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Unless the poor of the world agitate for themselves to be heard, there will be no changes in their circumstances.

Vandana Shiva

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Vandana Shiva
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 5
Author
Environmentalist
Philosopher
Politician
University Teacher
Writer
Dehra Dun
Unless
Heard
Poor
World
Agitate
Changes
Circumstances

More quotes by Vandana Shiva

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In civilizational issues you don't look at the tiny details as the debate. You have to look at the big picture!
Vandana Shiva
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I think we will become disenchanted with the glamour of globalization.
Vandana Shiva
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The agrarian crisis [in India] is an unnecessary tragedy, resulting directly from an economics of greed and a politics driven by the economies of greed.
Vandana Shiva
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My father had been a forester and I had grown up on those hills. I had seen forests and streams disappear. I jumped into Chipko movement and started to work with the peasant women. I learned from them about what forests mean for a rural woman in India in terms of firewood and fodder and medicinal plants and rich knowledge.
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Given that I was interested in physics, I think it was easier for me to do physics in India.
Vandana Shiva
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The environmental movement can only survive if it becomes a justice movement. As a pure environmental movement, it will either die, or it will survive as a corporate 'greenwash'. Anyone who's a sincere environmentalist can't stand that role.
Vandana Shiva
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When the wilderness movement emerged, it emerged separate from the issue of social inequality and the economic problems of survival. It was a preservationist ecology movement created by an occupying culture. Clearly, a wilderness movement started by Native Americans would not have had the same roots.
Vandana Shiva
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democracy ... begins from the ground up. Anything living grows from the bottom up. Everything dangerous, like bombs, gets dropped from the sky down.
Vandana Shiva
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When you control seed, you control food.
Vandana Shiva
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The poorest of families, the poorest of children, are subsidizing the growth of the largest agribusinesses in the world. I think it’s 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
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It is only with local [agriculture] that we can manage the complexity and care that sustainability requires.
Vandana Shiva
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In India, crossbreeding programs aimed at mimicking the milk yields of Western cows like the Jerseys and the Holsteins actually breed out the capacity of our animals to pull ploughs and pulley-cars. So, thanks to cross-breeding programs, we now have humpless cattle with no stamina.
Vandana Shiva
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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.
Vandana Shiva
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Governments have a favorite phrase: “lean and mean.” But they’ve been made very, very fat for corporate interests.
Vandana Shiva
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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
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American firms are beginning to reproduce nonsustainable systems, to force the elite of India to become energy consumers of the kind that the U.S. has become. That’s what globalization is about: Find markets where you can.
Vandana Shiva
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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.
Vandana Shiva
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In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life.
Vandana Shiva
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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.
Vandana Shiva
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Whatever happens to seed affects the web of life.
Vandana Shiva