Vandana Shiva Quotes

The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Humans will take a rain forest and lose it and cover it with concrete. They will take the woods and turn it into a parking garage and I am not saying that's bad. I am just saying that's what we do. We occupy the planet with a vengeance. We seek to dominate it.

You've got to spread out as far as you can, cut down a whole forest, irrigate a whole desert, just to make sure that you won't accidentally stumble upon a place that's still in its natural state.

Economic development is what's going to make mountaintop removal palatable.

But when you have bad governance, of course, these resources are destroyed: The forests are deforested, there is illegal logging, there is soil erosion. I got pulled deeper and deeper and saw how these issues become linked to governance, to corruption, to dictatorship.

The landscape has been so transformed by ignorance, arrogance and greed that those who must prove their case are not those who call for forest protection, but those who call for business as usual.

You cannot, for instance, sustainably protect the environment if the majority of the people are still in primitive agriculture leading to the encroachment of forest reserves.

Tropical rain forests, as well as tropical and temperate dry forests, are being destroyed rapidly. At present rates, some critical forest types will be gone in a few years, and most of the tropical rain forest will be gone before the end of the next century. With them will go large numbers of plant and animal species.

We often destroy ecology-based livelihoods in the name of employment creation.

Only people who lack wisdom would say that a project should be pursued even if it leads to wanton destruction of forests.

The degradation of natural resources such as forests and freshwater has removed much of the resilience that societies formerly enjoyed.

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.

One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better.

I am the Lorax! I speak for the trees, Which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please; But I also speak for the brown Barbaloots, Who frolicked and played in their Barbaloot suits, Happily eating Truffula fruits. Now, since you've chopped the trees to the ground There's not enough Truffula fruit to go 'round! And my poor Barbaloots are all feeling the crummies Because they have gas, and no food, in their tummies.

The time has come to link ecology to economic and human development. When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. What is happening to the rain forests of Madagascar and Brazil will affect us all.

One thing leads to the other. Deforestation leads to climate change, which leads to ecosystem losses, which negatively impacts our livelihoods - it's a vicious cycle.

Our planet is changing in ways that will have profound impacts on all of humankind.

If I put myself on the side of those who see the world as warming up in a bad way, who see the general march of industrial culture as something undesirable, the one thing I must be beware of doing and which my colleagues on that side don't beware of doing, we must beware of saying we've got to stop changing the environment. There is no 'the' environment which we can change, the world is changing all the time.

"Clear-cutting" was the word for what the Rusties had done to the old forests: felling every tree, killing every living thing, turning entire countries into grazing land. Whole rain forests had been consumed, reduced from millions of interlocking species to a bunch of cows eating grass, a vast web of life traded for cheap hamburgers. "Look, we're not clear-cutting. All we're doing is pulling out the garbage that the Rusties left behind,” David said. "It just takes a little surgery to do it."

We aren’t exactly emptying the oceans; it’s more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.

Since half of all trees cut go to making paper, the only meaningful way to address destruction of our forest is to change the way paper is made.

We need to get a broader awareness. People say climate change is really bad, but painting that picture of what you're putting at risk.

When we build an attractive home, we raze land on which animals have already built their homes. They have nowhere to go.

An now the silences come in a single lifetime, in a single year... when species die, leaving a silent space in the world song that can never be filled.