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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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Vandana Shiva
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: November 5
Author
Environmentalist
Philosopher
Politician
University Teacher
Writer
Dehra Dun
Learn
Monoculture
Thought
Diversity
Mind
Healing
Time
Mistakes
Violence
Turn
Mistake
Turns
Reductionist

More quotes by Vandana Shiva

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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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If you see cattle as a source of organic manure, animal energy, as well as milk products, then Indian cattle are not inferior. It is only when you measure them as milk machines that they become inferior. What if we measured the dairy cows of America or Jersey or the Swiss Alps in terms of their work functions? They would be terribly inferior.
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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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I saw brilliant ideas coming out of the [Chipko] movement that needed better articulation, that needed elaboration and systematic analysis. I just followed that and it's been very exciting.
Vandana Shiva
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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.
Vandana Shiva
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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.
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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There is now a patent restricting the use of an herb called philantis neruri for curing jaundice. An even more blatant example is the use of turmeric for healing wounds, which is something every mother and grandmother does in every home in India. Now the Mississippi Medical Center claims to have invented the capacity of turmeric to heal wounds
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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We are in a strange kind of time, where the kind of liberation movements such as anti-apartheid movements and freedom struggles in India need to be reinvented. We need to retool them so that all the gains that our generation has made can be passed on to future generations.
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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We have managed to make the celebration of diversity our mode of resistance.
Vandana Shiva
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We're living in the anthropocene age and now human beings will be the shapers of our future, that totally control the overall functions of not just our planet, but our relationship with other planets.
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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As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.
Vandana Shiva
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We're still eating the leftovers of World War II.
Vandana Shiva
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If you read Wall Street’s reports, they don’t talk of soya bean as originating in China. They don’t talk of soya bean as soya bean. They talk of Monsanto soya. Monsanto soya is protected by a patent. It has a patent number. It is therefore treated as a creation of Monsanto, a product of Monsanto’s intelligence and innovation.
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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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.
Vandana Shiva