Top 15 Vandana Shiva Quotes

I’ve learned from the Bhagavad Gita and other teachings of our culture to detach myself from the results of what I do, because those are not in my hands. The context is not in your control, but your commitment is yours to make, and you can make the deepest commitment with a total detachment about where it will take you. You want it to lead to a better world, and you shape your actions and take full responsibility for them, but then you have detachment. And that combination of deep passion and deep detachment allows me always to take on the next challenge because I don’t cripple myself, I don’t tie myself in knots. I function like a free being. I think getting that freedom is a social duty because I think we owe it to each other not to burden each other with prescription and demands. I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.

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 in itself creates new potential.

The way out of this violent cycle is to deepen democracy—to bring decisions that directly affect people’s lives as close as possible to where people are and to where they can take responsibility.

there is a strong affinity between the forces of empire and a politics of hate that justifies policies of domination and exclusion. So long as people’s attention is focused on fear and hatred of foreigners or members of a particular religious group, such as Muslims, they are distracted from organizing to deal with the system of institutional domination and exploitation that is the real source of their insecurity.

I have had to suffer the violence and brutality that comes with rising fundamentalism, and I’ve asked myself how a society that is the cradle of peace, the land of Gandhi and Buddha, could be reduced to one of the most volatile societies in the world.

Instead of water belonging to millions of local communities, water too is to be controlled by five or six global water giants. These are recipes that use economic systems to appropriate for the few the base of survival of the majority.

Scarcity is not a result of uneven endowments—that is diversity. Scarcity is having a mismatch between a culture and nature’s giving. Cultures have evolved cultural diversity to mimic the biological diversity of climates and ecosystems. It’s when that relationship is disrupted that you get unsustainable population growth.

Many conflicts within Third World countries are related to the practice of exploiting resources faster than nature can renew them or diverting them away from where people need them. Dams in every society have become major sources of conflict. As water scarcity grows, neighbors, families turn against each other.

The WTO-related events in Seattle created the first experience of a rainbow politics—a successful pluralistic politics, without the working of a master mind, but with the currents and beauty that come out of free thinking. In the new politics, people have different ways of talking, but I feel the core will be living democracy and living economies, and that it will include both taking personal responsibility to make change and being part of national and international movements for change.

There is, I think, a spontaneous resurgence of thinking that centers on protection of life, celebrating life, enjoying life as both our highest duty and our most powerful form of resistance against a violent and brutal system that globalizes not just trade, but fascism, and denies civil liberties and freedoms.

corporate globalization is really about an aggressive privatization of the water, biodiversity, and food systems of the Earth, when these communities declare sovereignty and act on that sovereignty, they have developed a powerful response to globalization. Living democracy then is the democracy that is custodian of the living wealth on which people depend.

Just like Chief Seattle talked about being in the web of life, in India we talk about vasudhaiva kutumbkam, which means the earth family. Indian cosmology has never separated the human from the non-human—we are a continuum.

The future will not be like the past. There is, of course, the ecological issue of slowing down to lighten our footprint. But there are other futures unfolding. Firstly, because the lockdown has resulted in so many people losing their livelihoods.
According to the International Labour Organization, of the world’s 3.3 billion working people, 1.9 billion will have lost their livelihood base. Unfortunately, I’m watching a new class of throw-away people being deliberately created, not by the virus but by the inhuman implementation of lockdown. Further, there is another future being planned by big tech, based on surveillance and control...
The tech billionaires are already shaping a new kind of future during lockdown. The challenge we face as humanity is imagining futures that are free of the fossil fuel corporations, the poison cartel that has shaped industrial agriculture and spread the chronic disease pandemic, and the tech giants who are the new billionaires trying to shape our future... the money machine. We have a future if we can reimagine and reclaim our life and freedom from the money machine.

When Bill Gates pours money into Africa for feeding the poor in Africa and preventing famine, he’s pushing the failed Green Revolution, he’s pushing chemicals, pushing GMOs, pushing patterns.

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.