The Chipko activists have always been close to my parents, since my father was among the few forestry officials who supported them within the bureaucracy. And I was involved with the Chipko movement in my student days.

Biotech and geo engineering have the same mindset, of engineering, of power, of control, of mastery of nature.

In civilizational issues you don't look at the tiny details as the debate. You have to look at the big picture!

One particular spark was when I went back to my favorite spot in the mountains where my father always used to take us before my graduate studies in Canada and finding that the stream I had gone swimming in wasn’t there. The forest had been converted into an apple orchard with World Bank financing. The entire place, literally, had changed.

If India is an emerging economy with millions of new consumers, sell them the Volvo. Sell them the Cielo car. Sell them whatever you can, hamburgers and KFCs. It’s the middle classes who have moved into being able to own a car, a refrigerator. For them there is this mantra that the General Electric refrigerator is better than some other model, that the Cielo car is fancier than the Ambassador.

Governments have a favorite phrase: “lean and mean.” But they’ve been made very, very fat for corporate interests.

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