NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27

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Xref: sparky misc.activism.progressive:8472 sci.med.physics:455 alt.censorship:8841 alt.activism:18916 Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive,sci.med.physics,alt.censorship,alt.activism Path: sparky!uunet!gumby!wupost!mont!pencil.cs.missouri.edu!daemon From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe) Subject: Dr. Rosalie Bertell: "Quietly Eating Radioactivity" Message-ID: <1992Nov17.154614.6434@mont.cs.missouri.edu> Followup-To: sci.med.physics Summary: the militaristic segment of our society is whats distorting everything Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu Keywords: We're not choosing to live on this planet, we're choosing to kill it. Sender: news@mont.cs.missouri.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: pencil.cs.missouri.edu Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc. Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 15:46:14 GMT Approved: map@pencil.cs.missouri.edu Lines: 619 Quietly Eating Radioactivity i first heard segments from the following speech by Dr. Rosalie Bertell-- President of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health, in Toronto, Canada, she is a Doctor of Biometrics, and a researcher on cancer, leukemia and mortality among people exposed to nuclear power plants--in a tape produced by The Other America's Radio in 1986. it affected me deeply from that time forward. i recently obtained the (virtually) complete recording and include the transcription of it 148 lines below this one. As Dr. Bertell states, "this is our future. And somehow or other there has to be communication between the scientists and the farmers and the activists and the ordinary people who see these things and the rest of the community because this is an alarm system for survival. This is something everybody needs to know if we're going to survive." -- ratitor * * * * * * * excerpts from the following speech by Dr. Rosalie Bertell on the consequences of man-made radioactive matter which is killing us and the future of all life: . . . . as things get tighter and as money gets shorter, the thing that's sacrificed is always health. . . . there's no justice issue which does not result in a violation of human health. Everytime there's a justice issue, somebody gets sick. It's quite clear. . . . . we have a right to know what's in our food. But the problem is just quietly going underground and everybody's just quietly eating radioactive food, and they're going to be quietly getting cancer and quietly having deformed babies. We will quietly undermine the rest of the integrity of the gene pool, and the integrity of the earth. . . . . At some point or other if we survive, there's going to have to be a massive non-cooperation with our society which is producing death. . . . And if we are ever to break out of the militaristic society that we live in--and that *is* what I think is our basic aim, because that's what distorting everything--it's going to have to be through an across-the-board non-cooperation effort. It's this preoccupation with producing death, and instruments of death and mega-death. This is our root sickness. We're not choosing to *live* on this planet, we're choosing to kill it. If we're going to turn that around it's going to require massive non-cooperation; it's going to have to be non-violent because you can't violently choose life, you kill it. So it's going to *have* to be non-violent. And it's going to have to be basically people-to-people networks built on trust because you're *trusting* the future and you're trusting your life. . . . So we're in a crisis. I think it's a global crisis. It's manifested differently where you live but it's basically the same crisis. It's the crisis that says, "If I have more weapons, or I'm physically stronger, then I'm in charge and you have to do what I want." That's it. Right through our society whether you talk about rape, you talk about abuse, you talk about despotic rulers, or you talk about nuclear club, it's the same thing: if I'm bigger or I've got more power, therefore I'm in charge, and it just destroys everybody else. . . . I think it's both a death process and a birth process, and the death is coming hard. And it's the death of militarism. It's the death of the rule of the club. It's the death of might makes right. And we are capable of running the world on a different basis than that. It has happened before in history that we have turned aside from behaviors and it can happen again. And it *will* happen again. Dr. Rosalie Bertell was born in Buffalo, New York in 1929; she received her PhD in mathematics from the Catholic University of America, Washington in 1966. Between 1974 and 1978 she worked as Assistant Research Professor at the Graduate School, State University of New York at Buffalo, and between 1970 and 1978 as Senior Cancer Research Scientist at Roswell Park Memorial Institute, Buffalo. She has acted as consultant for the National Council of Churches Energy Task Force and for the Citizens Advisory Committee of the President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the US Environmental Protection Agency. She has published over ninety academic papers, addresses and articles in an international range of environmental, peace, and health journals and books; she has been called as an expert witness before the United States Congress, and in licensing hearings for nuclear power plants before the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In the international arena Dr Bertell has testified before the Select Committee on Uranium Resources in Australia in 1980, and at the Sizewell Enquiry in Britain in 1984. A member of the Order of Grey Nuns, she now researches low-level radiation as Director of Research of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health in Toronto, Canada, and campaigns internationally against the dangers of nuclear technology. . . . The industry