Activists From India

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I think we have reached a stage now where we need to find solutions to economic injustice in the same place and in the same ways that we find solutions to sustainability. Sustainability on environmental grounds and justice in terms of everyone having a place in the production and consumption system - these are two aspects of the same issue. They have been artificially separated and have to be put back again in the Western way of thinking. (1998)"

"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. (1998)"

"The system of technological production that we have today has been justified in terms of creating more goods to feed more people and to meet more needs. But it actually destroys more of the resources that we need in order to meet those multiple needs. If we shift to an ecological perception, a diversity perception, we realize that some of the instruments of which we are very proud are actually extremely primitive for dealing with nature. To me that is the great lesson of ecological awareness at the turn of the millennium. (1998)"

"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."

"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."

"As Gandhi taught, freedom can be reclaimed only by refusing to cooperate with unjust, immoral laws. The fight for truth—employing the principles of civil disobedience, nonviolence, and noncooperation—is not just our right as free citizens of free societies. It is our duty as citizens of the earth. (p184)"

"Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence. (p116)"

"What J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were to the Age of Robber Barons, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett, as well as digital moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are to the contemporary age of the rule of the 1%. Then as now, the super-rich used governments to write laws and rules to allow them to accumulate unlimited wealth; then as now, creating monopolies by enclosing the commons and killing competition is the strategy for becoming the 1%."

"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. Restraint in resource use and living within nature's limits are preconditions for social justice. The commons are where justice and sustainability converge, where ecology and equity meet. The survival of pastures and forests as community property, or of a common good like a stable ecosystem, is only possible with social organizations with checks and controls on the use of resources built into their principles. The breakdown of a community, with the associated erosion of concepts of joint ownership and responsibility, can trigger the degradation of common resources. (p.50)"

"Principles of Earth Democracy, #10: Earth Democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation, and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict, fear and hatred. In the face of a world of greed, inequality, and overconsumption, Earth Democracy globalizes compassion, justice, and sustainability. (p. 11)"

"It is the indignity of being treated as disposable that pushes people towards religious fundamentalism in order to retrieve a sense of self, of meaning, of significance. This is why globalization breeds religious fundamentalism and free markets create terrorism and extremism, not democracy. (p80)"

"The business of grabbing and money-making, through a violent extractive economy that the 1% have built, is burdening the earth and humanity with unbearable and non-sustainable costs, and has brought us to the brink of extinction. We do not have to escape from the earth; we have to escape from the illusions that enslave our minds and make extinction look inevitable."

"The national accounting systems which are used for calculating growth in terms of GDP are based on the assumption that if producers consume what they produce, they do not in fact produce at all, because they fall outside the production boundary. The production boundary is a political creation that, in its workings, excludes regenerative and renewable production cycles from the area of production. Hence all women who produce for their families, children,community and society are treated as ‘non-productive’ and ‘economically inactive’. When economies are confined to the marketplace, economic self-sufficiency is perceived as economic deficiency. The devaluation of women’s work, and of work done in subsistence economies of the South, is the natural outcome of a production boundary constructed by capitalist patriarchy. By restricting itself to the values of the market economy, as defined by capitalist patriarchy, the production boundary ignores economic value in the two vital economies which are necessary to ecological and human survival:nature’s economy and the sustenance economy. In these economies, economic value is a measure of how the Earth’s life and human life are protected. The currency is life-giving processes, not cash or the market price. Second, a model of capitalist patriarchy which excludes women’s work and wealth creation in the mind deepens the violence by displacing women from their livelihoods and alienating them from the natural resources on which their livelihoods depend -their land, their forests, their water, their seeds and biodiversity."

