Author Archives: Maria

In Memory of John Trudell: What it Means to be a Human Being

By MariaDecember 23, 20152015

Archives: His 2001 talk in support of the U’wa of Columbia
When John Trudell died on December 8, 2015, many were at a loss how to explain in a few words what he meant to them: Santee Sioux poet, philosopher, musician and warrior came to mind and the commercial media added his roles in films and the films made about him.
TUC: Trudell grew up on and around the Santee Sioux reservation near Omaha, Nebraska. In 1969 he participated in the Indians of All Tribes occupation of Alcatraz Island . From 1973 to 1979, he served as national chairman of A.I.M., the American Indian Movement. The government response to A.I.M. was swift Trudell said, “They waged war against us. They hunted us [ . . . ]

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

Vandana Shiva: Soil Not Oil (TWO of TWO)

By MariaDecember 16, 20152015

This is the conclusion of the keynote speech by the Indian physicist, ecologist, seed collector, author and founder of many vibrant organizations, Vandana Shiva.
She made a moving appeal to commit ourselves – whatever is the land on which our lives depend – to restore the soils that have been depleted and poisoned by industrial agriculture. Such action, she says, doesn’t just address the climate crisis it addresses the health crisis that comes from eating industrial food, the water crisis, the desertification, biodiversity, and extinction crisis. Most of all it allows us to reclaim earth democracy, and have an active role to truly deserve the citizenship of the beautiful planet.
Shiva is the author of many books, among them: Earth Democracy, [ . . . ]

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

Vandana Shiva: Soil Not Oil (ONE of TWO)

By MariaDecember 9, 20152015GMOs, Organic Farming

This is the keynote speech by the Indian physicist, ecologist, seed collector, anti GMO and Monsanto campaigner, teacher of organic agriculture, author and founder of many vibrant organizations. In a life spanning local action and international politics, academic teaching and gardening alongside her rural neighbors Vandana Shiva has become an inspiration to many.
Her books include: Stolen Harvest, Earth Democracy, Biopiracy, the plunder of nature and knowledge, Water Wars, and Soil Not Oil. This book, first published in 2007, has become influential beyond it’s initial success because it addresses the most urgent issue of our time: Climate change.
As we are becoming more aware that industrial agriculture is a major cause of greenhouse gas emissions that bring about climate change – Vandana [ . . . ]

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

James G. Anderson – Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry at Harvard

By MariaDecember 2, 20152015

Interview on Climate Change
Professor James Anderson did much of the research resolving the mystery of which industrial chemicals destroyed the ozone layer over Antarctica. The urgent need to deal with deadly UV radiation led to the signing of the Montreal Protocol in 1989.
Now, almost 30 years later, Anderson is doing ozone research again. This time over the continental US. Harvard Magazine said as early as 2012 that Atmospheric Chemists report a serious and wholly unexpected risk of ozone loss over the United States in summer. And Anderson explains how climate change is a factor in this new phenomenon.
He also answers basic questions about the interconnectedness of climate systems, the fallacy of global average temperatures, how living and teaching [ . . . ]

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

Our Renewable Future – With Richard Heinberg (TWO of TWO)

By MariaNovember 24, 20152015

How to get there from here
In part ONE of this program Heinberg gave an analysis of fossil fuel supply and climate risk. Here now is his three level plan for the transition to renewable energy. He is touching on food production, transportation, housing, manufacturing, steel and cement construction mining, the internet and much more. He calls this the economic transformation for the remainder of our life time.
Richard Heinberg is Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and has written extensively on energy, economic, and ecological issues. He has been quoted and interviewed by Reuters, AP, and Time magazine, and on television in the US, Canada, Australia and by Al-Jazeera. Heinberg has also appeared in many film and television documentaries, [ . . . ]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:59 — 19.9MB)

Our Renewable Future – With Richard Heinberg (ONE of TWO)

By MariaNovember 18, 20152015

On a cool November Sunday the hall of the Little Lake Grange in Willits, CA, filled with members and supporters of WELL – Willits Economic Localization.
11 years earlier many of them had come to hear Richard Heinberg after reading his book The Party’s Over: Oil, War & the Fate of Industrial Societies. The 2004 Canadian documentary, The End of Suburbia, featured an interview with Heinberg and became an inspiration here as well as for the emerging international Transition Town movement.
Arguing that modern life as we know it will end as oil reserves begin running out and climate change does not allow us to burn the rest, the Transition Town Movement focuses on the interrelated issues of energy and economy and [ . . . ]

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

War, Peace & Climate Change – Questions and Answers

By MariaNovember 11, 20152015

with Professor Michael Klare (TWO of TWO)
After his talk at the Chicago Area Peace Action in October 2015 Professor Klare answered questions for almost an hour in an animated give and take.
Here are the best exchanges on climate and war; and why the Defense Department takes climate change very seriously; that the Navy prepares to lose their bases around the world to sea level rise, and why the conservative government of England is upset at their powerful Governor of the Bank of England. He said publicly that fossil fuels pose a rising risk to banking and insurance. Also included is an fascinating exchange over Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, and how it might apply to us today.
Professor Klare spoke at the [ . . . ]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:58 — 19.9MB)

War, Peace & Climate Change – Professor Michael Klare (ONE of TWO)

