We share this planet, our home, with millions of species. Justice and sustainability both demand that we do not use more resources than we need.

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.

The problem of numbers can only be dealt with by recognizing that people have a fundamental right to economic security. If you provide them with economic and environmental security, the population will stabilize itself.

I saw brilliant ideas coming out of the [Chipko] movement that needed better articulation, that needed elaboration and systematic analysis. I just followed that and it's been very exciting.

Food is the place where you begin.

I do not allow myself to be overcome by hopelessness, no matter how tough the situation. I believe that if you just do your little bit without thinking of the bigness of what you stand against, if you turn to the enlargement of your own capacities, just that itself creates new potential.

We are in a strange kind of time, where the kind of liberation movements such as anti-apartheid movements and freedom struggles in India need to be reinvented. We need to retool them so that all the gains that our generation has made can be passed on to future generations.