"When we wrote Ecofeminism we raised the issue of reductionist, mechanistic science and the attitude of mastery over and conquest of nature as an expression of capitalist patriarchy. Today the contest between an ecological and feminist world-view and a worldview shaped by capitalist patriarchy is more intense than ever. This contest is particularly intense in the area of food. GMOs embody the vision of capitalist patriarchy. They perpetuate the idea of ‘master molecules’and mechanistic reductionism long after the life sciences have gone beyond reductionism, and patents on life reflect the capitalist patriarchal illusion of creation. There is no science in viewing DNA as a ‘master molecule’ and genetic engineering as a game of Lego, in which genes are moved around without any impact on the organism or the environment. This is a new pseudo-science that has taken on the status of a religion. Science cannot justify patents on life and seed. Shuffling genes is not making life; living organisms make themselves. Patents on seed mean denying the contributions of millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of farmers’ breeding. One could say that a new religion, a new cosmology, a new creation myth is being put in place, where biotechnology corporations like Monsanto replace Creation as ‘creators’. GMO means ‘God move over’. Stewart Brand has actually said ‘We are as gods and we had better get used to it.’"

"We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a future at all."

"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."

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

"When Maria Mies and I wrote Ecofeminism two decades ago, we were addressing the emerging challenges of our times. Every threat we identified has grown deeper. And with it has grown the relevance of an alternative to capitalist patriarchy if humanity and the diverse species with which we share the planet are to survive. Ecofeminism was first published one year after the Earth Summit, where two important treaties were signed by the governments of the world: the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. There was no World Trade Organization. However, two years after Ecofeminism, the WTO was established, privileging corporate rights, commerce and profits, and further undermining the rights of the Earth, the rights of women and the rights of future generations. We wrote about what globalization implied for nature and women. Every crisis we mentioned is deeper; every expression of violence more brutal. When we wrote Ecofeminism we raised the issue of reductionist, mechanistic science and the attitude of mastery over and conquest of nature as an expression of capitalist patriarchy. Today the contest between an ecological and feminist world-view and a worldview shaped by capitalist patriarchy is more intense than ever. This contest is particularly intense in the area of food. GMOs embody the vision of capitalist patriarchy."

"In the last 50 years agrotoxins have spread and are pushing bees to extinction. The choices before humanity are clear, a Poison Free Future to save bees, farmers, our food and humanity. Or continue to use poisons, threatening our common future by walking blindly to extinction through the arrogance that we can substitute bees with artificial intelligence and robots... There is no substitute for the amazing biodiversity and gifts of bees. Let us together as diverse species and diverse cultures and through poison free organic food and farming, rejuvenate the biodiversity of our pollinators and restore their sacredness. We have the creative power to stop the sixth mass extinction and climate catastrophe without the need for these false technocratic solutions."

"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."

"The ideology of development has implied the globalization of the priorities, patterns, and prejudices of the West. Instead of self-generated, development is imposed. Instead of coming from within, it is externally guided. Instead of contributing to the maintenance of diversity, development has created homogeneity..."

"I have repeatedly stressed that the rape of the Earth and rape of women are intimately linked - both metaphorically, in shaping world-views, and materially, in shaping women’s everyday lives. The deepening economic vulnerability of women makes them more vulnerable to all forms of violence, including sexual assault, as we found out during a series of public hearings on the impact of economic reforms on women organized by the National Commission on Women and the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology."

"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."

"What could be a better indication of man’s continued dependence on nature than the fact that today’s so-called post-industrial societies satisfy most of their food needs through imports from so-called underdeveloped countries?"

"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."

"Kamla Bhasin, an Indian feminist who tried to spell out what ‘sustainable development’ could mean for all women in the world lists a number of principles of sustainability similar to the features of a subsistence perspective. It is clear to her, as it is to many women and men who are not blind to the reality that we live in a limited world, that sustainability is not compatible with the existing profit- and growth-oriented development paradigm. And this means that the standard of living of the North’s affluent societies cannot be generalized. This was already clear to Mahatma Gandhi 60 years ago,who, when asked by a British journalist whether he would like India to have the same standard of living as Britain, replied: ‘To have its standard of living a tiny country like Britain had to exploit half the globe. How many globes will India need to exploit to have the same standard of living?’ From an ecological and feminist perspective, moreover, even if there were more globes to be exploited, it is not even desirable that this development paradigm and standard of living was generalized, because it has failed to fulfil its promises of happiness, freedom, dignity and peace, even for those who have profited from it."

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

"Those least responsible for climate change are worst affected by it."

