Ecofeminism Quotes

“Now, after the material resources of the colonies have been looted, their spiritual and cultural resources are being transformed into commodities for the world market.”
― Maria Mies, Ecofeminism

“The act of ‘moving out’ thus becomes the act of owning, and it is for the facilitation of the ability to ‘move out’, separate and fragment that capital depends on science and technology. Ownership procured through removal and ‘mixing with labour’, however, denies that prior to this, labour had been involved. There is no clear line between nature and human labour expended on the cultivated seed and nature and the human offspring. What the industrializing vision sees as nature is other people’s social labour that it wants to denigrate by defining it as non-labour, as biology and nature, and defining both nature and women’s work as passive. From the dominant standpoint, as Claudia von Werlhof6 has pointed out, ‘nature’ is everything that should be available free, and/or as cheaply as possible. This includes products of social labour. “The labour of these people is therefore pronounced to be non-labour, to be biology; their labour power — their ability to work — appears as a natural resource, and their products as akin to a natural deposit.”
― Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism

“It is in this sense that the seed and women’s bodies as sites of regenerative power are, in the eyes of capitalist patriarchy, among the last colonies.4 These sites of creative regeneration are transformed into ‘passive’ sites where the expert ‘produces’ and adds value. Nature, women and non-white people merely provide ‘raw’ material. The devaluation of contributions from women and nature goes hand-in-hand with the value assigned to acts of colonization as acts of development and improvement.”
― Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism

“The epistemological assumptions of reductionism are related to its ontological assumptions: uniformity permits knowledge of parts of a system to stand for knowledge of the whole. Divisibility permits context-free abstraction of knowledge, and creates criteria of validity based on alienation and non-participation, which is then projected as ‘objectivity’.”
― Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism

“But the most important lesson was: you cannot understand an unbearable social situation unless you try to change it. We did not use the usual methodological tools to ‘study’ the issue of domestic violence, namely to collect statistics to quantify that there was a ‘need’ for social intervention. We did not first read books about domestic violence in Germany. We started with street action and we demanded a house for battered women. The response to our action for a Frauenhaus was enormous, and we got it within seven months. This struggle taught me the most important lesson for my further life: experience and struggle come before theoretical study.”
― Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism

“This involves working as co-creators and co-producers with the Earth. This demands using our intelligence to conserve and heal, not conquer and wound. This is the creative and constructive Anthropocene of Earth Democracy, based on ecological humility in place of arrogance, and ecological responsibility in place of careless and blind exercise of power, control and violence. For humans to protect life on Earth and their own future we need to become deeply conscious of the rights of Mother Earth, our duties towards her and our compassion for all her beings. Our world has been structured by capitalist patriarchy around fictions and abstractions like ‘capital’, ‘corporations’ and ‘growth’, which have allowed the unleashing of the negative forces of the destructive Anthropocene. We need to get grounded again – in the Earth, her diversity, and her living processes – and unleash the positive forces of a creative Anthropocene. We will either make peace with the Earth or face extinction as humans, even as we push millions of other species to extinction. Continuing the war against the Earth is not an intelligent option.”
― Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism

“We are part of nature, not her masters and owners. Bestowing intellectual property rights on life forms, living resources and living processes is an ethical, ecological and economic perversion. We need to recognize the rights of Mother Earth and therefore the intrinsic value of all her species and living processes.”
― Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism

“A revolução científica propunha-se remover as fronteiras da ignorância. Em vez disso, uma tradição de conhecimento que tem considerado a natureza e a mulher unicamente como fonte de recurso, e os limites da natureza como entraves, criou uma ignorância fabricada pelo homem sem precedentes - uma ignorância que está a tornar-se uma nova fonte de ameaça para a vida neste planeta. A colonização da semente reflecte os padrões da colonização do corpo da mulher. Lucros e poder passam a estar intimamente associados à invasão de todos os organismos biológicos.”
― Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminismo: Prólogo de Airel Salleh - Prólogo a la edición española de Yayo Herrero