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The Chipko activists have always been close to my parents, since my father was among the few forestry officials who supported them within the bureaucracy. And I was involved with the Chipko movement in my student days.

Vandana Shiva

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Vandana Shiva
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 5
Author
Environmentalist
Philosopher
Politician
University Teacher
Writer
Dehra Dun
Father
Among
Activists
Always
Parents
Bureaucracy
Involved
Supported
Movement
Activist
Parent
Officials
Days
Student
Since
Close
Within
Students
Forestry

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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.
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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.
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Population control is not an issue involving contraceptives for third world women. It is an issue of ecological justice.
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Earth Democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation, and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict, fear and hatred.
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For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity - saying no to patents on life, and developing intellectual ideas of resistance - is very much a continuation of Gandhian satyagraha. It is, for me, keeping life free in its diversity.
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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.
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The problem of numbers can only be dealt with by recognizing that people have a fundamental right to economic security. If you provide them with economic and environmental security, the population will stabilize itself.
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Water must be free for sustenance needs. Since nature gives water to us free of cost, buying and selling it for profit violates our inherent right to nature's gift and denies the poor of their human rights.
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If you are doing the right thing for the earth, she's giving you great company.
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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.
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It is only with local [agriculture] that we can manage the complexity and care that sustainability requires.
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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.
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Biopiracy (is) biological theft illegal collection of indigenous plants by corporations who patent them for their own use.
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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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It's not an investment if its destroying the planet.
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