Vandana Shiva Quotes
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We're living in the anthropocene age and now human beings will be the shapers of our future, that totally control the overall functions of not just our planet, but our relationship with other planets.
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Nature has given us this for free, it was meant to sustain us, we will not allow it to become a monopoly to finance the Imperial Army.
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I think we will become disenchanted with the glamour of globalization.
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Genetic engineering has never been about saving the world, it's about controlling the world.
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A single, one-dimensional way of thinking has created a monoculture of the mind. And the monoculture of the mind has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the root of why we have pitted equity against ecology and sustainability against justice.
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Uniformity is not nature's way; diversity is nature's way.
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One particular spark was when I went back to my favorite spot in the mountains where my father always used to take us before my graduate studies in Canada and finding that the stream I had gone swimming in wasn't there. The forest had been converted into an apple orchard with World Bank financing. The entire place, literally, had changed.
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Biotech and geo engineering have the same mindset, of engineering, of power, of control, of mastery of nature.
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Given that I was interested in physics, I think it was easier for me to do physics in India.
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Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.
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I saw brilliant ideas coming out of the [Chipko] movement that needed better articulation, that needed elaboration and systematic analysis. I just followed that and it's been very exciting.
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When I find too many puzzles about the way explanations are given about why there is inequality - why people who work the hardest in the world end up being the poorest - I can't just sit back and not try to understand why the gaps between people are increasing, or why there are so many homeless and hungry people in the world.
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The occupation of America (and Columbus's arrival quite clearly was an occupation, no one can deny that) meant that the entire history of the Native Americans was rendered invisible. The land could only be occupied if it was first defined as empty. So it was defined as a wilderness, even though it had been used by native people for millennia.
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I like to live my life so that my loved ones give me the things I need as gifts and I give them the things they need. Frankly a society built around consumerism is hell
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The spinning wheel became the symbol of Indian independence. So we always say, "if the spinning wheel was the symbol of our first independence, then the seed is the symbol of our second independence."
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The only way to build hope is throuhgh the Earth.
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In traditional agriculture, the soil is the mother. She's the mother who gives, to whom you must give back.
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We are in a strange kind of time, where the kind of liberation movements such as anti-apartheid movements and freedom struggles in India need to be reinvented. We need to retool them so that all the gains that our generation has made can be passed on to future generations.
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When you control seed, you control food.
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Globalisation has in effect made the citizen disappear, and it has reduced the state into being a mere instrument of global capital.
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If you see cattle as a source of organic manure, animal energy, as well as milk products, then Indian cattle are not inferior. It is only when you measure them as milk machines that they become inferior. What if we measured the dairy cows of America or Jersey or the Swiss Alps in terms of their work functions? They would be terribly inferior.
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When the forest is destroyed, when the river is dammed, when the biodiversity is stolen, when fields are waterlogged or turned saline because of economic activities, it is a question of survival for these people. So our environmental movements have been justice movements.
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I did physics because of my love of nature. As a young student of science, I was taught that physics was the way to learn nature. So my travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology.
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When the wilderness movement emerged, it emerged separate from the issue of social inequality and the economic problems of survival. It was a preservationist ecology movement created by an occupying culture. Clearly, a wilderness movement started by Native Americans would not have had the same roots.