Vandana Shiva Quotes

You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.

Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.

In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life.

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.

Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.

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.

As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.

If you are doing the right thing for the earth, she's giving you great company.

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.

The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.

Living democracy grows like a tree, from the bottom up.

You are not Atlas carrying the world on y6our shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you

Globalized industrialized food is not cheap: it is too costly for the Earth, for the farmers, for our health. The Earth can no longer carry the burden of groundwater mining, pesticide pollution, disappearance of species and destabilization of the climate. Farmers can no longer carry the burden of debt, which is inevitable in industrial farming with its high costs of production. It is incapable of producing safe, culturally appropriate, tasty, quality food. And it is incapable of producing enough food for all because it is wasteful of land, water and energy. Industrial agriculture uses ten times more energy than it produces. It is thus ten times less efficient.

Those least responsible for climate change are worst affected by it.

The only way to build hope is through the Earth.

The fight for truth...is not just our right as free citizens of free societies. It is our duty as citizens of the earth.

We're still eating the leftovers of World War II.

We can and must respond creatively to the triple crisis and simultaneously overcome dehumanization, economic inequality, and, ecological catastrophe.

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.

Climate change is not just a problem for the future. It is impacting us every day, everywhere.

Simplicity and nonviolence are the basis of an economy of wellbeing, and such an economy must be localised.

[How do I do it?] Well, it's always a mystery, because you don't know why you get depleted or recharged. But this much I know. 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. And I've learned from the Bhagavad-Gita and other teachings of our culture to detach myself from the results of what I do, because those are not in my hands. The context is not in your control, but your commitment is yours to make, and you can make the deepest commitment with a total detachment about where it will take you. You want it to lead to a better world, and you shape your actions and take full responsibility for them, but then you have detachment. And that combination of deep passion and deep detachment allows me to take on the next challenge, because I don't cripple myself, I don't tie myself in knots. I function like a free being. I think getting that freedom is a social duty because I think we owe it to each not to burden each other with prescription and demands. I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.

Staying home is an ecological imperative, an ethical imperative. It is also a joyful option. It is the practice of oikonomia as the art of living. It is earth democracy in action, cultivating and expanding the freedoms of all beings.

Being a planetary citizen does not need space travel. It means being conscious that we are part of the universe and of the earth. The most fundamental law is to recognise that we share the planet with other beings, and that we have a duty to care for our common home.

Centralized economic systems also erode the democratic base of politics. In a democracy, the economic agenda is the political agenda.

The business of grabbing and money-making, through a violent extractive economy that the 1% have built, is burdening the earth and humanity with unbearable and non-sustainable costs, and has brought us to the brink of extinction. We do not have to escape from the earth; we have to escape from the illusions that enslave our minds and make extinction look inevitable.

Maldevelopment is the violation of the integrity of organic, interconnected and interdependent systems, that sets in motion a process of exploitation, inequality, injustice and violence. It is blind to the fact that a recognition of nature’s harmony and action to maintain it are preconditions for distributive justice.

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.

It is the indignity of being treated as disposable that pushes people towards religious fundamentalism in order to retrieve a sense of self, of meaning, of significance. This is why globalization breeds religious fundamentalism and free markets create terrorism and extremism, not democracy.

Ecology movements are political movements for a nonviolent world order in which nature is conserved for conserving the options for survival.

Vandana Shiva: We know what free trade means. The first free trade agreement written was by the East India Company. It means asymmetric trade. It means extraction. It means transfer of wealth. [As quoted by DW Gibson.]

Modern science, as we have noted earlier, has a world-view that both supports and is supported by the socio-political-economic system of western capitalist patriarchy which dominates and exploits nature, women, and the poor.

