Vandana Shiva Quotes
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Unless the poor of the world agitate for themselves to be heard, there will be no changes in their circumstances.
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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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I've just been told that Nestle has taken out patents on the making of pullao. (Pullao is the way we make our rice in India, with either vegetables or meat or whatever.) Before you know it, every common use of plants will be patented by a Western corporation.
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For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity - saying "no" to patents on life, and developing intellectual ideas of resistance - is very much a continuation of Gandhian satyagraha. It is, for me, keeping life free in its diversity.
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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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In traditional agriculture, the soil is the mother. She's the mother who gives, to whom you must give back.
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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.
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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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I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.
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Today the environmental movement has become opposed to issues of justice. You can see this in the way issues are framed. It's a permanent replay of jobs-versus-the-environment, in nature-versus-bread. These are extremely artificial dichotomies.
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Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.
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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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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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The art of teaching is clarity and the art of learning is to listen.
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We share this planet, our home, with millions of species. Justice and sustainability both demand that we do not use more resources than we need.
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I didn't leave physics because of boredom. I left it because other issues compelled me in a bigger way. And I always say to myself, "When I'm 60, I'd like to go back to what I interrupted."
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In civilizational issues you don't look at the tiny details as the debate. You have to look at the big picture!
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Something is very, very wrong when people dont have access to drinking water, and Coke creates its market out of that scarcity.
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Food is the place where you begin.
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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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We will either defend the rights of people and the earth, and for that we have to dismantle the rights that corporations have assigned to themselves, or corporations will in the next three decades destroy this planet, in terms of human possibilities.
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As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.
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Gandhis idea of swadeshithat local societies should put their own resources and capacities to use to meet their needs as a basic element of freedomis becoming increasingly relevant. We cannot afford to forget that we need self-rule, especially in this world of globalization.
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The Chipko activists have always been close to my parents, since my father was among the few forestry officials who supported them within the bureaucracy. And I was involved with the Chipko movement in my student days.