Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, and anti-globalization author. She has written more than 20 books and is a leader and board member of the International Forum on Globalization.
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.
Genetic engineering has never been about saving the world, it’s about controlling the world.
Earth Democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation, and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict, fear and hatred.
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.
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.
In traditional agriculture, the soil is the mother. She’s the mother who gives, to whom you must give back.
You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.
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.
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.
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.
I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.
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.
Water must be free for sustenance needs. Since nature gives water to us free of cost, buying and selling it for profit violates our inherent right to nature’s gift and denies the poor of their human rights.
Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.
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.
As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.
Globalisation has in effect made the citizen disappear, and it has reduced the state into being a mere instrument of global capital.
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.
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.
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.
Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.
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.
The myth of “free choice” begins with “free market” and “free trade”. When five transnational corporations control the seed market, it is not a free market, it is a cartel.
Seeding the future when possible extinction stares us in the face; seeding freedom when the freedoms of all beings are being closed for the limitless freedom of the 1% to exploit the earth and people, to manipulate life and our minds: this calls for a quantum leap in our imaginations, our intelligences, our capacity for compassion and love, as well as our courage for creative nonviolent resistance and non-cooperation with a system that is driving us to extinction.
The Chipko activists have always been close to my parents, since my father was among the first to write about the movement in the 1970s. I have been involved with the Chipko movement since I was a child.