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I'm a woman, born the daughter of a feminist and the granddaughter of a feminist grandfather. I don't think I could have avoided working on women's issues. I don't do it as a career or profession it's my very essence as a human being.

Vandana Shiva

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Vandana Shiva
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 5
Author
Environmentalist
Philosopher
Politician
University Teacher
Writer
Dehra Dun
Humans
Career
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Careers
Granddaughter
Thinking
Issues
Avoided
Working
Grandfather
Woman
Feminist
Born
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Women
Daughter
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Essence

More quotes by Vandana Shiva

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Nobody defines it as something women shouldn't be doing. In a way, there are more mathematicians, more doctors, more scientists in India than there are in this country. We even had a woman head of state, and that's something the United States has yet to catch up with.
Vandana Shiva
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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.
Vandana Shiva
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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.
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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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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My training in science is actually one that is very critical of mechanistic science. I was trained in quantum theory which emerged at the turn of the last century. We are a whole century behind in absorbing the leaps that quantum theory made for the human mind.
Vandana Shiva
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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.
Vandana Shiva
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In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life.
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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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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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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Something is very, very wrong when people don’t have access to drinking water, and Coke creates its market out of that scarcity.
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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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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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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The art of teaching is clarity and the art of learning is to listen.
Vandana Shiva
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The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.
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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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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The end of consumerism and accumulation is the beginning of the joy of living.
Vandana Shiva