Vandana Shiva Quotes
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We must occupy the food system to create food democracy.
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It is from the Himalayan forests and ecosystems that I learned most of what I know about 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.
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Amory Lovins has said that the only reason Americans look efficient is that each has 300 energy slaves. Those 300 energy slaves will now be reproduced among the elite of India.
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The environmental movement can only survive if it becomes a justice movement. As a pure environmental movement, it will either die, or it will survive as a corporate 'greenwash'. Anyone who's a sincere environmentalist can't stand that role.
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My personal background is actually very unusual for the kind of career I chose. I didnt meet anyone who had ever done physics in my life. I grew up in the Himalayan forests. My father was a forest conservator, which meant that if I wasnt in school I was in the forests with him. That has been very largely responsible for my ecological inclinations.
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The idea of engineering is an idea of mastery. And today the role that we are being asked to play is a role based on informed humanity.
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Seen from a monocultural perspective, manipulating objects is very, very clever. But seen from a multidimensional perspective, from a perspective of diversity, this is extremely crude because what we have lost out on is a cow that serves as a source of sustainable energy.
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The reductionist measure of yield is to agriculture systems, what GDP is to economic systems. It is time to move from measuring yield of commodities, to health and well-being of ecosystems and communities. Industrial agriculture has its roots in war. Ecological agriculture allows us to make peace with the earth, soil and the society.
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Patriarchy is based on appropriating rights and leaving responsibility to others.
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If you read Wall Street's reports, they don't talk of soya bean as originating in China. They don't talk of soya bean as soya bean. They talk of Monsanto soya. Monsanto soya is protected by a patent. It has a patent number. It is therefore treated as a creation of Monsanto, a product of Monsanto's intelligence and innovation.
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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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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 agrarian crisis [in India] is an unnecessary tragedy, resulting directly from an economics of greed and a politics driven by the economies of greed.
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That amazing power of being able to stand with total courage in the face of total power and not be afraid. That is stri shakti.
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I do sculpting sometimes when I have the time, and the first thing I sculpted was a bust of [Albert] Einstein. It still sits on my table and still inspires me. He was a person who triggered my imagination and my ideas.
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It is not an investment if it destroys the planet
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The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.
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Population control is not an issue involving contraceptives for third world women. It is an issue of ecological justice.
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Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.
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We have managed to make the celebration of diversity our mode of resistance.
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Soil, not oil, holds the future for humanity.
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I started out in nuclear physics. But after I became more sensitized to the environmental and health implications of the nuclear system - I was being trained to be the first women in the fast-breeder reactor in India (and was in it when it first went critical) - I didn't feel comfortable with it. So I went into theoretical physics.
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Biopiracy (is) biological theft; illegal collection of indigenous plants by corporations who patent them for their own use.