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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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Vandana Shiva
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 5
Author
Environmentalist
Philosopher
Politician
University Teacher
Writer
Dehra Dun
Possible
Healing
Involving
Knowledge
Plant
Evolved
Use
Slave
Collectives
Makes
Worse
Plants
Part
Trade
Collective
Medicinal
Live
Percent
Heritage
Traded
World
Growing
Seeds
Biodiversity
People
Rich
Survival
Crops

More quotes by Vandana Shiva

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We're still eating the leftovers of World War II.
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An organic farmer is the best peacemaker today, because there is more violence, more death, more destruction, more wars, through a violent industrial agricultural system. And to shift away from that into an agriculture of peace is what organic farming is doing.
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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.
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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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We must occupy the food system to create food democracy.
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Amory Lovins has said that the only reason Americans look efficient is that each has 300 energy slaves. Those 300 energy slaves will now be reproduced among the elite of India.
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Uniformity is not nature's way diversity is nature's way.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
Vandana Shiva
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Whatever happens to seed affects the web of life.
Vandana Shiva
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The spinning wheel became the symbol of Indian independence. So we always say, if the spinning wheel was the symbol of our first independence, then the seed is the symbol of our second independence.
Vandana Shiva
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Biopiracy (is) biological theft illegal collection of indigenous plants by corporations who patent them for their own use.
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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Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.
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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
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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 absolutely get thrills from taking on these big guys and recognizing how, behind all their power, they are so empty. I just keep going at it. Each of these balloons does deflate. I’ve seen a lot of balloons get deflated in my life.
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