Quote

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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Vandana Shiva
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 5
Author
Environmentalist
Philosopher
Politician
University Teacher
Writer
Dehra Dun
Grows
Bombs
Living
Begins
Anything
Sky
Everything
Ground
Like
Bottom
Gets
Dangerous
Democracy
Dropped

More quotes by Vandana Shiva

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You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.
Vandana Shiva
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I do have fun. Even when I’m fighting I’m enjoying it: I think there’s nothing as exhilarating as protecting that which you find precious.
Vandana Shiva
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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.
Vandana Shiva
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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.
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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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 hell
Vandana Shiva
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The role of geo-engineering should, in a world of responsibility, in a world of scientifically enlightened decision making and ecological understanding, it should be zero. There is no role for geo-engeneering. Because what is geoengineering but extending the engineering paradigm?
Vandana Shiva
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If you are doing the right thing for the earth, she's giving you great company.
Vandana Shiva
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Globalisation has in effect made the citizen disappear, and it has reduced the state into being a mere instrument of global capital.
Vandana Shiva
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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.
Vandana Shiva
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When I find too many puzzles about the way explanations are given about why there is inequality - why people who work the hardest in the world end up being the poorest - I can't just sit back and not try to understand why the gaps between people are increasing, or why there are so many homeless and hungry people in the world.
Vandana Shiva
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We are in a strange kind of time, where the kind of liberation movements such as anti-apartheid movements and freedom struggles in India need to be reinvented. We need to retool them so that all the gains that our generation has made can be passed on to future generations.
Vandana Shiva
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Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.
Vandana Shiva
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It is not an investment if it destroys the planet
Vandana Shiva
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Seen from a monocultural perspective, manipulating objects is very, very clever. But seen from a multidimensional perspective, from a perspective of diversity, this is extremely crude because what we have lost out on is a cow that serves as a source of sustainable energy.
Vandana Shiva
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It is often too late by the time the government reacts.
Vandana Shiva
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The occupation of America (and Columbus's arrival quite clearly was an occupation, no one can deny that) meant that the entire history of the Native Americans was rendered invisible. The land could only be occupied if it was first defined as empty. So it was defined as a wilderness, even though it had been used by native people for millennia.
Vandana Shiva
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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.
Vandana Shiva
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The reductionist measure of yield is to agriculture systems, what GDP is to economic systems. It is time to move from measuring yield of commodities, to health and well-being of ecosystems and communities. Industrial agriculture has its roots in war. Ecological agriculture allows us to make peace with the earth, soil and the society.
Vandana Shiva
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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