Vandana Shiva (born 5 November 1952) is an Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, and alter-globalization author. Shiva, currently based in Delhi, has authored more than twenty books.
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.
The best and most evolved technologies are those that do not destroy the very base on which we live
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.
Ecofeminism is a good term for distinguishing a feminism that is ecological from the kind of feminisms that have become extremely technocratic. I would even call them very patriarchal.
If you read Wall Streets reports, they dont talk of soya bean as originating in China. They dont 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 Monsantos intelligence and innovation.
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.
If you are doing the right thing for the earth, she's giving you great company.
The reductionist measure of yield is to agriculture systems, what GDP is to economic systems. It is time to move from measuring yield of commodities, to health and well-being of ecosystems and communities. Industrial agriculture has its roots in war. Ecological agriculture allows us to make peace with the earth, soil and the society.
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.
Diversity creates harmony, and harmony creates beauty, balance, bounty and peace in nature and society, in agriculture and culture, in science and in politics.
It is from the Himalayan forests and ecosystems that I learned most of what I know about ecology.
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.
We have managed to make the celebration of diversity our mode of resistance.
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.
Uniformity is not nature's way; diversity is nature's way.
We must occupy the food system to create food democracy.
I think the American people should see that the corporations abandoned them long ago. That people will have to build their own economies and rebuild democracy as a living democracy. The corporations belong to no land, no country, no people. They have no loyalty to anything apart from their profits. And the profits today are on an unimaginable scale; it has become illegitimate, criminal profit — profits extracted at the cost of life.
The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.
Soil, not oil, holds the future for humanity.
I have called this phenomenon of stealing common knowledge and indigenous science "biopiracy" and "intellectual piracy. " According to patent systems we shouldn't be able to patent what exists as "prior art. " But the United States patent system is somewhat perverted. First of all, it does not treat the prior art of other societies as "prior art. " Therefore anyone from the United States can travel to another country, find out about the use of a medicinal plant, or find a seed that farmers use, come back here, claim it as an invention or an innovation.