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
Living
Begins
Anything
Sky
Everything
Ground
Like
Bottom
Gets
Dangerous
Democracy
Dropped
Grows
Bombs

More quotes by Vandana Shiva

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I think the structures of exclusion are more systematically built up in American society, for example, so that young girls interested in science eventually lose their confidence over time. The structures of exclusion work against them. We have other structures of exclusion in India, but not around modern scientific knowledge.
Vandana Shiva
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It's a phenomenon that started in the United States in which corporations make claims on the life forms, biodiversity and innovations of other cultures by applying for patents on them.
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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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.
Vandana Shiva
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As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.
Vandana Shiva
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I do sculpting sometimes when I have the time, and the first thing I sculpted was a bust of [Albert] Einstein. It still sits on my table and still inspires me. He was a person who triggered my imagination and my ideas.
Vandana Shiva
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The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.
Vandana Shiva
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When you don't take into account the way ecological systems work, then you do damage.
Vandana Shiva
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Food is the place where you begin.
Vandana Shiva
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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.
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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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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I saw some women had written that the cloning of Dolly was wonderful since it showed that women could have children without men. They didn’t even understand that this was the ultimate ownership of women—of embryos, of eggs, of bodies—by a few men with capital and control techniques, that it wasn’t freedom from men but total control by men.
Vandana Shiva
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One particular spark was when I went back to my favorite spot in the mountains where my father always used to take us before my graduate studies in Canada and finding that the stream I had gone swimming in wasn’t there. The forest had been converted into an apple orchard with World Bank financing. The entire place, literally, had changed.
Vandana Shiva
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Diversity creates harmony, and harmony creates beauty, balance, bounty and peace in nature and society, in agriculture and culture, in science and in politics.
Vandana Shiva
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Population control is not an issue involving contraceptives for third world women. It is an issue of ecological justice.
Vandana Shiva
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Whatever happens to seed affects the web of 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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The only way to build hope is throuhgh the Earth.
Vandana Shiva
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It is often too late by the time the government reacts.
Vandana Shiva