Asking the hard questions

Peter Coyote challenges Stewart Brand's hypothesis that "we are like gods", positing instead that human beings are "idiot savants"

Famous Actor: Fukushima is dumping nuclear fuel into Pacific

— Plutonium “named after devil” — View of nuclear advocate “a little sociopathic” — Entire biosphere at risk from these poisons fatal to everything with replicating cells

ENENews,

2 Febraury, 2014

Peter Coyote, Wikipedia: American actor, author, director, screenwriter and narrator of films, theatre, television and audio books. His voice work includes narrating the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics and Apple’s iPad campaign. He has also served as on-camera co-host of the 2000 Oscar telecasts [and won an] Emmy for narration in 1992 [...] ["Coyote is most famous for his 50-plus movie roles, including E.T.'s sympathetic scientist" -Source]

Peter Coyote question to nuclear energy advocate Stewart Brand (h/t Gar Smith): What I find disturbing and sort of a little sociopathic about your perspective is the absence of doubt. […] You are willing to risk the entire commons by introducing a biocide that’s fatal to everything with replicating cells. That stays deadly longer than all human history […] the half-life of plutonium is over 100,000 years, and I can only see the reason is to support this culture. So my question to you is, in the light of such risk, which will be enduring forever […] why are you not willing to entertain all the prior precautionary steps […] rather than continuing the model of centralized power, centralized sale, and keeping us consumers, at the risk of the entire biosphere? (audience applause)

Peter Coyote at the Commonwealth Club of California, May 2013: Actor Peter Coyote imagines that the scientists behind the Manhattan Project didn’t anticipate the global disasters of nuclear energy like Fukushima’s radioactive spill.

Peter Coyote: After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, if Oppenheimer and the scientists said, ‘There’s no reason that this substance named after the devil, should be promulgated in our culture. We can’t control it. We’re asking ourselves to be perfect, in a universe where people say ‘oops’ every day.’  […] had they said that, we would not have tons and tons of nuclear fuel leaking into the rivers in Hanford Washington, leaking into the Tennessee Valley Authority — all over the world piling up, dumping into the ocean in Japan. […] Had they just asked themselves, we’re creating a permanently toxic poison that’s antithetical to anything with replicating cells, are we sophisticated enough, capable enough to leash this on the universe.’ I think wisdom might have had second thoughts, and said, ‘I don’t think we are.’

Peter Coyote: How the Manhattan Project Poisoned Science from Commonwealth Club on FORA.tv