Quote

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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Vandana Shiva
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 5
Author
Environmentalist
Philosopher
Politician
University Teacher
Writer
Dehra Dun
Forests
Spot
Graduate
Back
Changed
Canada
Swimming
Spark
Take
Particular
Favorite
Apples
Graduates
Always
Went
Bank
Stream
World
Study
Findings
Mountains
Sparks
Gone
Finding
Streams
Studies
Orchard
Father
Entire
Spots
Apple
Converted
Place
Mountain
Literally
Forest
Financing
Used
Wasn

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The idea of engineering is an idea of mastery. And today the role that we are being asked to play is a role based on informed humanity.
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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.
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Governments have a favorite phrase: “lean and mean.” But they’ve been made very, very fat for corporate interests.
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Something is very, very wrong when people don’t have access to drinking water, and Coke creates its market out of that scarcity.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Given that I was interested in physics, I think it was easier for me to do physics in India.
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I started out in nuclear physics. But after I became more sensitized to the environmental and health implications of the nuclear system - I was being trained to be the first women in the fast-breeder reactor in India (and was in it when it first went critical) - I didn't feel comfortable with it. So I went into theoretical physics.
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We must occupy the food system to create food democracy.
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Unless the poor of the world agitate for themselves to be heard, there will be no changes in their circumstances.
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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.
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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.
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The system of seeds based on monoculture is wrong and inappropriate. The biodiverse system has produced more food, and biodiversity means that seeds must be in the hands of farmers.
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