Academics From The United States

"The environmental justice framework shifts the burden of proof to polluters and dischargers who do harm, who discriminate, or who do not give equal protection to racial and ethnic minorities. Under the current system, individuals who challenge polluters must prove that they have been harmed, discriminated against, or disproportionately affected. Few affected communities have the resources to hire the lawyers, expert witnesses, and doctors needed to sustain such a challenge."

"It’s not just the landfill, it’s not just the incinerator, it’s not just the garbage dump, it’s not just the crisscrossing freeway and highway, and the bus barns that dump all that stuff in these neighborhoods — it’s all that combined. Even if each particular facility is in compliance, there are no regulations that take into account this saturation. It may be legal, but it is immoral. Just like slavery was legal, but slavery has always been immoral."

"This whole question of environment, economics, and equity is a three-legged stool. If the third leg of that stool is dealt with as an afterthought, that stool won’t stand. The equity components have to be given equal weight. But racial and economic and social equity can be very painful topics: people get uncomfortable when questions of poor people and race are raised."

"community organizations, institutions, that have been doing this work in the city for many, many years, they need to be funded. They need to have—they need capacity to staff up and to start doing the kind of work, because they have the trust and because they have the experience and because they are here, they are local."

"we will have more hurricanes. We will have more floods. But the thing is, how do we—how do we build, rebuild in a way that will make our city more resilient?"

"I saw that 100 percent of all the city-owned landfills in Houston were in black neighborhoods, though blacks made up only 25 percent of the population. Three out of four of the privately owned landfills were located in predominantly black neighborhoods, and six out of eight of the city-owned incinerators. In a city that does not have zoning, it meant that these were decisions made by individuals in government."

"those populations that lived, for example, on those fencelines with those chemical companies, people say, “Well, what’s happening at the chemical company that burnt and exploded? They say it’s safe. The chemical company says it’s safe. The EPA says it’s safe. But I’d like to know: Where does the CEO of that company live? If it’s so safe—you know what I’m saying?—how about him pack up and camp out next door?” The problem is, individuals making decisions oftentimes don’t have to deal with the kinds of issues that fenceline communities have to deal with, even when we’re not talking about flooding. We’re talking about the flooding of pollution and chemicals on communities. And people don’t ask for—to be polluted. It’s without their consent."

"what we’re saying is that our communities, communities of color, want to be sustainable, want to be resilient. They want to be healthy and livable. And it should not somehow be something that’s relegated to white middle-class suburban or urban core."

"We have to talk about environmental racism and call it out when it exists. We can’t just run from it"

"we have to have strong community-based organizations on the ground with the capacity to assist and support families and households that can get things right, that can pressure and apply the points of saying, “Well, we need to make sure that just because you don’t have a car, just because you don’t have a big bank account doesn’t mean that you should not be safe, that your community should not come back and that you should not have the same level of protection and the same level of importance as if you were a middle-class white neighborhood.” That is—that’s what we have to ensure."

"the whole idea of rebuilding, needs to be democratized. Those communities, people need to decide what it is that they want and what they can live with."

"The gentrification that oftentimes occurs in many of our communities, it occurs at the—I guess, the detriment of communities that have historically lived in those areas...we have to say that we want to make sure that we redevelop and we develop our communities in a way that minimizes displacement of incumbent residents, and also ensure that those residents who want to remain in those older neighborhoods that are undergoing transformation, that they can. And those who want to leave, by choice, can leave."

"Houston is very segregated along racial and economic lines. And this flood has really shown that. If you look at ZIP codes, you can map where that vulnerability is. You can also map how resources have been allocated and distributed over the last 50 years."

"not only will they get washed out in terms of their homes, they’ll get washed out in terms of their income."

"Invisible Houston, that I wrote 30 years ago, there’s a huge population that is still invisible. Houston’s demographics, you know, a lot of people like to say we are one of the most diverse, ethnically and racially, cities in the country. We’re the fourth-largest city in the country. We are racially and ethnically diverse. But when it comes to economics and when it comes to power and decision-making, it stops."