also implies that only reactor fuel rod waste should be of concern to the public. It was low level waste, not reactor fuel, which apparently exploded in Chelyabinsk and almost exploded in Hanford, Washington. It is uranium mine tailings which have bathed the North American continent in radon gas. It is tritium, carbon 14, and stratospheric pollution from weapon testing which is already in the biosphere and which will slowly continue to pollute the food chain, undermining the life-nurturing power of the planet earth. Even if nuclear pollution were to stop today and all the controllable waste jettisoned into space (the dream of sending nuclear waste into space is utopian because of its extremely heavy weight, and the likelihood of periodic rocket failure), the uncontrollable waste already released into the biosphere would cause devastating damage over time. (p.121) . . . Because of inadequate military record-keeping policy, the US government seems unable to provide even the names or service experience of military men who participated in nuclear tests. Such record-keeping would allow comparison between their health today and that of other men of the same age. Similarly, workers in nuclear installations, people along transporation routes for radioactive material, or those whose main food supply comes from areas around nuclear power plants, cannot now be identified and their experiences compared with those of persons not so exposed to radiation. Non-record- keeping is hardly a commendable public health policy or the way to `prove' the safety of an industry. The subtle limiting factors in the public relations statement, "there is no record of a member of the general public having died from a commercial nuclear power plant operation,' so frequently quoted, include: `member of the general public' -- which excludes all nuclear workers, even part-time employees and those involved in transportation of radioactive materials; `commercial' -- which excludes government-operated or military nuclear power plants; `nuclear generator' -- which excludes all other parts of the nuclear fuel cycle such as mining, milling, fabrication, transporation, reprocessing and waste disposal; `died from' -- which excludes non-fatal cancers and other diseases directly caused by the radiation exposure. It also excludes genetic damage such as blindness, deafness or chronic diseases which occur in a child of the victim. (pp. 128-129) -- from "No Immediate Danger, Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth" by Dr. Rosalie Bertell, (c) 1985 by The Book Publishing Company, Summertown, Tennessee 38483 the following is the transcript of a speech given by Dr. Bertell in August of 1986 to AMARC, an international community radio group, in Vancouver, Canada: _____________________________________________________________________________ First of all I'd like to thank you for inviting me to come to this gathering, this is the biggest "press conference" I've ever seen. I had the experience when I was in India that they had a very clear-cut code. In fact you had to sign a piece of paper before you talked on the radio. They didn't even consider me for television because on the television in India you're not allowed to criticize government policy at all. On the radio, there are certain things you can criticize and certain other things you can't criticize. In the newspapers you can say anything you want. So you have to sign and agree to this code. I think in terms of communication with the public, that they're probably right in perceiving that the radio reaches more of the public than the written word, much more. But probably not as much as the television. I would like to speak tonight as someone who has studied public health, studied cancer, studied birth defects, studied the effects of radiation pollution, and then had to listen to all the official propaganda that comes out--no matter where you live--at the time of an accident like Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island, or Mighty Oak, which was the failed nuclear test in Nevada at the same time as Chernobyl. I think that trying to put together a story that's meaningful for people when you're snowed with technical jargon, must be pretty difficult. And I know I've had a great deal of compassion for the media when they first ran into rems, and rads, and becquerels and picocuries and what have you, when these kinds of accidents occurred. I would say quite frankly that the vocabulary or the jargon is meant to confuse you and it's deliberate. It's become even worse of late because in order to impress the public with how insignificant the exposures are, there seem to be two tactics. One tactic is to make the numbers small. So if you've been in the business of reporting radiation exposure or accidents for awhile, you'll remember that it used to be in terms of maybe eighty millirem at Three Mile Island, or a hundred millirem as background radiation, or 5,000 millirem permitted to workers per year. It's now changed so that instead of eighty millirem it would be eight-tenths of a millisievert. Eight-tenths is a littler number. Instead of workers getting 5,000 millirems per year they now get fifty millisieverts. So they changed the unit to make it a hundred times bigger which makes the numbers a hundred times smaller. So that's one tactic. The other tactic is to give everything in percent so that you're told `well, there's a little bit of iodine 131 in your milk, but it's O.K., it's only a small percentage of the permissible level.' Now you're not really told where that permissible level came from, or who said you could have radioactive material in your milk and it was O.K. But to even express it as a small percentage of a permissible level is very deceptive because those permissible levels are extraordinarily high. What we're talking about here is death-dealing material. I would like to tell you a story about just what happened to me over this past weekend. If you were following me around you would find that