Vandana Shiva
Diversity creates harmony, and harmony creates beauty, balance, bounty and peace in nature and society, in agriculture and culture, in science and in politics.Collection: Agriculture
In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life.Collection: Economy
We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.Collection: Earth Day
Uniformity is not nature's way; diversity is nature's way.Collection: Nature
Soil, not oil, holds the future for humanity.Collection: Oil
I do not allow myself to be overcome by hopelessness, no matter how tough the situation. I believe that if you just do your little bit without thinking of the bigness of what you stand against, if you turn to the enlargement of your own capacities, just that itself creates new potential.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Home
The time has come to reclaim the stolen harvest and celebrate the growing and giving of good food as the highest gift and the most revolutionary act.Collection: Giving
Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being.Collection: Foundation
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.Collection: Humanity
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.Collection: War
It is not an investment if it destroys the planetCollection: Investment
I think the American people should see that the corporations abandoned them long ago. That people will have to build their own economies and rebuild democracy as a living democracy. The corporations belong to no land, no country, no people. They have no loyalty to anything apart from the base-line - their profits. And the profits today are on an unimaginable scale; it has become illegitimate, criminal profit - profits extracted at the cost of life.Collection: Loyalty
We've moved from wisdom to knowledge, and now we're moving from knowledge to information, and that information is so partial – that we're creating incomplete human beings.Collection: Moving
You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.Collection: Inspirational
I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.Collection: Thinking
Genetic engineering has never been about saving the world, it's about controlling the world.Collection: Engineering
Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.Collection: Nature
In the seed and the soil, we find the answers to every one of the crises we face. The crises of violence and war. The crises of hunger and disease. The crisis of the destruction of democracy.Collection: War
In traditional agriculture, the soil is the mother. She's the mother who gives, to whom you must give back.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Thinking
When you don't take into account the way ecological systems work, then you do damage.Collection: Way
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.Collection: Luxury
Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.Collection: Luxury
It is time to learn from the mistakes of monocultures of the mind and the essentialising violence of reductionist thought. It is time to turn to diversity for healing.Collection: Mistake
As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.Collection: Usual
Squeezing the lives of people is now being proposed as the saviour of the planet. Through the green economy an attempt is being made to technologise, financialise, privatise and commodify all of the earth’s resources and living processes.Collection: People
Unless the poor of the world agitate for themselves to be heard, there will be no changes in their circumstances.Collection: World
It is often too late by the time the government reacts.Collection: Government
The system of technological production that we have today has been justified in terms of creating more goods to feed more people and to meet more needs. But it actually destroys more of the resources that we need in order to meet those multiple needs. If we shift to an ecological perception, a diversity perception, we realize that some of the instruments of which we are very proud are actually extremely primitive for dealing with nature. To me that is the great lesson of ecological awareness at the turn of the millennium.Collection: Order
I think we will become disenchanted with the glamour of globalization.Collection: Thinking
For example, the idea that objects have properties out there in fixed ways is an incorrect idea about the world. Properties are created through relationships and processes. They are not inherent in electrons or photons or quanta any more than they are inherent in soil or trees or people. So my critique of reductionistic science is a critique that I have inherited from my scientific training. But it has been deepened by my experiences as an ecologist, in seeing the ecological destruction taking place today.Collection: Ideas
I absolutely get thrills from taking on these big guys and recognizing how, behind all their power, they are so empty. I just keep going at it. Each of these balloons does deflate. Ive seen a lot of balloons get deflated in my life.Collection: Guy
Every farmer must go to the seed industry every year to buy their seed and pay an 80 percent royalty to a corporation. Over-the-fence exchanges have started to be treated as crimes. Or, if you need a biological pest control, you can no longer use the need seed in your back yard. Instead you have to depend on the Grace Corporation or some other entity. That kind of dependency basically leads to increased poverty and increased ecological destruction.Collection: Years
I'm a woman, born the daughter of a feminist and the granddaughter of a feminist grandfather. I don't think I could have avoided working on women's issues. I don't do it as a career or profession; it's my very essence as a human being.Collection: Daughter
We could replace people with fossil fuels, have higher and higher levels of industrialization, of agriculture, of production, without thinking of the green-house gases we were admitting, and climate change is really the pollution of the engineering paradigm, when fossil fuels drove industrialism. To now offer that same mindset as a solution is to not take seriously what Einstein said: that you can't solve the problems by using the same mindset that caused them.Collection: Thinking
Nature has given us this for free, it was meant to sustain us, we will not allow it to become a monopoly to finance the Imperial Army.Collection: Army
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.Collection: Taken
I do have fun. Even when Im fighting Im enjoying it: I think theres nothing as exhilarating as protecting that which you find precious.Collection: Fun
Biotech and geo engineering have the same mindset, of engineering, of power, of control, of mastery of nature.Collection: Engineering
Nature has gifted this rich biological diversity to us. We will not allow it to become the monopoly of a handful of corporations. We will keep it as the basis of our wealth and our sustenance.Collection: Diversity
We're still eating the leftovers of World War II.Collection: War
If you read Wall Streets reports, they dont talk of soya bean as originating in China. They dont 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 Monsantos intelligence and innovation.Collection: Wall
I have called this phenomenon of stealing common knowledge and indigenous science "biopiracy" and "intellectual piracy." According to patent systems we shouldn't be able to patent what exists as "prior art." But the United States patent system is somewhat perverted. First of all, it does not treat the prior art of other societies as "prior art." Therefore anyone from the United States can travel to another country, find out about the use of a medicinal plant, or find a seed that farmers use, come back here, claim it as an invention or an innovation.Collection: Country
I like to live my life so that my loved ones give me the things I need as gifts and I give them the things they need. Frankly a society built around consumerism is hellCollection: Giving
I still can't figure out what inspired me to do physics. But since I was nine or ten years old, I wanted to be like [Albert] Einstein. He was my hero. I knew no physicists. I knew no scientists. I had nobody around me. And I went to a convent that didn't even have higher mathematics and physics. I taught myself these subjects in order to get into university.Collection: Hero
Ecofeminism is a good term for distinguishing a feminism that is ecological from the kind of feminisms that have become extremely technocratic. I would even call them very patriarchal.Collection: Feminism
Population control is not an issue involving contraceptives for third world women. It is an issue of ecological justice.Collection: Issues
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.Collection: Ideas
Earth Democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation, and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict, fear and hatred.Collection: Compassion