Vandana Shiva

Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shivais an Indian scholar, environmental activist and anti-globalization author. Shiva, currently based in Delhi, has authored more than twenty books...
Vandana Shiva quotes about
bacteria genes insert
You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed and call it LIFE. You have not created life, instead you have only polluted it.
fun creativity mean
We have to build movements in the face of trade retaliation on the basis of people's democratic rights, on the basis of an ancient heritage of collective innovation. We work from the grassroots all the way to the national government and the World Trade Organization. It basically means being very multidimensional in our campaigns. And that is where part of the fun is. It involves both resistance and creativity. It involves constructive action, while at the same time saying "no."
responsibility rights accountability
The kind of capitalism we are seeing today under this expansion of property into living resources is a whole, new, different phase of capitalism. It is totally inconsistent with democracy as well as with sustainability. What we have is capital working on a global scale, totally uprooted, with accountability nowhere, with responsibility nowhere, and with rights everywhere. This new capital, with absolute freedom and no accountability, is structurally anti-life, anti-freedom.
inspirational inspiring world
You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.
real believe responsibility
Gandhi is the other person. I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy — not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you. Democracy begins with freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from fear, and freedom from hatred. To me, those are the real freedoms on the basis of which good human societies are based.
country drinking agriculture
There are scarcities in drinking water when you pollute the groundwater with nitrates. There is a scarcity in diversity when you create huge cornfields with the same strain of corn so that when one disease strikes - which happened in the United States in the 70s - all the cornfields in the country are wiped out. That was the first time the U.S. realized the value of diversity in agriculture and began to discuss genetic resources and their conservation.
nature diversity way
Uniformity is not nature's way; diversity is nature's way.
home justice use
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.
foundation source source-of-life
Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being.
healing people survival
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.
nature food growth
Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.
loyalty country thinking
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 their profits. And the profits today are on an unimaginable scale; it has become illegitimate, criminal profit — profits extracted at the cost of life.
humanity earth next
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.
years grace needs
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.