Patriarchy is based on appropriating rights and leaving responsibility to others.

The fact that I still find so much beauty in a handicraft is because my mother taught us to see not just the craft as a product but the craft as an embodiment of human creativity and human labor.

Diversity creates harmony, and harmony creates beauty, balance, bounty and peace in nature and society, in agriculture and culture, in science and in politics.

I saw some women had written that the cloning of Dolly was wonderful since it showed that women could have children without men. They didn’t even understand that this was the ultimate ownership of women—of embryos, of eggs, of bodies—by a few men with capital and control techniques, that it wasn’t freedom from men but total control by men.

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.

My father had been a forester and I had grown up on those hills. I had seen forests and streams disappear. I jumped into Chipko movement and started to work with the peasant women. I learned from them about what forests mean for a rural woman in India in terms of firewood and fodder and medicinal plants and rich knowledge.

The enclosure of the biological and intellectual commons in this way is a real threat to the future of people everywhere because it creates a situation where common practices that have been part of people's lives for generations become monopolies of a handful of pharmaceutical, agribusiness and agrichemical corporations. People then become incapable of looking after their own needs.