If you want a cow to be not just a cow but a milk machine, you can do a very good job at that by creating new hormones like the Bovine Growth Hormone. It might make the cow very ill, it might turn it into a drug addict, and it might even create consumer scares about the health and safety aspects of the milk. But we've gotten so used to manipulating objects and organisms and ecosystems for a single objective that we ignore the costs involved. I call this the "monoculture of the mind."

Nature has given us this for free, it was meant to sustain us, we will not allow it to become a monopoly to finance the Imperial Army.

Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being.

It is only with local [agriculture] that we can manage the complexity and care that sustainability requires.

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.

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.

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