Author Archives: Maria

Onkalo – Into Eternity – from the Archives

Onkalo is the first permanent storage for waste from nuclear power plants in the world. Blasted into bedrock of the island of Olkiluoto in Finland on the shores of the Baltic Sea, it has to remain secure for 100,000 years.
Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen’s documentary of the building in progress of Onkalo is a meditation on eternity, insanity and the impossibility of projecting anything 100,000 years into the future. The film also proves eloquently and with expert statements the terrible danger that arises from so-called “spent” nuclear fuel from power plants and makes us see Fukushima with very different eyes.
This radio program presents excerpts from the film and its amazing sound design.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 19.9MB)

Joanna Macy – Resilience

On June 6, 2019 Joanna Macy, the environmental activist, author, scholar of Buddhism and Deep Ecology was one of two keynote speakers at The New School at Commonweal’s Resilience Project in Bolinas, California. A longtime San Francisco/Bay Area resident – she had just celebrated her 90th birthday.
The question, that the participants at the Commonweal event had come to explore, was: Is resilience a possible response in the face of climate change and civilizational collapse. And what might resilience look like.
Joanna Macy gave a personal and movingly psychological/philosophical talk, led a brief exercise in Open Questioning and closed with generous credits to writers and their ideas that are helpful in navigating and intervening in the collapsing civilization around us.

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Joanna Macy – Interviewed by Extinction Rebellion

TUC Radio is reporting on the work of the environmental direct action group Extinction Rebellion – aka XR. It was with great  joy that I discovered that Joanna Macy, teacher and writer on environmental justice, Deep Ecology, and Buddhist practice is admired by XR and is engaging with them in dialog. Here is an interview of Joanna Macy by XR podcast presenter Jessica Townsend from August 27, 2019. This program also includes a reading of the iconic story of the Shambala Warrior – one of the most moving metaphors for our time.
XR refers to a book by and about Joanna Macy that will be released in April 2020. The title is “A Wild Love for the World: Joanna Macy and [ . . . ]

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Rupert Read – This Civilization is Finished: So what is to be done? (TWO of TWO)

In October 2019 the global movement of Extinction Rebellion, that started in the UK, will be one year young. They credit the experiences of Gandhi, the US Civil Rights Movement the School Strikes of High school students and carefully designed their goals and strategy. On their web site <rebellion.earth> they say that “We are facing an unprecedented global climate emergency. The government has failed to protect us. and we are using civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance to protest against climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and the risk of social and ecological collapse.”
One of their strategies is for speakers, such as Rupert Read, to travel across the country and lay out the science of climate change and what role people can assume [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 19.9MB)

Rupert Read – This Civilization is Finished: So what is to be done? ONE of TWO

Dr. Rupert Read is teaching Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. He is a long time Green Party politician.
In October 2018 Read declared himself a supporter of Extinction Rebellion, an environmental direct action group, and became a signatory of their open letters published in The Guardian. Vandana Shiva, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben and many more also signed on to that letter in support of Extinction Rebellion.
Acting as one of Extinction Rebellion’s spokespersons, Rupert Read gave a number of interviews on national news programs and was part of the Extinction Rebellion group invited to meet with the British Environment Secretary to discuss their demands. The following day the UK Parliament declared a “climate change emergency”.
Rupert Read was also [ . . . ]

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Daniel Ellsberg – The Doomsday Machine – Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (Two of Two)

Archival program – Updated from January 2018 broadcast – In 1969 Daniel Ellsberg secretly copied the plans for the United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967, later to be published as the Pentagon Papers. What was not known widely until late 2017 is that Ellsberg also copied the top secret plans for nuclear war that he consulted on for the Department of Defense and drafted for Secretary Robert McNamara.
Some of these papers, along with his first person report of the history of nuclear war planning, have now finally been published to high acclaim. The publication comes at an extraordinarily auspicious and dangerous time as nuclear tensions are mounting and the US president is challenging North Korea.
This program begins with two excerpts [ . . . ]

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Daniel Ellsberg – The Doomsday Machine – Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (One of Two)

Archival program – Updated from January 2018 broadcast – The international journalist Robert Fisk wrote in the British Independent in August 2019 that we should have paid more attention to the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki since India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran and the US are currently – quote – “Rattling the Nuclear Cage” — and Donald Trump has just pulled out of the Cold War Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia.
When this program was broadcast first in early 2018 Donald Trump’s serial threats of destruction on North Korea had also heightened the risk of nuclear war – and the Seattle anti nuclear movement invited Daniel Ellsberg for an on stage discussion about nuclear winter, staggering death tolls and how terrifyingly [ . . . ]

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Helen Caldicott on Nuclear Fallout

In April 2019, the internationally known pediatrician and anti-nuclear campaigner Dr. Helen Caldicott gave an interview to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. She reviewed and added information to the 2018 book Fallout by Fred Pearce. Pearce recently travelled the world to visit the contaminated test sites, bomb making locations, nuclear power accident sites, and launch systems for nuclear weapons that are still on high alert. The concluding chapter of his book deals with the attempts at a cleanup of some of the longest lived and dangerous substances known to man.
Adding to the ten minute podcast with Helen Caldicott, this program contains readings from the book on the system failures during the decommissioning of the British Sizewell power plant, and a detailed [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 19.9MB)