this isn't a peculiar weekend, this is something that happens regularly. And these are the kinds of stories happening all over the world. This particular one happened in Gore, Oklahoma which you maybe never heard of. It's a very small town in the eastern part of Oklahoma, not too far from Arkansas, and in Gore, Oklahoma there's really only one industry and that is Kerr-McGee's production of uranium hexafluoride. Now Kerr-Mcgee had a lot of waste at this plant, so they decided they would have these deep-well injections, and they would inject this waste down into the ground, into the rock, and then forget about it. So they were going to put 300,000 gallons per minute down into the earth about ten feet above the water table. This radioactive waste was full of at least seventeen heavy metals that are known to be seriously toxic. The people organized and they stopped the deep-injection wells. But what happened, in the long run, was an even worse horror because the Kerr-McGee plant has declared that this material, which they were going to inject in the deep wells, is really a hidden source of fertilizer and nobody recognized it. So now they have declared an experimental farm and they are spreading this nuclear waste on the farm as a fertilizer. Now fertilizer has three possible things in it--it has nitrates, or phosphates, or potash. And when you describe a fertilizer you give the percentage, maybe ten percent nitrogen, or nitrates, and twenty percent phosphates, and ten percent potash. That's how you describe a fertilizer: 10-20-10. That would tell you what was in it. Well if I had to describe Kerr-McGee's fertilizer it's 0-0-0. Now they take this 0-0-0 "fertilizer" and they put a little ammonia in it, which puts some nitrate in it, and then they call it a 2-0-0, because they added ammonia. And this is being spread--they started out with 160 acres, it's now moving to between 7,000 and 8,000 acres of Oklahoma prime farmland, beautiful part of Oklahoma. And what does this mean for the rest of us? It means that that's the hay that is fed to the cattle over the winter that's going to be grown on this soil. They've already had beef cattle roaming around on their specially fertilized ground. And it's another example of the fact that radiation is now a fact of life. We get it whether we like it or not. On Rabbit Hill, in Oklahoma, where they are doing this little fertilizer experiment, one of the families told me they had at home, a frog that their son had caught that had nine legs. And I thought, `this is crazy'--they must be just bumps that they're calling legs. Anyway I said I wanted to see it. So I went over Saturday night and the frog was dead and they had it in alcohol in a bottle, they'd kept it, and I never saw anything look so peculiar in my life. It was a frog with the normal four legs--two arms, two legs--but then it had a leg coming out of the center of the chest and two on each side. So there were *five* legs coming out of the center of the chest. They were long, they had two parts, and they had the fingers with the web between them. So they were formed, they were not just growths. This is on the same land where they have been using the radioactive waste. The reason I'm telling you this is that this is what is happening to our earth, this is what's happening to our people. This is Cherokee land, this is the native people's land. Oklahoma is mostly native land, or it should be mostly native land. This is our food, and this is our future. And somehow or other there has to be communication between the scientists and the farmers and the activists and the ordinary people who see these things and the rest of the community because this is an alarm system for survival. This is something everybody needs to know if we're going to survive. Because nothing else is going to matter if we kill the earth and we kill the food and we destroy the gene pool and there aren't any people around to enjoy the earth. None of the other issues are going to matter. And as things get tighter and as money gets shorter, the thing that's sacrificed is always health. I noticed your resolutions, on the board, and they certainly look encouraging, and I'm really glad to see so many people here and glad that you have this conference and glad for what you're doing. And I did see a resolution out there that you were going to propose to give more time and energy to peace and justice issues. I would suggest that you specialize and that you realize that there's no justice issue which does not result in a violation of human health. Everytime there's a justice issue, somebody gets sick. It's quite clear. It's always hard to argue on a philosophical basis; it's always hard to carry on ideological arguments; but it's much simpler to make visible the sickness, to make visible the people that are suffering because of the decisions. And I would think one of the things you could do that would be *most* important is to bring out the problems and to give a voice to the victims. And there are many. I've mentioned, I've touch into the nuclear problem. You might be unaware of the fact that just since 1945--not counting Hiroshima and Nagasaki--there are somewhere between 10 million and 20 million radiation victims in the world. I'm talking about uranium miners and millers, transportation people, the ones who run the power plants, the ones who separate out the weapons materials, fabricate the weapons, test the weapons, and live downwind of the tests, and handle the waste. And at the rate we're going, and if we start spreading it as fertilizer, then you can expect the number to skyrocket, and you can expect the number of victims to skyrocket. There's another thing that the alternative media could do and that is to act as a social critique of the main-line media. Let me suggest an area where I think you could take a very strong stand and a very credible stand, and one which I think would attract more support for the alternative media. There are many things that once you point them out, become