Earth Democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation, and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict, fear and hatred.

I do sculpting sometimes when I have the time, and the first thing I sculpted was a bust of [Albert] Einstein. It still sits on my table and still inspires me. He was a person who triggered my imagination and my ideas.

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.

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.

We have a very old conservation movement, particularly in the United States, which has focused on campaigns to protect endangered species: the spotted owl, the old-growth forest. But usually it stops there. To me, biodiversity is the full spectrum. Species conservation is not only about wilderness conservation. It’s also about protecting the livelihood of people even while changing the dominant relationship that humans have had with other species. In India, it’s an economic issue, not just an ecological one.

Genetic engineering has never been about saving the world, it's about controlling the world.

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.