Uniformity is not nature’s way; diversity is nature’s way.
Diversity creates harmony, and harmony creates beauty, balance, bounty and peace in nature and society, in agriculture and culture, in science and in politics.
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 human future at all.
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 itself creates new potential.
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.
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.
In nature’s economy the currency is not money, it is life.
An organic farmer is the best peacemaker today, because there is more violence, more death, more destruction, more wars, through a violent industrial agricultural system. And to shift away from that into an agriculture of peace is what organic farming is doing.
The liberation of the earth, the liberation of women, the liberation of all humanity is the next step of freedom we need to work for, and it’s the next step of peace that we need to create.
Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being.
Soil, not oil, holds the future for humanity.
In traditional agriculture, the soil is the mother. She’s the mother who gives, to whom you must give back.
We’ve moved from wisdom to knowledge, and now we’re moving from knowledge to information, and that information is so partial – that we’re creating incomplete human beings.
I think the American people should see that the corporations abandoned them long ago. That people will have to build their own economies and rebuild democracy as a living democracy. The corporations belong to no land, no country, no people. They have no loyalty to anything apart from the base-line – their profits. And the profits today are on an unimaginable scale; it has become illegitimate, criminal profit – profits extracted at the cost of life.
It is not an investment if it destroys the planet
A single, one-dimensional way of thinking has created a monoculture of the mind. And the monoculture of the mind has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the root of why we have pitted equity against ecology and sustainability against justice.
Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.
You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.
I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.
Genetic engineering has never been about saving the world, it’s about controlling the world.
Whatever happens to seed affects the web of life.
When you don’t take into account the way ecological systems work, then you do damage.
Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.
When the forest is destroyed, when the river is dammed, when the biodiversity is stolen, when fields are waterlogged or turned saline because of economic activities, it is a question of survival for these people. So our environmental movements have been justice movements.
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.
