Watching the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi by Godfrey Reggio the other night, and listening to the film’s mesmerizing score by Philip Glass, I got to thinking again about the large-scale plutonium pit production gearing up at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL), a scant 35 car miles from Santa Fe and immediately downwind of Santa Clara and San Ildefonso Pueblos and Espanola, and how crazy wrong it all is. Scheduled to make 80 pits a year by 2030, the whole enterprise is a classic example of how rational decision making can morph into the sinister shadow lands of insanity.
Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi Pueblo word that can be translated roughly to mean “life out of balance” that’s teetering on the edge of the end. Reggio produced the film to show the craziness of the world that modern humanity and its reliance on technology has given itself over the last 150 years. And the nuclear arms race that characterized the Cold War, the end of which is still to be seen, was among the riskiest and craziest of all.
According to “The World: A Brief Introduction,” by Richard Haass, President of the Council of Foreign Relations, in 2019 Russia had a stockpile of 4,330 nuclear warheads; the United States had 3,800 warheads, many stored near Albuquerque; France had 300; the United Kingdom 215; India 130-140; North Korea 30-40; China 280; Pakistan 140-150; Israel 80. That’s 48,325 nuclear warheads! And who knows exactly how many are packed in bombers and atop land-based and submarine missiles.
They’re all kept “safely” in place by nothing more than a promise of logic known as MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, which assumes that rational leaders would never start a nuclear war because of a guaranteed second strike in retaliation that would obliterate them in return. That rationality has governed Cold War leadership for more than sixty years. Most of us know this, of course. And we know that somehow, magically, it’s worked so far. But most of us have put out of our minds that nearly 50,000 of those demonic weapons are stockpiled around the world. What if an intractable and mentally unstable leader with some of those bombs under his control should come to power, and MAD’s supposedly failsafe logic didn’t impress him? What if Donald Trump had won a second term? Or what if some of the warheads fell into the hand of a maniac terrorist?
And it doesn’t really feel as if the cold war is actually over. There’s still an unholy mix of potentially rogue governments, terrorist groups, conspiracy fanatics, the triggers of climate change diasporas and water wars in a desert world and the inflamed ambitions of Russia and China that put pressure on the increasingly unstable United States. A Koyaanisqatsi evolving right before our eyes.
Reggio, born in 1940, is concerned, though, with more than nuclear weapons. He prophesied more than 40 years ago how the topsy-turvy world of climate change — with its extinctions, heat waves, floods and pandemics — has been spawned, ironically, by the so-called rationality of applied science and its vast array of technologies, all mostly powered by greenhouse-gas polluting fossil fuels.
Climate change is bad enough. But add to it a “refreshed” stockpile of warheads with spanking new plutonium pits and assume that all the other stockpile holders will be doing the same — all to produce more “efficient” weapons of mass destruction — and it’s hard to push away the feeling that madness and chaos and moral corruption reign on earth.
It’s not as if LANL has a pristine and hyper-responsible history of disposing safely of the waste its mission has accumulated over the last 70 plus years of plutonium/polonium research, development and pit manufacture. In May 2002, the New Mexico Environment Department issued an administrative order demanding that LANL clean up laboratory wastes, saying LANL’s practices were of “imminent and substantial endangerment” to the people of Northern New Mexico. It remains a mystery as to how much of LANL’s legacy waste has actually been removed from “the hill.”
This year, environmental journalist Laura Paskus reported on NM PBS that “forever chemicals” have been found recently at LANL. “For nearly eight decades, Los Alamos National Laboratories has contaminated waters and soils with myriad hazardous chemicals and radioactive waste. Now, testing by scientists … reveals widespread — and in some instances — extremely high-levels of PFAS, or per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances” around LANL at concentrations “60 to 60,000 times the recommending lifetime exposure limit.” The PFAS “family of toxic, human-made chemicals are called ‘forever chemicals’ because they do not break down under natural processes like exposure to sunlight or microbes. They also bioaccumulate, lodging themselves in one body after another as they moved up the food chain.” PFAS are associated with many cancers and other ills.
