-
I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.
Vandana Shiva
-
In civilizational issues you don't look at the tiny details as the debate. You have to look at the big picture!
Vandana Shiva
-
We have managed to make the celebration of diversity our mode of resistance.
Vandana Shiva
-
Unless the poor of the world agitate for themselves to be heard, there will be no changes in their circumstances.
Vandana Shiva
-
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.
Vandana Shiva
-
Soil, not oil, holds the future for humanity.
Vandana Shiva
-
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.
Vandana Shiva
-
Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.
Vandana Shiva
-
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.
Vandana Shiva
-
My mother taught that if anyone needs you, you should be available to them.
Vandana Shiva
-
Whatever happens to seed affects the web of life.
Vandana Shiva
-
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.
Vandana Shiva
-
In traditional agriculture, the soil is the mother. She's the mother who gives, to whom you must give back.
Vandana Shiva
-
I think the structures of exclusion are more systematically built up in American society, for example, so that young girls interested in science eventually lose their confidence over time. The structures of exclusion work against them. We have other structures of exclusion in India, but not around modern scientific knowledge.
Vandana Shiva
-
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.
Vandana Shiva
-
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.
Vandana Shiva
-
Something is very, very wrong when people dont have access to drinking water, and Coke creates its market out of that scarcity.
Vandana Shiva
-
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."
Vandana Shiva
-
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.
Vandana Shiva
-
The best and most evolved technologies are those that do not destroy the very base on which we live
Vandana Shiva
-
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.
Vandana Shiva
-
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.
Vandana Shiva
-
Food is the place where you begin.
Vandana Shiva
-
The liberation of the earth, the liberation of women, the liberation of all humanity is the next step of freedom we need to work for, and it's the next step of peace that we need to create.
Vandana Shiva