obvious to everybody, and you don't really need to prove them. It's just that nobody thought about them. There are many things in society that are like that. People go on in a kind of mindless way doing something because they've always done it, and then when someone points out that it's ridiculous they recognize it immediately. I would suggest that the main-line media was very vulnerable in their handling of the Chernobyl accident on many scores, but one in particular is the common assumption that you should turn to a nuclear physicist to ask about your health. If you turn to a *nurse* to ask about your health, you would have had the whole medical association down on your head. But not one person objected. I know in Canada I think Ian Wilson, head of the Canadian Nuclear Society, was on every program talking about health. And he has no credentials whatsoever in health. They are extremely vulnerable on this. I refused to be on "Cross-Country Checkup" and I refused to be on "The Journal" precisely because it was to be talking about health *with* Ian Wilson, and I said "No, he has no credentials." And so the main-line media went with Ian Wilson, not with somebody that has credentials in radiation health. Sometimes they use a scientist only to be provocative, or only to set up an argument. And what we really need to do is some kind of social critique like, "*Why* are you asking a physicist in the first place?" It's pretty obvious if it's said, but it's not obvious when it isn't said. I'd like to say something else about the difficulty that we're in right now in terms of radiation pollution of North America much of which is just not being talked about at all. I'd like to reconstruct what happened in late April and early May including both what happened in North America *and* what happened at Chernobyl. On April 10th [1986], the nuclear test called "Mighty Oak" was set off in Nevada. And what they're doing now in Nevada is they're setting the test off in an underground tunnel and they have three sets of doors. These doors are six or seven foot thick. They leave two doors ajar and they close the third one, and at the very first seconds of the blast, they try to let through the radiation and then slam the doors shut so they don't get the blast or the fire. Then they take that radiation that comes off in the beginning of the blast and they're trying to put it into a weapon beam. Anyway whatever happened on April 10th, the two sets of doors that were supposed to close didn't, and they had a raging nuclear fire underground in the tunnel. The last door held. They always lose some of the nuclear material in these blasts. But this time it had filled the whole cavity where it was not supposed to be, so it couldn't just be released as they usually do, slowly. They went out, as usual, after they had this accident, and gave themselves a permit to vent. That makes it legal. So if you ask about it, it's legal venting, it isn't an accident. And they started venting sometime about April 20th. They did a small amount of venting. After that, they must have seen the Chernobyl accident from satellite though they didn't announce it--they waited for Sweden to announce it. But on the day after, the 27th, they began venting everything, and they continued to vent for five or six days in Nevada from that test. They didn't admit it either until the 6th of May--if you look back on the press conference it was May 6th that they finally admitted that. Before that they said they were being maligned--that they had not had an accident. Meanwhile another agency of the government, the EPA, started telling the radiation levels in North America, and in Canada it was the radiation protection branch of health and welfare in Ottawa. I don't know how many Canadians are here but maybe you remember the very first announcement of radioactive rain was where? Ottawa. Isn't that interesting? It didn't go to the east coast or the west coast but it came from Chernobyl and it landed in Ottawa. It was really incredible. If you look at the EPA measurements for the states, you'll find the highest measurement for the whole United States was in Salt Lake City--directly downwind of the Nevada Test Site. You'll also find it quite high in Spokane and other places. Now all they measured in Canada and the United States was iodine 131, and the reports are really quite carefully worded. It says "Post-Chernobyl Federal Radiation Measurements." It doesn't say it came from Chernobyl. *Legally* you cannot say that the government said it came from Chernobyl--because they didn't--you just imply it because that's the heading. Meanwhile when they had their press conference, the Department of Energy announced that they really only lost one gas and that gas was zenon 133. And nothing else. Now if you know what a nuclear explosion is like, and you think that they just lost one little gas out of between 300 and 400 radionuclides produced in that nuclear blast, then you deserve to be deceived. But let's suppose that was true--that they could do that--that they could only release that one and that all the rest were kept underground. Then you *still* have the problem that they're claiming Chernobyl radioactive iodine all over the United States at very high levels, and there's been no follow-up. I presume you know that in Europe they're now reporting the cesium 137. After you have an accident the first thing's the radioactive iodine but that's gone in about two months. And the next thing is the cesium. Sweden, for example, has forbidden anybody to fish in their 20,000 lakes because of the high levels of cesium in the fish. They're high levels of cesium in berries all over Europe, the blackberries and the raspberries. There's high levels of cesium in apricots and peaches from Greece. There are high levels of cesium in wild mushrooms and in deer, and people are being warned not to eat these things. So *if* indeed it was Chernobyl radiation in North America, and we had the iodine, then why are we not being warned