Quotes from Vandana Shiva

Owning our seeds through seed freedom, our own food through food freedom, our own minds and intelligence through intellectual freedom, our own economies through freedom to produce and consume ecologically and locally, is the 'barbarianism' that the 1% would like to extinguish.

Then, as now, the issue is control. Then, as now, the prejudice of the super rich, and their fear of women, the poor, the migrant, and the coloured, shapes what they call 'science', as the ultimate objective truth, when in reality it is the articulation of subjective prejudice, of fear of the other, of the uncontrollable urge to dominate.

CHAPTER TWO Science, Nature, and Gender The recovery of the feminine principle is an intellectual and political challenge to maldevelopment as a patriarchal project of domination and destruction, of violence and subjugation, of dispossession and the dispensability of both women and nature.

This book focuses on science and development as patriarchal projects not as a denial of other sources of patriarchy, such as religion, but because they are thought to be class, culture, and gender neutral.

Properties perceived in nature will depend on how one looks and how one looks depends on the economic interest one has in the resources of nature. The value of profit maximization is thus linked to reductionist systems, while the value of life and the maintenance of life is linked to holistic and ecological systems.

Kuhn, Feyerband, Polanyi, and others have convincingly argued that modern science is not practised according to a well defined and stable scientific method; all that can be granted it is that it is a single mode of thought, among many.

the severing of the link, not just the link—the understanding—between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence.39

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

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.

We must occupy the food system to create food democracy.

When you control seed, you control food.

Food is the place where you begin.

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.