If you are a card-carrying human being, chances are that you share the same fear as all other humans: the fear of losing love, respect and connection to others. And if you are human, in order to avoid or prevent the pain, trauma and perceived devastation of the loss, you will do anything to avoid your greatest fear from being visited on you.

So long as the most vulnerable people in our population are consigned to places that the rest of us will always shun and flee and view with fear, I am afraid that educational denial, medical and economic devastation, and aesthetic degradation will be inevitable.

The human and environmental devastation caused by nuclear weapons - whether by testing, mistake or malice - is the very reason we need to eliminate them altogether.

This business is a tightrope between ultimate ego and absolute devastation. You could lose. You could get knocked out. You could get in a car accident. I want to deal with the total truth of the situation. When you cross-reference the paths your life might take and modalities that might apply to you, I find I'm more at ease in a humble ground.

I can't explain the mind of a writer to you, Jeremy. Especially the mind of a writer who has been through more devastation than most writers combined.

"Man's destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he's done - almost. He hasn't quite made it, and it looks as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man's conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world - or to repair the devastation we've already wrought. We've poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit - and we go on pouring our poisons into the world. We've gobbled up irreplaceable resources as though they could never run out - and we go on gobbling them up. It's hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody's really doing anything about it. It's a problem our children will have to solve, or their children.

Did I really want to stay on this road longer, knowing it was only going to end in devastation?