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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.

Vandana Shiva

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Vandana Shiva
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 5
Author
Environmentalist
Philosopher
Politician
University Teacher
Writer
Dehra Dun
First
Comfortable
Trained
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Health
Physics
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Started
Environmental
Breeder
System
Fast
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Nuclear
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Women
India
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Theoretical

More quotes by Vandana Shiva

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It is from the Himalayan forests and ecosystems that I learned most of what I know about ecology.
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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When you don't take into account the way ecological systems work, then you do damage.
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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In civilizational issues you don't look at the tiny details as the debate. You have to look at the big picture!
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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Gandhi’s idea of swadeshi—that local societies should put their own resources and capacities to use to meet their needs as a basic element of freedom—is becoming increasingly relevant. We cannot afford to forget that we need self-rule, especially in this world of globalization.
Vandana Shiva
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Biotech and geo engineering have the same mindset, of engineering, of power, of control, of mastery of nature.
Vandana Shiva
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Unless the poor of the world agitate for themselves to be heard, there will be no changes in their circumstances.
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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Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.
Vandana Shiva
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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.
Vandana Shiva
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Food is the place where you begin.
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 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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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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It's worse than slave trade because what is being traded is the very knowledge that makes survival possible for 80 percent of the people of this world. These 80 percent live on the biodiversity and the knowledge they have evolved as part of a rich collective heritage involving the use of seeds for growing crops and medicinal plants for healing.
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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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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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