Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.

Something is very, very wrong when people don’t have access to drinking water, and Coke creates its market out of that scarcity.

When you take the entire system into account, ways of developing more of something in one dimension can actually create scarcities in another. If we say we have to increase production because people need more food, more housing, more meat, or more milk, we can make one thing grow in a certain way. But by doing that we create externalities so that there are scarcities in other related things.

I've just been told that Nestle has taken out patents on the making of pullao. (Pullao is the way we make our rice in India, with either vegetables or meat or whatever.) Before you know it, every common use of plants will be patented by a Western corporation.

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.

It’s not that Monsanto is making money out of the blue. It’s making money by coercing and literally forcing people to pay for what was free. Take water, for instance. Water has always been free. We’ve never paid for drinking water. The World Bank says the reason water has been misused is because it was never commercially priced. But the reason it’s been misused is because it was wasted by the big users—industry, which polluted it.

I believe that we will see a lot of destruction, but I believe that if we can see the right patterns and draw the right lessons from that destruction, we might be able to rebuild before it's too late. And then I have that ultimate optimism that even if we can't, life will rebuild itself. In a way, the global economy might collapse, but Gaia won't, and people's ingenuity won't. We will rebuild society, we will rebuild local economies, we will rebuild human aspirations.