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Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development QUOTES

Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development QUOTES

1 " Maldevelopment is the violation of the integrity of organic, interconnected and interdependent systems, that sets in motion a process of exploitation, inequality, injustice and violence. It is blind to the fact that a recognition of nature’s harmony and action to maintain it are preconditions for distributive justice. "

― Vandana Shiva , Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

2 " Modern science, as we have noted earlier, has a world-view that both supports and is supported by the socio-political-economic system of western capitalist patriarchy which dominates and exploits nature, women, and the poor. "

― Vandana Shiva , Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

3 " However, such theorising is uninteresting in the context of a comparison with ethno-science and an evaluation in an ecological perspective, though for a dualist philosophy of science restricted to the analysis of ideas alone it is just these fields which are most interesting since they are the most advanced in the reductionist-positivist scheme of thought. "

― Vandana Shiva , Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

4 " Dominant modes of perception based on reductionism, duality and linearity are unable to cope with equality in diversity, with forms and activities that are significant and valid, "

― Vandana Shiva , Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

5 " 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? "

― Vandana Shiva , Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

6 " Ecology movements are political movements for a nonviolent world order in which nature is conserved for conserving the options for survival. "

― Vandana Shiva , Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

7 " The recovery of the feminine principle allows a transcendance and transformation of these patriarchal foundations of maldevelopment. It allows a redefinition of growth and productivity as categories linked to the production, not the destruction, of life. It is thus simultaneously an ecological and a feminist political project which legitimises the way of knowing and being that create wealth by enhancing life and diversity, and which deligitimises the knowledge and practise of a culture of death as the basis for capital accumulation. "

― Vandana Shiva , Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

8 " The worldwide destruction of the feminine knowledge of agriculture evolved over four to five thousand years by a handful of white male scientists in less than two decades has not merely violated women as experts but, since their expertise is modeled on nature’s system of renewability, has gone hand in hand with the ecological destruction of nature’s processes and the economic destruction of poor people in rural areas. "

― Vandana Shiva , Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

9 " The assumptions are evident: nature is unproductive; organic agriculture based on nature’s cycles of renewability spells poverty; women and tribal and peasant societies embedded in nature are similarly unproductive, not because it has been demonstrated that in cooperation they produce less goods and services for needs, but because it is assumed that ‘production’ takes place only when mediated by technologies for commodity production, even when such technologies destroy "

― Vandana Shiva , Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

10 " The close nexus between reductionist science, patriarchy, violence, and profits is explicit in 80 percent of scientific research that is devoted to the war industry, and is frankly aimed directly at lethal violence— "

― Vandana Shiva , Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

11 " Monocultures and monopolies symbolize patriarchal agriculture. The war mentality underlying military-industrial agriculture is evident from the names given to the herbicides destroying the economic basis of the survival of the poorest women in the rural areas of the Third World. Roundup, Machete, and Lasso from Monsanto. Pentagon, Prowl, Scepter, Squadron, Cadre, and Avenge from American Home Products, which has merged with Monsanto. The language is of war, not sustainability. "

― Vandana Shiva , Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

12 " 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. "

― Vandana Shiva , Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

13 " food security for rural communities. When the household and community are food-secure, the girl child is food-secure. When the household and community are food-insecure, it is the girl child who, because of gender discrimination, pays the highest price in terms of malnutrition. When access to food diminishes, the girl child’s share is last and least. The politics of food is gendered at multiple levels. "

― Vandana Shiva , Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

14 " 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. "

― Vandana Shiva , Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

15 " 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. "

― Vandana Shiva , Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

16 " 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. "

― Vandana Shiva , Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development