about the cesium. Alright? They can't have it both ways. Somehow or other there's something pretty fishy about the radiation reports for North America. But we need some independent reporting, and we need some independent investigative reporters, and we need some people who are willing to interview bureaucrats and ask them why these kinds of anomalies exist. Because we have a right to know what's in our food. But the problem is just quietly going underground and everybody's just quietly eating radioactive food, and they're going to be quietly getting cancer and quietly having deformed babies. We will quietly undermine the rest of the integrity of the gene pool, and the integrity of the earth. So we're in a very bad situation. One of the lifelines is in the alternative media. One of the things that provides us with an international network to be able to help one another is the alternative media. And part of the infrastructure of hopefully a growing global village that will replace this insanity which is destroying us has got to be the alternative media. That means you've got responsibility for not passing on the lies; for being awake and alive and questioning; and also for nourishing what moves us toward a more life-giving agenda. You've got a big responsibility. I presume you know it because you are here and that's heartening. But it means picking out the people to nourish and also providing a network so that the people who see things and know things can get it out. Because it's very important to get it out. I'll tell you a few more things that I heard in Europe because I think there are people here who maybe could use that information. Some of the milk was condemned in England, some of the milk on the continent was condemned. It was the understanding of the people over there that it was put in to powdered milk form, after which they lost track of it. Now where do you think that's likely to end up? The third world. Right. So there's got to be a way when something like this happens in the first world, that those things can be marked and that people in the receiving countries know right away when they get there, and that it gets a *lot* of press. Because there's nothing that works in our present lawless international arena as much as popular opinion. There's a lot of flaunting of the law, but opinion of people all over the world *still* has some kind of pressure. And it's going to take more than that to rouse the public. At some point or other if we survive, there's going to have to be a massive non-cooperation with our society which is producing death. I don't know how they did it in Poland, but somehow or other in spite of pressures, they were in touch with one another, they were able to call a strike even if it was only for an hour. And they were able to shut down the society and say `we mean business.' We have not yet been able to do this in the west. They did do it in Poland, they did accomplish that. I know a little more about what they did in the Philippines. They worked very very hard for a long time and they suffered for many years. But what happened in the Philippines was really overwhelming. When I look at the escalation--when I look at Cuba and I see that there was one person who was the hero in Cuba; and when I look at Nicaragua and I see that there was a group of people who were the heros in Nicaragua--that's an escalation. And then I look at the Philippines and I see the Philippines was everybody. That is a *fantastic* progression. And it depends very much on communication. Because the *only* security we have, the only safety we have is in number. And the only way we can be safe is if we do things together. And the only way we can do things together is if we communicate with one another. And if we are ever to break out of the militaristic society that we live in--and that *is* what I think is our basic aim, because that's what distorting everything--it's going to have to be through an across-the-board non-cooperation effort. It's this preoccupation with producing death, and instruments of death and mega-death. This is our root sickness. We're not choosing to *live* on this planet, we're choosing to kill it. If we're going to turn that around it's going to require massive non-cooperation; it's going to have to be non-violent because you can't violently choose life, you kill it. So it's going to *have* to be non-violent. And it's going to have to be basically people-to-people networks built on trust because you're *trusting* the future and you're trusting your life. To me, there are four stages that populations will move through in trying to deal with these issues. I would suggest if you have not read the book by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, "On Death And Dying," that you read it, and if you have read it I suggest you read it again, but read it not in terms of personal death, read it in terms of the death of the species. I think you'll find that a society goes through the same kind of stages as an individual goes through when they deal with these life- and-death questions. And this applies to revolution, it applies to the nuclear issue, it applies to Star Wars, it applies to many things in society that carry with them the potential of destroying us as a species and destroying our future. The first stage, which is the one that you probably come up against the most, is just flat out denial: bug off, don't bother me, I hope I die before it happens, I'm too busy, leave me alone, I want to live my live if it happens it happens, I can't stop it anyway, I'm helpless. All those things, that's denial, flat out denial. If a person gets over that, or if a society gets over the denial stage then they move into a second stage which is normally called anger, frustration, high emotional content, maybe just look at a child and you fill up and start to cry and you say, `where did the tears come from?' And you don't know, but there's something inside of you that says, `things are really bad and what's it going to