Vandana Shiva Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

Although two thirds of our planet is water, we face an acute water shortage. The water crisis is the most pervasive, most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth.

Vandana Shiva
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
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
Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being.

Vandana Shiva
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
Nuclear power started in weaponry. It was designed for war. And any instrument that has its origins in war always has the potential for war. First because the material you need to make bombs, you're multiplying it though nuclear power, you're taking uranium and turn it into plutonium. Second by equipping governments and private companies with this potential, in society you spread this potential, that here is a weapon of mass destruction available. This is exactly what happened with fertilizers. Chemical fertilizers came from explosive factories are increasingly used in terrorist attacks.

Vandana Shiva
Earth Democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation, and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict, fear and hatred.

Vandana Shiva
Economic reforms based on the idea of limitless growth in a limited world, can only be maintained by the powerful grabbing the resources of the vulnerable. The resource grab that is essential for growth creates a culture of rape—the rape of the earth, of local self-reliant economies, and of women.

Vandana Shiva
Biopiracy (is) biological theft; illegal collection of indigenous plants by corporations who patent them for their own use.

Vandana Shiva
Water must be free for sustenance needs. Since nature gives water to us free of cost, buying and selling it for profit violates our inherent right to nature's gift and denies the poor of their human rights.

Vandana Shiva
As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.

Vandana Shiva
I've had letters from Chinese scientists at the peak of the SARS epidemic who said the problem is a hybridization between the viruses planted into GMO feed, which is then fed to animals, then the virus jumped from the animals to humans. We're going to see more and more of these kinds of risks. I think the whole issue of the H1N1 virus was the fact that it had genes for three influenza types—human, chicken, pig. All of these crossings are becoming possible because of the crossing of genes across species barriers.

Vandana Shiva
I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy — not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you. Democracy begins with freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from fear, and freedom from hatred. To me, those are the real freedoms on the basis of which good human societies are based.

Vandana Shiva
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
If you look at the graph of the growth of G. M. O. s, the growth of application of glyphosate and autism, it's literally a one-to-one correspondence. And you could make that graph for kidney failure, you could make that graph for diabetes, you could make that graph even for Alzheimer's.

Vandana Shiva
Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.

Vandana Shiva
The gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that could eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans, from the planet.

Vandana Shiva