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@@ -1,3 +1,31 @@ + + + +This is the same sort of paradox Michael Pollan identified regarding food: we are the first generation to have obesity and malnourishment simultaneously. + + +From Ben Falk's book: + +• 104 nuclear reactors in 31 states, operated by 30 different companies. Every single one “temporarily” storing high-level waste that will be lethal for 10,000 to 24,000 years + +• 40,000 to 80,000 (exact number unknown) chemical factories producing or processing materials with multiple “compounds known to be carcinogenic and/or mutagenic” + +• More than 40 weapons-testing facilities and 70,000 nuclear bombs and missiles + +• 104,000,000 cubic meters of high-level radioactive waste from weapons-testing activities alone + +• 925 operating uranium mines + +• 20 to 30 times the average historical background rates of mercury in rain + +• 2,200 square miles of excavated valleys and leveled mountains in Appalachia alone + +• 478,562 active natural gas mines in the United States in 2008, with 1,800 expected to be drilled in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania alone in 2010 + +• 18,433,779,281 cubic feet of trash per year, or 100,000 acres of trash one-foot deep per year, or about 250 square miles, with trash 400 feet deep + + + ## Novelty and place It's one Barry Lopez spends some time on in *Artic Dreams*, noting that for natives of the Arctic Circle, "land does... what architecture sometimes does for us. It provides a sense of place, of scale, of history." Architecture has never done much for me, but I've been known to try constructing a cathedral of words to describe simple things, the way a blade of grass bends in the wind. |