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Quote by Andy Singer

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Andy Singer

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“Nuclear waste is unlike other wastes. It is not only the danger…but the timescale. Trash inside a landfill might decay over decades, plastics over hundreds or thousands of years - the truth is we don’t know yet. But the half-life of Plutonium-239 created inside the reactor cores of nuclear power plants is 24,100 years. Uranium-235, the fuel used to power the reactors, has a half-life of 700 million years. To dispose of nuclear waste is to think in geological time. Uranium is older than the Earth, forged more than 6 billion years ago by exploding supernovae and colliding neutron stars. It is, by any measure, a miraculous element: a single pellet barely larger than a multivitamin can generate as much energy as a ton of coal, without any direct carbon emissions”

“But just across the U.S. border, up in the tar sands of Alberta, there is another equally horrific image. A gaping pit, an abyss on its way to becoming the size of Florida, exists where Imperial Oil -- the largest company in the world -- is using the wild Athabasca River to pressure-wash underground sand formations that they gouge up like honeycombs, using huge amounts of energy and clean fresh water to steam the oil from those sands. Native people in the area are dying from drastically abnormal incidences of rare cancers, and Imperial Oil is seeking to transport more giant mining equipment -- on trucks over two hundred feet long and three stories high-- up the Snake River to Lewiston, Idaho, along the same route where the Nez Perce tribe rescued Lewis and Clark and directed them to the Pacific, shortly before the U.S. betrayed the Nez Perce and chased them toward Canada before killing them. (Rick Bass)”

“Along with the rest of the environmental movement, I used the expression 'climate emergency', but over the past year of elm-watching, I've realised emergencies are events that require immediate, drastic, high-paced intervention, designed to bring the situation to an end. Climate action just isn't like that and I no longer believe the emergency metaphor is helpful: it implies that the problem will be short-lived, that experts will be able to handle it and that we should be in a state of heightened emotion, in 'fight-or-flight' mode, until help arrives. It makes many people so upset that they're understandably immobilised or frozen with fear, or too distressed to be rational. In reality we all need to engage deeply and long term, in cool, life-affirming ways. I believe recovery or healing is a better way of thinking about the issue: getting off our fossil fuel addiction, restoring our damaged relationship with the rest of the natural world and trasforming to healthier ways of being.”

“As soon as one looks deeper into being one recognizes that all things are interconnected, that even the least of them communicates with a whole world. But the age of haste does not have the time to heighten perception. Only in the depth of being does a space open in which all things lie close to one another and communicate with one another. It is just this friendliness of being which gives the world its scent.”