"Bill Gates has hijacked the WHO and transformed it into an instrument of personal power that he wields for the cynical purpose of increasing pharmaceutical profits. He has single-handedly destroyed the infrastructure of public health globally. He has privatized our health systems and our food systems to serve his own purposes."

"Being a planetary citizen does not need space travel. It means being conscious that we are part of the universe and of the earth. The most fundamental law is to recognise that we share the planet with other beings, and that we have a duty to care for our common home."

"Simplicity and nonviolence are the basis of an economy of wellbeing, and such an economy must be localised."

"Right wins only when we dare and act."

"We respect law, when the law respects our needs. Whenever legality clashes with morality, legality should be opposed and morality should be upheld."

"Who takes the blame: the leader who talks of poverty but lives in luxury, or the poor who choose a leader of that type?"

"Real morality is possible when the sanctions for morality are also tangible and real. Therefore, atheism shifts the basis of morality from faith in god to obligations of social living. Moral conduct is not a passport to heaven; it is social necessity."

"Soul is as much a falsehood as god is. The stories connected with ghosts, spirit communication, salvation and life after death are fancies of the primitive mind which answered the question of death in a primitive way. Now we understand death as the failure of the mechanism of the body either due to wear and tear or to an accidental obstruction. Advances in medical science can repair the body and can, likely, protect it from death altogether."

"Atheism ensures morality. Morality is a social necessity. The immorality of one disturbs the happiness of another in social relations. So checks and counter-checks maintain morality."

"Further, economic systems … have never arranged themselves by themselves. It is men who do the ordering according to their attitudes, desires and understanding of things. Changes take place, not independent of man's will, but on account of man's wills. Civilization has progressed by man's interference with material conditions."

"Human problems are more psychological than materialistic. This is not only true of individual behaviour, but in mass action also. A suggestion from a leader sparks off a revolution. Material circumstances help mass action, but in themselves do not raise action. The conditions of untouchability and of poverty in India, especially at the time of famine in Bengal in 1945-46, when thousands of destitute died of sheer hunger in the streets of Calcutta City, are such as would provoke an immediate revolution. But the revolution does not come off in the Indian masses. The reason is clear. In India there are revolutionary circumstances, but there is no revolutionary consciousness among the people. If the revolutionary consciousness is present, people would revolt against any injustice on the slightest pretext. And consciousness is essentially psychological."

"Because morality is a social necessity, the moment faith in god is banished, man's gaze turns from god to man and he becomes socially conscious. Religious belief prevented the growth of a sense of realism. But atheism at once makes man realistic and alive to the needs of morality. Atheism alone is the surest way to morality. Those who oppose atheism in any form betray their vested interests in inequality of some kind of other."

"Positive secularism is not tolerance of all religions, but it is the total denial of religious beliefs: it is the emergence of homogeneous human outlook which is based upon verifiable facts of life."

"Religious belief prevented the growth of a sense of realism. But atheism at once makes man realistic and alive to the needs of morality."

"Patel's speech at Bahaddin College, Junagadh: "If Hyderabad does not see the writing on the wall, it goes the way Junagadh has gone. Pakistan attempted to set off Kashmir against Junagadh. When we raised the question of settlement in a democratic way, they (Pakistan) at once told us that they would consider it if we applied that policy to Kashmir. Our reply was that we would agree to Kashmir if they agreed to Hyderabad."

"So far as abductions are concerned, there is not a single village or town in the West Punjab which has not suffered. 1 he number of women abducted is large and seems to follow a pattern. I have been told that in Shakargarh tehsil about 500 young girls were removed from the families of “Dutt” Muhiyals alone who have been settled from times immemorial in the villages of Kanjrur Dattan, Virum Dattan, Fatehpore, Nangal, Mianwali and Kapurdev. Many of these unfortunate girls are reported to be lodged in the surrounding villages. The number of abductions in the whole district of Sialkot and Shakargarh tehsil is said to be more than 20,000. This is perhaps an exaggerated figure but I will not be surprised if it is correct. Recovery has been practically nothing. A young officer, Lt. G. N. Sinha now in the Kumaon Regimental Centre, Agra, who was previously in the Boundary Force, is said to be in possession of a good deal of information. I am making arrangements to send for him to get some definite clues."