To call this stuff "waste" is a misnomer, it is hardly an accurate term, because the strange and almost mythic character of the poison fire -- uranium -- and our processing of it has been that at every stage of the fuel cycle, everything that we have employed, every glove, every boot, every truck, every reactor, every facility, every mine, every heap of mill tailings, everything becomes not only contaminated, but contaminating. And governments and industry and scientists themselves don't know what on earth to do with it. They don't know what to do with this stuff, and it is our most enduring legacy. They say they have a final solution to bury it in the ground in deep geological disposal, hiding it out of sight and out of mind, as if the earth were dead, as if the earth were not a living being, shifting with underground waters and seismic activities, as if the containers themselves could outlast a generation, which they cannot! For nothing lasts as long, no container lasts as long as the poison fire itself. And it will leak out and out to contaminate. We know that that is true from our own personal lives. We try to hide something in our personal life, you know that happens, and it contaminates everything. And North of me, up at the Hanford Reservations they talk about clean up. Clean up! And even though Congress through the DOE has allocated millions of dollars for that now, they push around and they move the earth with their trucks and their bulldozers and their scoops. Try asking them where they are going to put it!
This challenge -- it asks of us to evolve a different relationship with uranium, with plutonium, with the poison fire. . . . more and more citizens are beholding, seeing, recognizing that this legacy must be guarded responsibly. Ground level storage on sight, and so we know better what to do with it, keep it visible with minimal transportation on sight where it is ecologically feasible. . .
I have been reading reports of five years of meetings between Soviet and American scientists from the Federation of American Scientists about what to do with the separated plutonium. There is a tremendous pressure to use it. . . . It is as if we don't know what to do with this unless we make it serve us, and that is exactly what I am beginning to think, that we cannot ask of the poison fire. If we want to make it serve us, it will kill us, and perhaps the plutonium is saying to us something like this: Look at me, just look at me. I cannot be your slave, I cannot serve your ambitions and your comforts. You cannot use me to fight each other. Just look at me and if you look at me, guarding me, keeping me out of the biosphere for the sake of your future generations, then I will become your teacher. And in the act of beholding me and guarding me, you will awaken to your courage and to your faithfulness and to your solidarity with each other."

Nuclear Guardianship
The Search for New Perspectives

Joanna Macy, California, USA. Ecologist, teacher,
founder of the Nuclear Guardianship Project
and the Council of All Beings.

I was about to say this is the last day of testimonies, but, of course, it is not. This Hearing is just the beginning. We are going to spend the coming years and probably all our lives seeing that the story is told, that the conspiracy of silence and secrecy is broken. And we will not do that alone. The work that we are moving into this afternoon in our workshops will lay plans for us to stay yoked together in harness for the work that must be done. I'd like right now to reflect on some of the perspectives that we gain in this Hearing and go forth with, for I have been a listener, I, Joanna, a middle-class woman, citizen of the country that first developed nuclear weapons and actually used them against great cities of the great people and has been preparing to do it again, only thousands of times worse over the majority of my lifetime.

The experience we gain here, at least for me, has been one of relief that finally the truth is breaking out, and in a way, a more concerted way than I have ever experienced before, sitting here and listening to our brothers and sisters from the land, as if we were hearing the voice of the earth herself. We have been gaining a lot of information. We go out armed with data, with facts, facts about open pit mines, about fallout from tests, about dumping of wastes, about poisoning of the food chains, about destruction of health and culture beyond the reach of the imagination, and we also go out with much more than information.

Last night, I ran across these words in a book by Susan Griffin who indeed wanted to be here this week: "To tell a story, to hear a story is not a simple transmission of information. Something else in the telling has been given, too, so that once hearing what one has heard becomes part of oneself." We go out from here changed, we are not the same people who came into this hall. In the Buddhist tradition there is a model of the saint, the hero or heroine is called a "Bodhisattva", and in the Lotos-Sutra it is said that the key distinguishing feature of the Bodhisattva is that she or he is able to hear, able to open the heart to pain. Everything in the dominant consumer culture from which we come tells us not to do that. We have instant cures and pills for backache, headache, neuralgia and pre-menstrual tension. We are told to avoid pain, the pain can shatter us, and here we are sitting together, we are voluntarily come together to open our hearts to the suffering of our people, our planet people. In the Lotos-Sutra it says the Bodhisattva is able to hear the music of the spheres, able to understand the language of the birds, choirs of angels. And by that same token, and indeed, it is because the Bodhisattva is able to hear the cries of anguish and distress in the deepest levels of hell.

