Author Archives: Maria

Resistance to the Willits Bypass – direct action and civil disobedience

By MariaJuly 3, 20132013

From TUC Radio’s Going Home series: On January 18, 2013 the British Guardian reported that tree sitters had gone up to stop a road project they say “will be expensive, unnecessary and ineffective at tackling congestion and cut through beautiful wetlands” in the south of England. Ten days later and unaware of each other, in Northern California, tree sitters went up in the former logging town of Willits, protesting a four lane bypass that will be expensive, unnecessary and ineffective at tackling congestion and cut through the treasured wetland of Little Lake Valley. Both groups are part of a growing effort to scale down fossil fueled construction and transportation in a global effort to reverse climate change.
The escalation to [ . . . ]

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

Lawrence Ferlinghetti Poet Laureate

By MariaJune 26, 20132013

On Poetry and City Culture, 1998 In October 1998 Lawrence Ferlinghetti became the first poet laureate of the city of San Francisco. Major Brown said he got the idea during a visit to the city of Seoul, South Korea. He had been asked when the city Poet Laureate would be giving his annual talk. A decision had to be made very fast to create the office and, as City Librarian Regina Minudri said, picking Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a no-brainer. She introduced him as a literary legend, a voice of dissent, and an internationally acclaimed writer, artist, bookseller and publisher.
Ferlinghetti is known to everybody in North Beach from his walks from his modest second floor flat to his roll-top desk in [ . . . ]

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

Rebecca Solnit, HOLLOW CITY

By MariaJune 18, 20132013

The destruction of San Francisco in the late 1990s
A new generation of writers Rebecca Solnit, Mike Davis, and Gray Brechin are intriguing us into seeing our familiar surroundings with new eyes. They also offer a different perspective on the radical transformation that development and venture capital have brought to so many cities. San Francisco, formerly famous for taking a travelers heart away, is now reaching for the soul and the wallet. A dot com boom combined with the growing biotechnology industry have driven housing prices up and residents and local small businesses out.
Rebecca Solnit says she wrote Hollow City in a hurry to document the beauty and rich culture that was being destroyed, and to inspire the growing movement of [ . . . ]

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

Living here: July 16, 2013 – update from August 2012:

By MariaJune 16, 2013Straw Bale House

BEFORE and AFTER – This is my Sun Shed, for solar electric and solar hot water, a wood stove inside also makes hot water for a shower and a utility sink for laundry. A small electric pump brings hot water into the radiant floor of my straw bale house. All the difficulties building this are forgotten. The expanded electric system is now running a Sunfrost refrigerator and all of TUC Radio as well as my personal electric use.
One year summary: There was hot water from the sun year round, except for 2 weeks. In one year I used 16 gallons of gasoline in my generator to replenish the solar electric system when the sun did not shine. During that [ . . . ]

From the City of Quartz to San Francisco

By MariaJune 11, 20132013

Interview of urban historian Mike Davis
This program takes you back to the year 2000, it is the third of TUC Radio’s four part series on the fate of California cities and the forces that shape them. When Davis spoke in San Francisco he was already widely known as author of Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control, The Ecology of Fear; Prisoners of the American Dream; and City of Quartz, Excavating the Future in Los Angeles.
This conversation between Mike Davis and the editor of the SF Bay Guardian, Tim Redmond, was recorded at a benefit for the SF Anti-Eviction Coalition. Standing room only audience had come to see the man who had taught Los Angelinos to see their city with new eyes. [ . . . ]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:02 — 19.9MB)

Gray Brechin: Imperial San Francisco TWO/TWO

By MariaJune 4, 20132013

Part Two: THE QUEST FOR WATER
In Part one of this program Dr. Gray Brechin explained that San Francisco grew in only 30 years to the largest city on the West Coast due to the convergence of people and gold/capital. However the city needed another essential ingredient to maintain growth: water.
Brechin describes how water was important not only for people and fire protection, but for industry and to give value to dry land that had been bought up by real estate speculators. As the first wave of destruction of Northern California was bought about by gold mining, the second wave was caused by the quest for water, the damming of rivers, and the flooding of land for reservoirs, even inside the [ . . . ]

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

Gray Brechin: Imperial San Francisco ONE/TWO

By MariaMay 28, 20132013

This is part of the history of a city, grown from 16 houses on sand dunes in 1850 to the largest city on the Pacific in only 30 years. The book, Imperial San Francisco by Dr. Gray Brechin, is one of the few examples of a scholarly dissertation that describes history in a new way and becomes a very popular book. Imperial San Francisco brings to light the huge sacrifices extracted by the surrounding land by any city from Babylon to the Italian city states to the instant cities of North America. Brechin says that he tried to answer the question he posed himself: was it worth it – and what was it worth for whom.
This program focuses on the [ . . . ]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:02 — 19.9MB)

Akio Matsumura: What did the World Learn from the Fukushima Accident?