"I started—my first job out of graduate school in 1976 was at Texas Southern University in 1976. I was a young, untenured professor in sociology in 1976. And two years out of graduate school, I was asked to collect data for a lawsuit, by my wife, who had filed a lawsuit suing the city of Houston, Harris County and the state of Texas. And I worked for a state university, so my wife actually sued my employer. And so I had 10 students in my graduate class. We collected data for a lawsuit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corporation. That was the first lawsuit in the country that was challenging environmental discrimination using a civil rights law. And it was basically challenging the location of a municipal landfill that was being proposed in a black, middle-class, suburban neighborhood in Houston. Nothing out in that northeast Houston neighborhood except trees, houses and black people—not a likely place for a landfill. And I collected data for that lawsuit, and we wrote studies. And that’s how I, you know, started working on this. And five out of five of the city-owned landfills were located in black neighborhoods. Six out of eight of the city-owed incinerators were located in black neighborhoods. And three out of four of the privately owned landfills were located in black neighborhoods. Eighty-two percent of all the waste garbage dumped in Houston, from 1930s up 'til 1978, were dumped in black neighborhoods. And blacks only made up 25 percent of the population. For me, that was eye-opening. That's what sent me on my way."

"The communities that have been suffering for all of these years really don’t have a voice. They are still invisible, and they are still underprotected. And as I said before, the most vulnerable population that we’re talking about is children. And if people don’t get angry or somehow concerned about children going to school or playing on playgrounds that’s on the fenceline with companies that’s pumping out dangerous chemicals and creating lots of environmental hazards—you know, you have to understand what kind of person would somehow just turn the other way, or governmental entity that would turn the other way, and say, “Oh, it’s about regulation. We need fewer regulations. And because the companies have to be competitive globally, and therefore the community that’s on the fenceline basically is a sacrifice zone.” And what we say in the environmental justice community, we say no to our communities being sacrifice zones."

"when you talk about all of the potential health threats and the potential damage not just damage to property and the tax base in terms of people’s houses, lowering the property values, but you’re also talking about schools and playgrounds that are located so close, you would say, “Who would do this?” And the idea of environmental justice and environmental racism and the fact that communities of color are disproportionately impacted by these things, not just in Houston, but that’s a national trend—and what we say—people are saying no. Communities have a right to say no, and they have a right to equal protection under the law, and they have a right not to have their children go to school or play on playgrounds that’s not impacted by pollution."

"billions come flowing in (after a disaster), and then you have all kinds of organizations and individuals parachuting in, raking up the money, I mean, when the local groups that have been working on these issues for years and years and years somehow get bypassed, get left behind."

"what you’re seeing in that kind of analysis is basically certain neighborhoods are unofficially zoned for it, even though we don’t have zoning, unofficially zoned for the things that other people don’t want."

"we have environmental segregation, we have what I call “outdoor apartheid.” This is basically that those areas, those geographic and spacial neighborhoods, that somehow are considered compatible with these types of facilities. And we know that the impacts of living close to, with these emissions or with explosion or accidents or releases that may come from flooding, like Harvey—I mean, we know which communities are impacted. And that’s the justice question."

"disasters like this widen and exacerbate inequality. And so, the communities that are most at risk from not having, you know, the kinds of infrastructure in those areas, in terms of flood protection, in terms of trying to get out, in terms of transportation, etc., I mean, it played out"

"Although the first two Timurid emperors and many of their noblemen were recent migrants to the subcontinent, the dynasty and the empire itself became indisputably Indian. The interests and futures of all concerned were in India, not in ancestral homelands in the Middle East or Central Asia. Furthermore, the Mughal empire emerged from the Indian historical experience. It was the end product of a millennium of Muslim conquest, colonization, and state-building in the Indian subcontinent."

"Terence's pivotal, existential crisis came abruptly, some time in '88 or '89. Everything that happened after that event was fallout. I don't know exactly when it happened, and I don't know exactly what happened; I am piecing it together from what Kat has told me, and she has volunteered few details, and I am reluctant to probe.It happened when they were living for a time on the big island, and it was a mushroom trip they shared that was absolutely terrifying for Terence. It was terrifying because, for some reason, the mushroom turned on him. The gentle, wise, humorous mushroom spirit that he had come to know and trust as an ally and teacher ripped back the facade to reveal an abyss of utter existential despair. Terence kept saying, so Kat told me, that it was "a lack of all meaning, a lack of all meaning." And this induced panic in Terence, and probably, I speculate, a feeling he was going mad. He couldn't deal with it. Kat's efforts to reassure him were fruitless. After that experience, he never again took mushrooms, and he took other psychedelics, such as DMT and ayahuasca, only on rare occasions and with great reluctance.Whatever the specific content of the psychedelic experience might have been that triggered the cognitive collapse of Terence's worldview and precipitated his existential crisis, what was most remarkable was that he did not see it coming."

"Every culture has its own creation myth, its own cosmology. And in some respects every cosmology is true, even if I might flatter myself in assuming mine is somehow truer because it is scientific. But it seems to me that no culture, including scientific culture, has cornered the market on definitive answers when it comes to the ultimate questions. Science may couch its models in the language of mathematics and observational astronomy, while other cultures use poetry and sacrificial propitiations to defend theirs. But in the end, no one knows, at least not yet. The current flux in the state of scientific cosmology attests to this, as we watch physicists and astronomers argue over string theory and multiverses and the cosmic inflation hypothesis. Many of the postulates of modern cosmology lie beyond, or at least at the outer fringes, of what can be verified through observation. As a result, aesthetics—as reflected by the "elegance" of the mathematical models—has become as important as observation in assessing the validity of a cosmological theory. There is the assumption, sometimes explicit and sometimes not, that the universe is rationally constructed, that it has an inherent quality of beauty, and that any mathematical model that does not exemplify an underlying, unifying simplicity is to be considered dubious if not invalid on such criteria alone. This is really nothing more than an article of faith; and it is one of the few instances where science is faith-based, at least in its insistence that the universe can be understood, that it "makes sense". It is not entirely a faith-based position, in that we can invoke the history of science to support the proposition that, so far, science has been able to make sense, in a limited way, of much of what it has scrutinized. (The psychedelic experience may prove to be an exception.)"

"[Putin's] afraid of the misinformed American president doing something that gets everybody killed. He’s not worried about us getting ourselves killed, but he is worried about Russia. So what he wants to do is make it clear to anybody — to a child on a bicycle — that you cannot win. They will destroy the United States in response, no matter what your defenses can or cannot do."

"We’re talking about a wall of fire that encompasses everything around us at the temperature of the center of the sun. That will literally turn us to less than ash, if this thing gets going. I can’t emphasize how powerful these weapons are. When they detonate, they’re actually four or five times hotter than the center of the sun, which is 20 million degrees Kelvin. They’re 100 million degrees Kelvin at the center of these weapons."

"Basically the American modernization (of nuclear weapons), and Russia’s unfortunate inability to improve their early-warning system, has resulted in a situation where everything is potentially a lot more dangerous, because an accident could much more easily occur. And this is both a social, political and technical problem."

"One of the things besides what it does, one of the things about DMT that always fascinated me, was the fact that it's such a simple molecule. Biosynthetically, it's two steps from tryptophan, right? Two trivial enzymatic steps from tryptophan. Well, tryptophan is an amino acid, of course, and it's everywhere. So all organisms have tryptophan, and all organisms have the two key enzymes that lead to the synthesis of DMT. And these enzymes are very ancient enzymes, they're all over the place. They are, again, part of basic metabolism. So, theoretically, anything could synthesize DMT."

"Terence was very … he was a good promoter. Basically, he said it's the ultimate metaphysical reality pill. Even though it's not a pill, but I thought that was a pretty good characterization after I took it. It would seem to be of a different order than LSD and mescaline and some of the other things that were around. DMT really did seem to be a whole other level of experience."

"It just rips that filtering mechanism away for a few minutes, and for a few minutes, you're immersed in sort of this raw data sphere of input, of sensory input, of memories, of associations. I mean, it seems like the brain builds reality out of these things: what you're experiencing, what you have experienced, and how you associate and synthesize these things together to tell yourself a story, essentially, about what's going on, where you are in space and time."

"What does it mean? Why is there a part of the brain that seems to be, for lack of a better word, a "God-detector", you know? What's the evolutionary advantage to having some part of the brain that seems to trigger and mediate experiences of the transcendent?"

"I think DMT is a forcible reminder that there's a lot more about reality, the universe, ourselves, the biosphere, whatever—there's a lot more to it than we imagine."

"Psychedelics are not suppressed because they are dangerous to users; they're suppressed because they provoke unconventional thought, which threatens any number of elites and institutions that would rather do our thinking for us. Historically, those in power have always sought to suppress free thought, whether bluntly or subtly, because it poses an inherent challenge to their rule. That's no less true today, in an age when corporate, political, and religious interests form a global bloc whose interests threaten all earthly life, including human life."

"...maybe the greatest threat that nuclear weapons possess today is that though it may be irrational for any government actually to use them because it could bring about a suicidal effect, if they get into the hands of terrorists, of nonstate actors, they can be used with perhaps impunity. And at the end of the Cold War, we had cooperative agreements with the Russians to secure their nuclear weapons, in what we call the Nunn — Sam Nunn and other senators sponsored this. These have all broken down now... And what worries me is there could be a creeping up of another nuclear arms race, because if the Russian government, if President Putin feels he is being pressed and his security threatened — rightly or wrongly, because it’s perceptions that count — then what’s to keep him, since we have walked out of most of the other agreements, from putting, say, intermediate-range missiles in Kaliningrad or bringing them close to the border? Then what are we going to do? So, to get into another insane arms race, when we have so many other common problems we need to deal with, I think, is extraordinarily unwise."

"We begin today’s show looking at the roots of the crisis with a former American diplomat who served as the last [sic] U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union prior to the collapse of the USSR. Ambassador Jack Matlock held the post from 1987 to 1991. He was first stationed in Moscow in the early 1960s and was there during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Matlock has written extensively about U.S.-Russian relations... His latest article is headlined “I was there: NATO and the origins of the Ukraine crisis.” ... Ambassador Matlock writes about testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a quarter of a century ago and about the possible expansion of NATO.... “I consider the administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved... it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.” Ambassador Matlock’s words."

"The problems with Russia are not just NATO expansion. There were also a process that began with the second Bush administration of withdrawing from all of the arms control — almost all of the arms control agreements that we had concluded with the Soviet Union, the very agreements that had brought the first Cold War to an end.... In effect, what the United States did after the end of the Cold War was they reversed the diplomacy that we had used to end the Cold War, and started sort of doing anything, everything the opposite way. We started, in effect, trying to control other countries, to bring them into what we called the “new world order,” but it was not very orderly. And we also sort of asserted the right to use military whenever we wished. We bombed Serbia in the ’90s without the approval of the U.N. Later, we invaded Iraq, citing false evidence and without any U.N. approval and against the advice not only of Russia but of Germany and France, our allies. So, the United States — I could name a number of others — itself was not careful in abiding by the international laws that we had supported."

"After the fall of the Soviet Union, I told the Senate that expansion would lead us to where we are today... Today we face an avoidable crisis between the United States and Russia that was predictable, willfully precipitated, but can easily be resolved by the application of common sense. But how did we get to this point? Allow me, as someone who participated in the negotiations that ended the Cold War, to bring some history to bear on the current crisis. We are being told each day that war may be imminent in Ukraine. Russian troops, we are told, are massing at Ukraine’s borders and could attack at any time. American citizens are being advised to leave Ukraine and dependents of the American Embassy staff are being evacuated. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president has advised against panic and made clear that he does not consider a Russian invasion imminent. Vladimir Putin has denied that he has any intention of invading Ukraine. His demand is that the process of adding new members to NATO cease and that Russia has assurance that Ukraine and Georgia will never be members."

"Can the crisis be resolved by the application of common sense? Yes, after all, what Putin is demanding is eminently reasonable. He is not demanding the exit of any NATO member and he is threatening none. By any common sense standard it is in the interest of the United States to promote peace, not conflict. To try to detach Ukraine from Russian influence — the avowed aim of those who agitated for the “color revolutions” — was a fool’s errand, and a dangerous one. Have we so soon forgotten the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis? Now, to say that approving Putin’s demands is in the objective interest of the United States does not mean that it will be easy to do. The leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties have developed such a Russo-phobic stance that it will take great political skill to navigate such treacherous political waters and achieve a rational outcome. President Biden has made it clear that the United States will not intervene with its own troops if Russia invades Ukraine. So why move them into Eastern Europe? Just to show hawks in Congress that he is standing firm? Maybe the subsequent negotiations between Washington and the Kremlin will find a way to allay Russian concerns and defuse the crisis. And maybe then Congress will start dealing with the growing problems we have at home instead of making them worse."

"Dr. Lindsell mentions that acceptance of inerrancy is the watershed of modern theological controversy. He is right in declaring that the attitude we have toward the trustworthiness of Scripture determines our later position, not only on faith, but also on practice. The evidence that those who surrender the doctrine of inerrancy inevitably move away from orthodoxy is indisputable. It is apparent that those who give up an authoritative, dependable, authentic, trustworthy, and infallible Scripture must ultimately yield the right to the use of the name "evangelical." Dr. Lindsell has done the church, and especially the evangelical cause, a great service in writing this book."

"HAROLD LINDSELL, Ph.D., D.D., has served as vice-president and professor of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena and professor at Columbia Bible College in Columbia, S.C., and at Northern Baptist Seminary in Chicago. He is the editor of Christianity Today."

"A journey of a thousand miles must come to an end. Even the rain water returns to the ocean from which it came. So the hour has come to draw some conclusions and let the reader make his own decision. I have presented an apologetic for biblical inerrancy. It is based on a legitimate concern. Simply stated, the concern is that evangelical Christianity is engaged in the greatest battle in its history. The central issue at stake is epistemological: it has to do with the basis of our religious knowledge. Does that knowledge come from reason, the church, or from the Bible?"

"I do not doubt that if evangelicals in concert with each other would stand firm and tall for biblical inerrancy and the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith, a new day would dawn and the blessing of God would follow. I can foresee, in that event, a new surge of spiritual power, a new advance in the task of evangelizing the world, and the establishment of churches around the world where Christ is honored, the true gospel is preached, and the kingdom of God manifested in holy power before the eyes of unconverted men. May the Lord speed that day!"

"I do not look for or expect a time in history as we know it when the whole professing church will believe either in inerrancy or the major doctrines of the Christian faith. There will always be wheat and tares growing together until the angels begin their task of reaping the harvest at the end of the age. Truth shall forever be the scaffold, and wrong forever on the throne as long as time shall last. But whatever the cost, whatever the sacrifice, God calls His people to faithful service based on unsullied adherence to His Word with the firm conviction that not one jot or tittle shall pass away till all has been fulfilled. When Jesus Christ comes, faith shall turn into sight and what we do not know now we shall know then. And when all of the mysteries of Scripture have been unlocked, we shall see what we have always believed- that the written Word of God is free from all error, and all parts of it in some fashion or another bear witness to the incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ the righteous Branch, who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords."

"The very nature of inspiration renders the Bible infallible, which means that it cannot deceive us. It is inerrant in that it is not false, mistaken, or defective. Inspiration extends to all parts of the written Word of God and it includes the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit even in the selection of the words of Scripture. Moreover, the Bible was written by human and divine agencies; that is, it was the product of God and chosen men. The authors of scripture retained their own styles of writing and the Holy Spirit, operating within this human context, so superintended the writing of the Word of God that the end product was God's. Just as Jesus had a human and a divine nature, one of which was truly human and the other truly divine, so the written word of God is a product that bears the marks of what is truly human and truly divine."

"Inspiration involved infallibility from start to finish. God the Holy Spirit by nature cannot lie or be the author of untruth. If the Scripture is inspired at all it must be infallible. If any part of it is not infallible, then that part cannot be inspired. If inspiration allows for the possibility of error then inspiration ceases to be inspiration. Now no one will assert that the human authors of scripture were infallible men. But believers in infallibility do say that fallible men were kept from error by the Holy Spirit."

"I have tried to tell it as it is. My responsibility ends at that point, except in those places where my own relationships give me the opportunity to carry through on my own commitment to inerrancy. Every reader of this book has a similar responsibility to do his thing in the place or places where he or she has the same opportunity."

"Although in hundreds of cases criticisms of Scripture have been shown to be unfounded, those who refuse to believe in inerrancy never seem to be satisfied. Why is this so? Does it not constitute a frame of mind that wants to disbelieve? Does it reflect a viewpoint that says in effect, "I will not believe what the Scripture teaches about itself until every objection has been answered to my satisfaction"? Does this not tell us something about the nature of man who, though he may be regenerated, yet retains strong characteristics of the old nature so that unbelief crops up again and again? May not the real difficulty be a want of biblical faith rather than a want of evidence?"

"This is a controversial book. It has to be. But I have tried to represent matters fairly and objectively. It should be understood and reacted to in the light of the facts. We are all responsible for what we say and write. I hope that I have not misquoted or misinterpreted anyone whose words appear in this book. There is a sufficient material available that makes it unnecessary to do this. In my professional life I have been involved in a number of theological controversies regarding the question of miracles. I have repeatedly stated that the supernatural is taught in Scripture. When anti-supernaturalists try to persuade me that I am mistaken I reply that I did not write the Bible. I only try to reflect what the Bible says. No one can make a case against the supernatural from the data of Scripture. The same idea is true with regard to the people I quote in this volume. Anyone who doesn't like what he says should not blame me for surfacing his opinions. I didn't say those things. The people I quote said them. And anything people, including myself, write is subject to those who read what they write."

"I regard the subject of this book, biblical inerrancy, to be the most important theological topic of this age. A great battle rages about it among people called evangelicals. I did not start the battle and wish it were not essential to discuss it. The only way to avoid it would be to remain silent. And silence on this matter would be a grave sin. I have written this book largely for evangelical lay people in their pews who may not be aware of the central issue that faces them, their denominations, and their institutions. Because of this I have sought to write simply, avoiding technical language wherever possible. The book itself could be expanded almost indefinitely, for there is no end to the available material. The data I have used comprise only a small part of what I have personally collected for ten years."