I bring you greetings from Novosibkov that is a realm of hell, a village in Briansk, actually a town of 45,000 people, where the clouds from the third wave of winds carrying the contamination from Chernobyl to Moscow -- it is the closest Russian town to the Chernobyl zone. Russian, not Belorussian or Ucraine. Seeded those clouds without telling the people, and they did not know the intensity of the radioactive rains for years. And last week, with a team of Russian and American psychologists I was with the towns people. Because this town, although its contamination is from 16 to 40 Curies, a kilometer of which is obligatory resettlement in Belorussia and the Ucraine, optional resettlement in Russia has decided to stay. And this year, Boris Nikolajew Vechelsin came to inaugurate a new plan of rosy future for Novosibkov, staying, although the forests that surrounded the forest that has been the home of their people for millions of years was all closed to them now. No more gathering of mushrooms, no more picnics and walks in the forest ways. And it won't be. And I said: "When can you go back into the forest?", and they said: "Not in the lifetime of our great great grandchildren." We met together for several days in order to explore how to name the suffering and speak it, because that seems essential to being able to go on. Because unless the suffering is named and expressed, it is turned inward against one's self, and alcoholism and drug abuse and depression are turned outward against each other in rising rates of crime and violence. We talked together about how this suffering can be used to build solidarity with each other and with people around the world, and so I told them that I would speak of them to you here.

And I want to tell you about one woman who on the first day stood in our large circle and said: "I don't know if I have a soul. I grew up told that I did not have a soul. But I have pain in my soul, so I think I have one." For us, too, here, who have come into this hall, into this Hearing, the pain that we open ourselves to reveals that we have a soul. Perhaps it is one soul, maybe it's the soul of the earth herself. And in that sense, the pain that we have heard and shared opens us to the sacredness of life, our life. And we will be different now. Let us never forget that. Otherwise the work that we have to do, the work that must be done, that we go out to insure happens, seems too hard. The voices of death seem too overwhelming. Just this morning I read the statement, the briefing from the Uranium Institute in London. This is what we have to face out there. They tell about how the uranium mining companies have preserved native culture, the great lengths to which they have gone on behalf of indigenous people, the cultural revival, etc., etc. That is what we have to face, and we must not be discouraged by the lies or silenced by the lies. And I think that we can't go on unless we feel a deep solidarity with each other. We have created here, we have opened ourselves to a deep community and let us be borne by that community. And when we go out feel by your side the uranium miners from Namibia, the Yami children of Taiwan, the reindeer herders in Siberia and of Novaya Zemlya. You carry them now in your minds, in your mind's eye and in your hearts, allow them to be with you and walk with you. I pledge myself to that. The sense of solidarity is essential, because it is the healing that must happen from the disintegrative forces of the fission of the atom.

For years I have been working in America and in Europe and in Australia, and how we deal with the pain of our time without closing down. Often I have heard people say, as my daughter's professor first expressed at her university, when I told him I said: "What do you consider the psychological effects of the nuclear age, the nuclear threat?", and he said: "Speaking personally, my life has become unglued, there is a sense of fragmentation, a sense of splitting apart on the psychic and cultural level as well, of course, as in the nuclear power facilities." And the solidarity that we can build out of this Hearing is essential because we have to hold together on the path we walk because we are going into a time, and you know it, of increasing chaos, of increasing political and economic and social disorder. And the forces to split us apart are very great if we let ourselves become prey to fear and feelings of isolation. If we become scared and fall for the notion that we are separate from each other and isolated, we can fall off this road we must walk together into ditches on either side. And on one side is the ditch of apathy, of withdrawal, a numb, dumb enactment of life as usual, business as usual, a kind of inner exile. We think others are responsible, they must fix it. And the ditch on the other side of the road is the one of panic and social hysteria, where our fears and isolation drive us into mobs and crowds, into political demagoguery and religious fundamentalisms and scapegoating and blame. And there we think, too, others are responsible for what's happened and they must be punished.