The assumptions are evident: nature is unproductive; organic agriculture based on nature’s cycles of renewability spells poverty; women and tribal and peasant societies embedded in nature are similarly unproductive, not because it has been demonstrated that in cooperation they produce less goods and services for needs, but because it is assumed that ‘production’ takes place only when mediated by technologies for commodity production, even when such technologies destroy

Dominant modes of perception based on reductionism, duality and linearity are unable to cope with equality in diversity, with forms and activities that are significant and valid,

According to Indian crop ecologist Vandana Shiva, humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species in our history. After recent precipitous changes, three-quarters of all human food now comes from just eight species, with the field quickly narrowing down to genetically modified corn, soy, and canola. If woodpeckers and pandas enjoy celebrity status on the endangered-species list (dubious though such fame may be), food crops are the forgotten commoners. We're losing them as fast as we're losing rain forests. An enormous factor in this loss has been the new idea of plant varieties as patentable properties, rather than God's gifts to humanity or whatever the arrangement was previously felt to be, for all of prior history.

The worldwide destruction of the feminine knowledge of agriculture evolved over four to five thousand years by a handful of white male scientists in less than two decades has not merely violated women as experts but, since their expertise is modeled on nature’s system of renewability, has gone hand in hand with the ecological destruction of nature’s processes and the economic destruction of poor people in rural areas.

The close nexus between reductionist science, patriarchy, violence, and profits is explicit in 80 percent of scientific research that is devoted to the war industry, and is frankly aimed directly at lethal violence—

What could be a better indication of man’s continued dependence on nature than the fact that today’s so-called post-industrial societies satisfy most of their food needs through imports from so-called underdeveloped countries?

the severing of the link, not just the link—the understanding—between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence.39

The recovery of the feminine principle allows a transcendance and transformation of these patriarchal foundations of maldevelopment. It allows a redefinition of growth and productivity as categories linked to the production, not the destruction, of life. It is thus simultaneously an ecological and a feminist political project which legitimises the way of knowing and being that create wealth by enhancing life and diversity, and which deligitimises the knowledge and practise of a culture of death as the basis for capital accumulation.

We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.2

The ideology of development has implied the globalization of the priorities, patterns, and prejudices of the West. Instead of self-generated, development is imposed. Instead of coming from within, it is externally guided. Instead of contributing to the maintenance of diversity, development has created homogeneity...

Properties perceived in nature will depend on how one looks and how one looks depends on the economic interest one has in the resources of nature. The value of profit maximization is thus linked to reductionist systems, while the value of life and the maintenance of life is linked to holistic and ecological systems.

However, such theorising is uninteresting in the context of a comparison with ethno-science and an evaluation in an ecological perspective, though for a dualist philosophy of science restricted to the analysis of ideas alone it is just these fields which are most interesting since they are the most advanced in the reductionist-positivist scheme of thought.

food security for rural communities. When the household and community are food-secure, the girl child is food-secure. When the household and community are food-insecure, it is the girl child who, because of gender discrimination, pays the highest price in terms of malnutrition. When access to food diminishes, the girl child’s share is last and least. The politics of food is gendered at multiple levels.

Society cannot tolerate a biology whose metaphysical base is outmoded and misleading: society desperately needs to live in harmony with the rest of the living world, not with a biology that is a distorted and [an] incomplete reflection of that world. Because it has been taught to accept the above hierarchy of the sciences, society today perceives biology as here to solve its problems, to change the living world…society will come to see that biology is here to understand the world, not primarily to change it. Biology’s primary job is to teach us. In that realization lies our hope of learning to live in harmony with our planet.

India’s leading human rights activist, Dr. Vandana Shiva, told me. “Gates has single-handedly destroyed all that. He has hijacked the WHO and transformed it into an instrument of personal power that he wields for the cynical purpose of increasing pharmaceutical profits. He has single-handedly destroyed the infrastructure of public health globally. He has privatized our health systems and our food systems to serve his own purposes.

Then, as now, the issue is control. Then, as now, the prejudice of the super rich, and their fear of women, the poor, the migrant, and the coloured, shapes what they call ‘science’, as the ultimate objective truth, when in reality it is the articulation of subjective prejudice, of fear of the other, of the uncontrollable urge to dominate.