be like for this child?' That stage is good, it's healthy. It's much healthier than the first stage even though you feel miserable. You're more in touch with reality. So it's a good stage. But if you're working with media then you've got to know whether you're trying to move people out of denial, or you're trying to deal with the people that are not denying it anymore but they're hurting. And you can't continue to try to raise consciousness when the people's consciousness is bursting and their heart's aching, and they want to know what to do. So you can't push it at the wrong stage. And again we go through this cyclically, we end up back in denial again and then we end up in a deeper hurting, which then opens us up to a deeper reality. You find after that that people move into a stage normally called barter. In a barter stage you sort of half accept the reality and half accept the responsibility, but you're not yet acting effectively. These are the people who "spin their wheels," a term the students use. And it's true, they *do* a lot. They often are very active, but they don't accomplish a whole lot. And their activity is satisfying that hunger in their heart and that feeling that things aren't right and that you have to do something. Again, you have to deal with people differently when they're in *that* stage of barter where they often think they're doing all they can but "all they can" is not really changing something. Do you know what I mean when I say that? I would put most politicians in that stage. And I would put most military people in that stage. They know darn well how bad it is. They also have gone through the stage of being horrified, and they have come to what *they* think grips with what reality is all about which is to deal with the economics and the politics of who's in charge. But they don't know anything about biology or sociology or psychology or physiology or survival. So they're just dealing with the little bit they think they can handle, and they're working very hard, and they think you're picking on them if you tell them to do more. And this is where many of us are. And we find ourselves back there, and we need a community to move to the fourth stage. In the fourth stage you have already let it all come in on you and I say that because I know when I began to realize what we were dealing with, how extensive and how deep in our world these problems work, it took me about a year. I actually took off for a year because I couldn't cope with it. And because I was broken inside. I was doing things, and at the same time wishing I was someplace else and not doing it. I was torn between what I though I ought to be doing, and what I found myself doing. So we're in a crisis. I think it's a global crisis. It's manifested differently where you live but it's basically the same crisis. It's the crisis that says, "If I have more weapons, or I'm physically stronger, then I'm in charge and you have to do what I want." That's it. Right through our society whether you talk about rape, you talk about abuse, you talk about despotic rulers, or you talk about nuclear club, it's the same thing: if I'm bigger or I've got more power, therefore I'm in charge, and it just destroys everybody else. If you let it come in on you and you stop your own defenses, then I think you will release a well of energy that you won't believe, and nobody else will believe. Most of our vitality is being absorbed inside of us because we're not dealing with it, because we're not *really* dealing with it. And if you stop all the defenses you find you've got so much energy you don't know where it came from and you can do what ten people do. And you'll have to. I'm not exaggerating. When someone says, `what can I do?' I know they haven't started. Because once you start and once you have reached, at least the depth of where you are now and you're willing to go with it totally, then all the barriers fall away. Not easily but they do. But they do and you do what you think you can't do. I think it's both a death process and a birth process, and the death is coming hard. And it's the death of militarism. It's the death of the rule of the club. It's the death of might makes right. And we are capable of running the world on a different basis than that. It has happened before in history that we have turned aside from behaviors and it can happen again. And it *will* happen again. The birthing is more exciting. And the birthing is to be nourished. And the signs of the birthing are here with us tonight. There's signs of cooperation instead of competition. There's signs of an equal sharing instead of hogging the things of the earth. There's signs of seeing the needs of others before we start piling up our own wants. There is a sign of a vision of a global community where we keep our individuality, where we share our resources, and where we learn to live together under common agreements and regional solutions to our problems instead of military might. It's going to take a lot of adjustments, but the people in the alternative movement are developing the skills that can bring about survival in this kind of a society. So I'd like to congratulate you on your beginnings and I would like to encourage you to go deeper, and encourage you to listen to what people are saying. Draw out the people in your local community and give them credibility and give them a voice when they really have something to say. And above all nourish the roots of the global village. Nourish the roots of the future. Because that village which is being born is still not quite there and it's very fragile, and very scary because we could blow the whole thing. Thank you. For more information about all this please contact: The International Institute of Concern For Public Health 830 Bathurst Street Toronto, Canada M5R3G1 416/533-7351 -- daveus rattus yer friendly neighborhood ratman KOYAANISQATSI ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language) n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.