Vandana Shiva Quotes
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Although two thirds of our planet is water, we face an acute water shortage. The water crisis is the most pervasive , most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth.
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My mother taught that if anyone needs you, you should be available to them.
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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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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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It is often too late by the time the government reacts.
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Nobody defines it as something women shouldn't be doing. In a way, there are more mathematicians, more doctors, more scientists in India than there are in this country. We even had a woman head of state, and that's something the United States has yet to catch up with.
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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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To create the protection for the corporations, government is actually growing bigger than ever before, in every part of the world. Yet its growing extremely thin as a protector of people.
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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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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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Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being.
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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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I saw some women had written that the cloning of Dolly was wonderful since it showed that women could have children without men. They didnt even understand that this was the ultimate ownership of womenof embryos, of eggs, of bodiesby a few men with capital and control techniques, that it wasnt freedom from men but total control by men.
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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 abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.
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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 fact that I still find so much beauty in a handicraft is because my mother taught us to see not just the craft as a product but the craft as an embodiment of human creativity and human labor.
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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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When you don't take into account the way ecological systems work, then you do damage.
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Biopiracy (is) biological theft; illegal collection of indigenous plants by corporations who patent them for their own use.
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The poorest of families, the poorest of children, are subsidizing the growth of the largest agribusinesses in the world. I think its time we recognized that in free trade the poor farmer, the small farmer, is ending up having to pay royalties to the Monsantos of the world.
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We have managed to make the celebration of diversity our mode of resistance.
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Genetic engineering has never been about saving the world, it's about controlling the world.
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Whatever happens to seed affects the web of life.