The director of the institute where I was working apologized about these young, enthusiastic researchers when the World Bank visited because he was afraid the institute would lose the World Bank consultancies.I went back home and started the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology—an extremely elaborate name for the tiny institute that I started in my mother’s cow shed. My parents handed over family resources and said, “Put them to public purpose.” That’s how I survived.

As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.

Uniformity is not nature's way; diversity is nature's way.

The poorest of families, the poorest of children, are subsidizing the growth of the largest agribusinesses in the world. I think it’s time we recognized that in free trade the poor farmer, the small farmer, is ending up having to pay royalties to the Monsantos of the world.

My personal background is actually very unusual for the kind of career I chose. I didn’t meet anyone who had ever done physics in my life. I grew up in the Himalayan forests. My father was a forest conservator, which meant that if I wasn’t in school I was in the forests with him. That has been very largely responsible for my ecological inclinations.

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.

To create the protection for the corporations, government is actually growing bigger than ever before, in every part of the world. Yet it’s growing extremely thin as a protector of people.