her simple lifestyle, passionate environmental advocacy and struggle for the rights of poor and disadvantaged people, Shiva seeks to remind us all of the humble origins of all life on Earth: a small seed, struggling towards the light.

Have we forgotten what life is?

Yes: Dr Vandana Shiva reminds us that we are supposed to live for our world, instead of at odds with it. Her life has been driven by a love of nature and a desire to remain in equilibrium with its beauty, never taking more than our share or altering what is natural.

No: We have not forgotten what life is, but we are adapting to the modern world. We are no longer restricted to the patterns of nature. We can shape and alter nature to fit our will. There is no need to be ashamed of progress.

Or... What Shiva is criticising is a movement that was built to save millions of people from famine. If the green revolution had not happened, some argue, and if corporations had not stepped up, many more people might have suffered.