Holding together we say to each other: "We are and will be responsible." So now, as we walk this path together, as we go forward in our work, not knowing where it is going to take us, but knowing that we are ready to go.

Our goal is to insure that the uranium is left in the ground. And it is more than that, as Claus mentioned, it is also to protect present and future generations from the uranium we have taken out of the ground. And as Ulrike Fink was speaking the day before yesterday about the problems of nuclear waste, there are vast, almost immeasurable amounts of it in the millions of cubic tons, and this must be kept out of the biosphere for far longer than recorded history.

To call this stuff "waste" is a misnomer, it is hardly an accurate term, because the strange and almost mythic character of the poison fire -- uranium -- and our processing of it has been that at every stage of the fuel cycle, everything that we have employed, every glove, every boot, every truck, every reactor, every facility, every mine, every heap of mill tailings, everything becomes not only contaminated, but contaminating. And governments and industry and scientists themselves don't know what on earth to do with it. They don't know what to do with this stuff, and it is our most enduring legacy. They say they have a final solution to bury it in the ground in deep geological disposal, hiding it out of sight and out of mind, as if the earth were dead, as if the earth were not a living being, shifting with underground waters and seismic activities, as if the containers themselves could outlast a generation, which they cannot! For nothing lasts as long, no container lasts as long as the poison fire itself. And it will leak out and out to contaminate. We know that that is true from our own personal lives. We try to hide something in our personal life, you know that happens, and it contaminates everything. And North of me, up at the Hanford Reservations they talk about clean up. Clean up! And even though Congress through the DOE has allocated millions of dollars for that now, they push around and they move the earth with their trucks and their bulldozers and their scoops. Try asking them where they are going to put it!

This challenge -- it asks of us to evolve a different relationship with uranium, with plutonium, with the poison fire. It suggests perhaps it is not enough for it to be seen as a monster that we must outlaw. It's too late for that. Already there is a shift of attitude on the part of citizens, certainly in the States, and I noticed it in England, too, where moving from the first reaction, the "Nimby" Syndrome: "Not in my backyard"; "no nuclear waste here", or, as I saw in Gorleben a few years back: "Kein atomarer Mull in Gorleben und anderswo!" It shouldn't be anywhere, and yet, of course, it is here. And more and more citizens are beholding, seeing, recognizing that this legacy must be guarded responsibly. Ground level storage on sight, and so we know better what to do with it, keep it visible with minimal transportation on sight where it is ecologically feasible. So these are, and . . . our testifier here from Kasakhstan put that very movingly two days ago.

So a vast effort of education is required of us who now live on this planet. An education and training in responsible care, a training in guardianship, a training that involves getting technical know-how, political savvy and moral and spiritual strength. I was just talking with would-be guardians in the iron fact in Pantex in Amarillo, Texas, at the Pantex plant, where the weapons are being dismantled, a thousand last year, 2,000 next year, and they are taking them apart, removing the plutonium pits, putting them aside, and they are realizing that we are getting clear that responsible care must not end there, but that the plutonium pits must be not just taken out but destroyed. You can destroy them by changing the shape, otherwise you can put them back in and use the weapons. And that it involves verification bilateral with the former Soviet Union, if not multilateral, a move that the Bush administration has consistently blocked and resisted although the Russians have been asking for it.

I have been reading reports of five years of meetings between Soviet and American scientists from the Federation of American Scientists about what to do with the separated plutonium. There is a tremendous pressure to use it. To maybe use it to have a whole new generation of plutonium-fueled energy and power. It is as if we don't know what to do with this unless we make it serve us, and that is exactly what I am beginning to think, that we cannot ask of the poison fire. If we want to make it serve us, it will kill us, and perhaps the plutonium is saying to us something like this: "Look at me, just look at me. I cannot be your slave, I cannot serve your ambitions and your comforts. You cannot use me to fight each other. Just look at me and if you look at me, guarding me, keeping me out of the biosphere for the sake of your future generations, then I will become your teacher. And in the act of beholding me and guarding me, you will awaken to your courage and to your faithfulness and to your solidarity with each other."

Workshop No. 1 will be dealing with this, among other things, this afternoon and I have some publications of the Guardianship Project with me, if you just ask me. Thank you for your attention.