By MariaNovember 4, 20152015

This is the record of a meeting of the minds between an organization, Peace Action, that has worked for over 50 years on the abolition of nuclear weapons and war, and an activist professor. Michael Klare has written and taught on U.S. military policy, international peace and security affairs, the global arms trade, and global resource politics.
The question on everybody’s mind that night was – how are war and climate change related – And how can we find ways of addressing that dual danger by working on strategies of resolving both.
Michael Klare is Five College professor of peace and world security studies and a prolific author. The titles of just the last three of his books clearly delineate his expertise [ . . . ]

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

Ricarda Winkelmann: The Melting of Antarctica

By MariaOctober 28, 20152015Antarctic, Climate Change

A fairly unknown scientist – at least by US standards – took the lime light in major media in the US in September 2015. The New York Times – and also Democracy Now – quoted her this way:
“To be blunt: If we burn it all, we melt it all,” said Ricarda Winkelmann, the lead author of a paper entitled: “Combustion of available fossil fuel resources sufficient to eliminate the Antarctic Ice Sheet.” It was published on September 11, 2015, in the journal Science Advances.
Winkelmann is Juniorprofessor of Climate System Analysis at the prestigious Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Her research areas are Anthropogenic climate change; Tipping elements; Antarctic ice dynamics and Sea-level rise.
The New York Times summed [ . . . ]

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

Obama’s Geopolitical Strategy for Containing China

By MariaOctober 20, 20152015

An interview with Professor Alfred McCoy
The historian Professor McCoy is an expert on U.S. foreign policy, the Philippines, Southeast Asia; global drug trafficking; and CIA covert operations.
He teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his September 2015 piece in Tom Dispatch “Grandmaster of the Great Game: Obama’s Geopolitical Strategy for Containing China,” stands in total contrast to the current views of media pundits as well as the Republican party.
They see Obama as weak, clueless, and indecisive in matters of foreign policy. McCoy provocatively places Obama among the limited number of presidents and public figures whose geopolitical skills – if he is allowed to succeed – will have transformed America’s global role.
In this interview McCoy takes listeners from [ . . . ]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:57 — 19.9MB)

Melting Arctic Sea Ice

By MariaOctober 14, 20152015Arctic, Climate Change

with Cambridge Glaciology Professor Peter Wadhams (Part TWO of TWO)

Only days before professor Wadhams set off on his 2015 research voyage to the Arctic the UK blogger Nick Breeze did an interview with him, asking him about the latest data on the disappearing Arctic sea ice.
At the end of September 2015 we had just heard on the news that the sea ice minimum at the end of the Arctic summer was the fourth lowest on record. It stands at about half of the ice that used to cover the same area.
Peter Wadhams is Professor of Ocean Physics at the University of Cambridge, UK. With over 40 years of research on Arctic sea ice, icebergs and polar oceanography, he is considered [ . . . ]

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

Our Time is Running Out – The Arctic Sea Ice is Going!

By MariaOctober 7, 20152015Arctic, Climate Change

with Cambridge Glaciology Professor Peter Wadhams (Part ONE of TWO)
Peter Wadhams is Professor of Ocean Physics at the University of Cambridge, UK. With over 40 years of research on Arctic sea ice, icebergs and polar oceanography, he is considered one of the leading experts in his field.
Recently Wadhams has gone public on an additional danger related to the loss of sea ice. The Arctic summer ends in September and observations show a tendency of shrinking ice followed by a dramatic lack of re-growth of ice during the subsequent Arctic winter. Wadhams has made studies from submarines that show that the new ice is thin and slushy and easily broken up by winds. An ice free Arctic in September would accelerate [ . . . ]

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

Vandana Shiva’s Celebration of Gandhi’s Home Rule; Part TWO of TWO

By MariaSeptember 30, 20152015GMOs, Organic Farming

This is the conclusion of the one hour talk by the Indian physicist, ecologist, author and seed saver Vandana Shiva.
This part of her speech is an indictment of industrial agriculture – much of it based on her research into the Green Revolution and her work with the Indian government and the UN.
Monsanto claims that Glyphosate can’t harm humans because we do not have the shikimate pathway that plants and bacteria have. Shiva says what they ignore – or deliberately not tell us – is that the human body is made up of 600 trillion cells – most of which are bacteria. Many of the trillions of bacteria in our bodies and especially inside our gut are affected by the Roundup [ . . . ]

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

Vandana Shiva’s Celebration of Gandhi’s Home Rule; Part ONE of TWO

By MariaSeptember 23, 20152015

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a philosopher, environmental activist and eco feminist. She is the co- founder and director of the Navdanya Research Foundation and the author of numerous books including, Soil Not Oil, Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis, and Stolen Harvest, The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply.
It was an extraordinary experience to hear her speak in the standing room only Little Lake Valley Grange in a very small former logging town in Northern California. Willits maintains one of the earliest successful economic Localization Projects.
Vandana Shiva had been invited by the Charter Project of Mendocino. If the voters approve, Mendocino would be joining Counties such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Santa Clara and San Mateo and [ . . . ]

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

RISING SEA LEVELS – Causes, Data and a Look into the Future

By MariaSeptember 15, 20152015

NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, has over 20 years of data on sea level rise in the oceans of the world. They give regular public updates and you will hear from four of their scientists who reported in a teleconference on August 26, 2015.
Sea level rise, NASA scientists say, is already occurring. The open question is just how quickly the seas will rise in the future. The consequences of global sea level rise could be more serious than the worst-case scenarios predicted by the dominant climate models and the IPCC, which don’t fully account for the accelerating breakup of ice sheets and glaciers.
With:
— Michael Freilich, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division
— Steve Nerem, lead for NASA’s Sea Level [ . . . ]

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