I have a deep connection with Mahatma Gandhi, partly because my mother was a very, very staunch Gandhian and brought us up that way. When I was six years old, and all the girls were getting nylon dresses, I was very keen to get a nylon frock for my birthday. My mother said, “I can get it for you, but would you rather—through how you live and what you wear and what you eat—ensure that food goes into the hands of the weaver or ensure that profits go into the bank of an industrialist?” That became such a checkstone for everything in life.

In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life.

We will either defend the rights of people and the earth, and for that we have to dismantle the rights that corporations have assigned to themselves, or corporations will in the next three decades destroy this planet, in terms of human possibilities.

The environmental movement can only survive if it becomes a justice movement. As a pure environmental movement, it will either die, or it will survive as a corporate 'greenwash'. Anyone who's a sincere environmentalist can't stand that role.

The kind of capitalism we are seeing today under this expansion of property into living resources is a whole, new, different phase of capitalism. It is totally inconsistent with democracy as well as with sustainability. What we have is capital working on a global scale, totally uprooted, with accountability nowhere, with responsibility nowhere, and with rights everywhere. This new capital, with absolute freedom and no accountability, is structurally anti-life, anti-freedom.

When you don't take into account the way ecological systems work, then you do damage.

American firms are beginning to reproduce nonsustainable systems, to force the elite of India to become energy consumers of the kind that the U.S. has become. That’s what globalization is about: Find markets where you can.