The genetic engineering paradigm invades life itself, redefining people and living organisms as machines to be manipulated and engineered. Defining a construct, the ‘gene’, as the building block of life, is scientifically flawed. As Richard Lewontin has said in The Doctrine of DNA, DNA is a dead molecule, among the most non-reactive, chemically inert molecules in the world. It has no power to reproduce itself. Rather, it is produced out of elementary materials by a complex cellular machinery of proteins. While it is often said that DNA produces proteins, in fact proteins (enzymes) produce DNA. When we refer to genes as self-replicating, we endow them with a mysterious autonomous power that seems to place them above the more ordinary materials of the body. Yet,

One of the most powerful voices speaking out against the overexploitation, or even theft, of indigenous wisdom by Western corporations is the philosopher and environmental activist Dr. Vandana Shiva. Of particular concern for her is the patenting of products derived from an indigenous plant. She sees this as a new sort of colonialism: “In the old way they took over the land—now they are taking over life.

It is often said,” Vandana Shiva has written, “that the so-called miracle varieties of the Green Revolution in modern industrial agriculture prevented famine because they had higher yields. However, these higher yields disappear in the context of total yields of crops on farms.

Seorang pria tanpa mimpi seperti burung tanpa sayap.

But agronomists in the Department of Agriculture had a better idea: Spread the ammonium nitrate on farmland as fertilizer. The chemical fertilizer industry (along with that of pesticides, which are based on poison gases developed for the war) is the product of the government’s effort to convert its war machine to peacetime purposes. As the Indian farmer activist Vandana Shiva says in her speeches, “We’re still eating the leftovers of World War II.

Western nations originally conceived the World Health Organization and the United Nations to embody liberal ideologies implemented via a democratic structure of one nation, one vote,” India’s leading human rights activist, Dr. Vandana Shiva, told me. “Gates has single-handedly destroyed all that. He has hijacked the WHO and transformed it into an instrument of personal power that he wields for the cynical purpose of increasing pharmaceutical profits.

Owning our seeds through seed freedom, our own food through food freedom, our own minds and intelligence through intellectual freedom, our own economies through freedom to produce and consume ecologically and locally, is the ‘barbarianism’ that the 1% would like to extinguish.

This book focuses on science and development as patriarchal projects not as a denial of other sources of patriarchy, such as religion, but because they are thought to be class, culture, and gender neutral.

CHAPTER TWO Science, Nature, and Gender The recovery of the feminine principle is an intellectual and political challenge to maldevelopment as a patriarchal project of domination and destruction, of violence and subjugation, of dispossession and the dispensability of both women and nature.

Kuhn, Feyerband, Polanyi, and others have convincingly argued that modern science is not practised according to a well defined and stable scientific method; all that can be granted it is that it is a single mode of thought, among many.

A revolução científica propunha-se remover as fronteiras da ignorância. Em vez disso, uma tradição de conhecimento que tem considerado a natureza e a mulher unicamente como fonte de recurso, e os limites da natureza como entraves, criou uma ignorância fabricada pelo homem sem precedentes - uma ignorância que está a tornar-se uma nova fonte de ameaça para a vida neste planeta. A colonização da semente reflecte os padrões da colonização do corpo da mulher. Lucros e poder passam a estar intimamente associados à invasão de todos os organismos biológicos.

The Indian farmer suicide story is a myth built on tragic individual anecdotes and extrapolated to a whole country by those like Vandana Shiva with an ideological axe to grind and little concern about the true facts.

Let’s be clear about the real-world impact of this activism however. Aubergine farmers in both India and the Philippines have sprayed millions of pounds of additional insecticides thanks to the activities of Greenpeace, Vandana Shiva and other anti-GMO campaigners and groups in denying them the opportunity to grow Bt brinjal.

Monocultures and monopolies symbolize patriarchal agriculture. The war mentality underlying military-industrial agriculture is evident from the names given to the herbicides destroying the economic basis of the survival of the poorest women in the rural areas of the Third World. Roundup, Machete, and Lasso from Monsanto. Pentagon, Prowl, Scepter, Squadron, Cadre, and Avenge from American Home Products, which has merged with Monsanto. The language is of war, not sustainability.

Vandana Shiva est une militante professionnelle. Elle connaît la puissance des mots et des images, et les maîtrise. Son combat : la préservation de la biodiversité et de la planète. Elle s'oppose aux semences génétiquement modifiées, qui sont, selon elle, le fer de lance de la stratégie de domination des firmes agro-industrielles.