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.

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

I still can't figure out what inspired me to do physics. But since I was nine or ten years old, I wanted to be like [Albert] Einstein. He was my hero. I knew no physicists. I knew no scientists. I had nobody around me. And I went to a convent that didn't even have higher mathematics and physics. I taught myself these subjects in order to get into university.

We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.

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.

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

For example, the idea that objects have properties out there in fixed ways is an incorrect idea about the world. Properties are created through relationships and processes. They are not inherent in electrons or photons or quanta any more than they are inherent in soil or trees or people. So my critique of reductionistic science is a critique that I have inherited from my scientific training. But it has been deepened by my experiences as an ecologist, in seeing the ecological destruction taking place today.