Vandana Shiva Quotes
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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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There is now a patent restricting the use of an herb called philantis neruri for curing jaundice. An even more blatant example is the use of turmeric for healing wounds, which is something every mother and grandmother does in every home in India. Now the Mississippi Medical Center claims to have "invented" the capacity of turmeric to heal wounds.
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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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We must occupy the food system to create food democracy.
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It is often too late by the time the government reacts.
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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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It is from the Himalayan forests and ecosystems that I learned most of what I know about ecology.
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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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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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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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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 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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Soil, not oil, holds the future for 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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Population control is not an issue involving contraceptives for third world women. It is an issue of ecological justice.
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It is not an investment if it destroys the planet
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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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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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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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The art of teaching is clarity and the art of learning is to listen.
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An organic farmer is the best peacemaker today, because there is more violence, more death, more destruction, more wars, through a violent industrial agricultural system. And to shift away from that into an agriculture of peace is what organic farming is doing.
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The primary threat to nature and people today comes from centralising and monopolising power and control. Not until diversity is made the logic of production will there be a chance for sustainability, justice and peace. Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.
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It's worse than slave trade because what is being traded is the very knowledge that makes survival possible for 80 percent of the people of this world. These 80 percent live on the biodiversity and the knowledge they have evolved as part of a rich collective heritage involving the use of seeds for growing crops and medicinal plants for healing.