I wonder how long it will take the state legislature and various NM governors to start testing for, and dare we hope cleaning up, the hazardous wastes LANL accumulates from making 80 plutonium pits a year, pits that are the heart of hydrogen bombs of indescribable destructive power. It’s almost mind boggling to think of the legacy waste accumulated at Chinese, Russian, French, British, North Korean, Pakistani, Indian, Iranian (?) and Israeli nuclear research, manufacture and development. That’s the deeply hidden story of MAD and the arms race: the long-term, unknown damage it’s done to civilians around the globe without a bomb being dropped after 1945.
Godfrey Reggio is eloquent about what Koyaanisqatsi means. In an interview in 1989 on PBS Colores, he told me that rather than looking at the Hopi through the categories of anthropological science, he was working to see the modern world through the categories of Hopi culture, one of those being the condition of the world in a chaotic state, doing too much and going too fast to be careful and respectful of life. For the Hopi, modern life is not only out of balance, it’s frighteningly in the grip of the kind of madness that makes MAD a logical deterrent to nuclear war, and have it actually work, so far. Reggio sees “technology” as an “infinite tool in a finite world,” too fast and powerful to be contained by mere mortals such as ourselves. He said he wanted his film to help us see ourselves from a different perspective, which he certainly has done.
Revisiting Reggio’s work now, in the midst of a climate change caused pandemic, in a world still possessing enough explosive power to literally wipe out life on earth as we know it, is a jolt of recognition that re-energizes one’s sense of urgency and even a hopefulness that modern humans still might turn the tables on their own inventions in time to avoid the worst of all possible worlds lurking in our way of life.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Image from The Criterion Collection poster for Koyaanisqatsi)
Godfrey Reggio was my Civics teacher at St, Michael’s High School in 1966-67.
The word, subject, class is not taught in the schools today Civics is never mentioned. Thanks to Godfrey and other visionary teachers I learned the meaning of democracy and how to participate in a Democratic Society. Follow the Hopi Way for a better world in the future. Good article. Peace.
Absolutely we live in madness. But let’s focus on the biggest demon here rather the “the inflamed ambitions of Russia and China.” It is the USA, with it’s lawless behavior and staggering military budget, more than the next eight countries combined, that destroys any possibility of social improvement here and drives a reckless and extraordinarily dangerous foreign policy that sees enemies everywhere it looks. Witness the lunatic and profoundly irresponsible actions of the US in the South China Sea (imagine Chinese warships in the Gulf of Mexico), whose aim is to provoke China into some kind of military response, and then… These are insane children playing with matches that could set the world aflame. Until we radically curtail the MIC, with its profoundly toxic effects on domestic health and disastrous influence on foreign policy, we will be on a path to ruin. And btw, tell Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján to stop rubber stamping every administration’s military budget, as all senators, Democrat and Republican, have done since the origins of the military colony AKA our beloved New Mexico.
Greed runs the world. Publicists have made us think in every day terms. In Albuquerque like places that have a near by Arm Forces base see military planes fly over head. I live in a very small town but in my county and the one next to it have bases one to the south shoots off missiles both to space and for stopping incoming missiles and one to the north where they play war games.
I once had a dream of walking along a mountain side below was a town with a festival going on. I wanted to go down and join them. But I found on the side of the mountain a dry dock battle ship with guns faced over the town. I kept walking for a safer place.
We have become use to military planes flying over and admire them because we have been taught to.
As a child in Albuquerque I remember walking past building that had stay out nuclear waste on them. No fences no guards, a simple lock. Nuclear has become an every day word not seen as a danger. I use to have a brush for cleaning negatives it said Caution radio Active. It did not say keep in a safe place, and it did a really good job at keeping the dust off.
I am 72 and these things may have shortened my life but I just turn the next page and move on.
We have those who are quite rightly saying clean it up. And others who just want to move on with their lives not realizing what the Greedy Donald Trumps of the world can do to us our friends and neighborhoods.
You have those who watch the news, the dangers of life, the horrible direction the world of politics are taking Mother Earth. And others how just watch TV game shows when they get home hoping that the people they voted for will keep them safe so they can just get on with their lives.
We all want good to happen to our world and it’s peoples. There are those who hold the Government accountable and those who will fight a war just to save a rubber tree. Who are told and be leave they are saving other people.
Greed is the word and it will always be there. And we need those who see through the smoke and point out what is really going on.
How many people know who Rachel Carson or Eugene Smith are?