Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.

We have to build movements in the face of trade retaliation on the basis of people's democratic rights, on the basis of an ancient heritage of collective innovation. We work from the grassroots all the way to the national government and the World Trade Organization. It basically means being very multidimensional in our campaigns. And that is where part of the fun is. It involves both resistance and creativity. It involves constructive action, while at the same time saying "no."

You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed and call it LIFE. You have not created life, instead you have only polluted it.

The system of seeds based on monoculture is wrong and inappropriate. The biodiverse system has produced more food, and biodiversity means that seeds must be in the hands of farmers.

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.

One of the movements we have developed is to say that, just as intellectual property rights protect the inventions of individuals, common rights are needed to protect the common intellectual heritage of indigenous peoples. These are rights that are recognized through the Convention on Biological Diversity. We are working to make sure that they become foundations of our jurisprudence.

I did physics because of my love of nature. As a young student of science, I was taught that physics was the way to learn nature. So my travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology.