“Back in the 1980s—late ‘70s, ‘80s--I and a number of graduate students were working up in the alpine of the Rocky Mountains studying salamanders and acidification of lakes and the consequences of coal fired power plants that didn’t have their emissions controlled in any way because the original Clean Air Act didn’t apply to the western power plants. We were looking at what the pollution from these plants were (sic) doing to life in alpine and sub-alpine ponds up in the Rockies. I had colleagues at Princeton and here and other places who were working on arms control and were trying to prevent nuclear war. I would sometimes go home at the end of the day, I’ll be very honest with you, [and think] Am I wasting my time studying salamanders when we could all be blown up tomorrow in a nuclear holocaust? That’s the tyranny of the concept that there is a most important problem and if you're not working on that most important problem, you are not doing the thing you should be doing. You’re wasting your time, and you’re not helping the world.

“Don’t be numbed by the idea that there’s a bigger problem to work on. Work on the one that you enjoy, that feels right to you, where your expertise matches the needs of the problem, and where you get your satisfaction. And in the long run, you may be doing as much to prevent nuclear war by leaving the world worth saving from nuclear war than you would be by working on it directly.“