Quote

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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Vandana Shiva
Age: 71
Born: 1952
Born: November 5
Author
Environmentalist
Philosopher
Politician
University Teacher
Writer
Dehra Dun
Way
Understand
Puzzles
World
Given
Homeless
People
Ends
Increasing
Back
Gaps
Find
Inequality
Many
Explanation
Trying
Hungry
Explanations
Work
Hardest
Poorest

More quotes by Vandana Shiva

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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.
Vandana Shiva
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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.
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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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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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I did my masters in elementary particles. But the foundations of elementary particles is quantum theory and there were too many conceptual problems around quantum theory that I couldn't live with. So I decided I was going to work on the foundations of quantum theory. That's what I did my Ph.D on.
Vandana Shiva
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In the seed and the soil, we find the answers to every one of the crises we face. The crises of violence and war. The crises of hunger and disease. The crisis of the destruction of democracy.
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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The liberation of the earth, the liberation of women, the liberation of all humanity is the next step of freedom we need to work for, and it's the next step of peace that we need to create.
Vandana Shiva
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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.
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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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.
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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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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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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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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The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.
Vandana Shiva
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When the forest is destroyed, when the river is dammed, when the biodiversity is stolen, when fields are waterlogged or turned saline because of economic activities, it is a question of survival for these people. So our environmental movements have been justice movements.
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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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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Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being.
Vandana Shiva