"One of the world's most prominent radical scientists."Guardian

Pitting humans against the earth, and placing them outside the earth community, is an outmoded, fossilized legacy of capitalist patriarchy and mechanistic thought that gave us fossil-fuel based industrialism and colonialism and is now imposing militarized growth on communities. If our species is to survive, we must re-imbed ourselves in the earth and become part of the earth community. We must reawaken our duties to protect the earth and our rights as earth citizens to a fair share of her gifts. For this we need to revisit our concepts of growth and prosperity.

Making peace with the Earth begins with a paradigm shift from the mechanistic ideas of the earth as dead matter to the earth as Gaia, a living planet, our mother.

We need a new paradigm for living on the Earth because the old one is clearly not working. An alternative is now a survival imperative for the human species. And the alternative that is needed is not only at the level of tools, it is at the level of our world view. How do we look at ourselves in this world? What are humans for? And are we merely a money-making and resource guzzling machine? Or do we have a higher purpose, a higher end?

Winner of the Sydney Peace Prize, Vandana Shiva is an internationally renowned physicist, activist, and best-selling author of many books, including Staying Alive, Earth Democracy, and Soil Not Oil.