To create the protection for the corporations, government is actually growing bigger than ever before, in every part of the world. Yet it’s growing extremely thin as a protector of people.

When the forest is destroyed, when the river is dammed, when the biodiversity is stolen, when fields are waterlogged or turned saline because of economic activities, it is a question of survival for these people. So our environmental movements have been justice movements.

The kind of capitalism we are seeing today under this expansion of property into living resources is a whole, new, different phase of capitalism. It is totally inconsistent with democracy as well as with sustainability. What we have is capital working on a global scale, totally uprooted, with accountability nowhere, with responsibility nowhere, and with rights everywhere. This new capital, with absolute freedom and no accountability, is structurally anti-life, anti-freedom.

The idea of engineering is an idea of mastery. And today the role that we are being asked to play is a role based on informed humanity.

I have a deep connection with Mahatma Gandhi, partly because my mother was a very, very staunch Gandhian and brought us up that way. When I was six years old, and all the girls were getting nylon dresses, I was very keen to get a nylon frock for my birthday. My mother said, “I can get it for you, but would you rather—through how you live and what you wear and what you eat—ensure that food goes into the hands of the weaver or ensure that profits go into the bank of an industrialist?” That became such a checkstone for everything in life.

Although two thirds of our planet is water, we face an acute water shortage. The water crisis is the most pervasive , most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth.

Biopiracy (is) biological theft; illegal collection of indigenous plants by corporations who patent them for their own use.