By MariaMay 22, 20132013

This is the last of a ten part program series covering the most recent and complex status of the ecological and medical consequences of the Fukushima catastrophe – as well as the very important details of engineering in nuclear power technology. The information was presented at the two day Fukushima Symposium at the New York Academy of Medicine in March 2013. The overwhelming conclusion was that the Fukushima accident is by no means over and another earthquake or tsunami might cause the reactor fuel to ignite.
I’m ending the series with a voice from Japan. I first heard from Ambassador Akio Matsumura in 2011 when he launched his ongoing attempt to engage international organizations and the governments of countries most affected to [ . . . ]

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

Ken Buesseler: Fukushima Ocean Impacts

By MariaMay 14, 20132013

Ken Buesseler is Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod. He specializes in natural and manmade radionuclides in the ocean. First he worked on fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, then on the impacts of the Chernobyl explosion on the Black Sea. Most recently he examined radionuclide contaminants in the Pacific ocean after the melt downs of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants.
Within weeks of the accident Buesseler managed to charter and equip a research vessel that arrived off the coast of Japan in June of 2011 to take the first ocean measurements. And you are about to hear his report from that scientific venture and his follow-up.
The most shocking result in those first weeks was [ . . . ]

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

Joseph Mangano: Post Fukushima Increases in Thyroid disease in Newborns on the West Coast of the USA

By MariaMay 8, 20132013

On March 7, 2013, an article was published in the Open Journal of Pediatrics. Co-written by Joseph Mangano and Dr. Jeanette Sherman it stated that in the first 15 weeks, after the fallout from Japan arrived in the US, the number of newborns with Hypothyroid disease increased by 28% on the West Coast while declining by 3% in the rest of the country. Mangano presented this report on March 12, 2013, at the Fukushima Symposium at the New York Academy of Medicine in New York City.
Mangano is the Executive Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project. He is a public health administrator and researcher.
The Fukushima Symposium presented two days of medicine, environmental science and nuclear engineering related to the [ . . . ]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:02 — 19.9MB)

Wladimir Wertelecki: Congenital Malformations in the Ukraine and the Chernobyl Accident

By MariaApril 30, 20132013

When Wladimir Wertelecki took the podium at the Fukushima Symposium in New York City he clearly stated that he was presenting breaking news. As this program goes to broadcast in May, 2013, two month after his talk, no major media and no international agency have taken up this report.
Wertelecki presented the results of OMNI-Net Ukraine’s Congenital Malformations Monitoring Program; the results of ten years of scientific study of birth defects of children and their possible relation to ionizing radiation. Since 2000 OMNI-Net scientists have conducted research of the Rivne, Polissia region just north-west of the exploded Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
They found statistically higher than normal incidents of the most heartbreaking birth defects: NTD, Neural Tube Defects of the brain or [ . . . ]

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

Timothy Mousseau: Chernobyl, Fukushima and Other Hot Places – Biological Implications

By MariaApril 23, 20132013

When the biologist, Professor Tim Mousseau, concluded this talk by showing heartbreaking pictures of the birds of Chernobyl and their tumors and birth defects, the physician and anti nuclear campaigner Dr. Helen Caldicott stepped up to the podium to thank him.
She said: “I want to pay homage to Tim Mousseau, who with his colleagues is actually endangering his life by going into extremely high radioactive areas doing pioneering work, which is going to change the concept of radiation exposure to humans. What is happening to the animals, the insects and the plants is going to happen to us.”
Mousseau is a Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina. For 13 years he and his scientific collaborator Anders Moller [ . . . ]

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

Cindy Folkers and Mary Olson: Post-Fukushima Food Monitoring and: Gender Matters in the Atomic Age

By MariaApril 16, 20132013

Cindy Folkers specializes in radiation impacts on health. She works with Beyond Nuclear. They call attention to the connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the need to abandon both to safeguard our future. Two weeks after Folkers gave this talk, Beyond Nuclear, in coalition with other groups, filed a petition with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to drastically reduce the amount of radioactive cesium permitted in food, from an unreasonable 1200 Bq/kg, to 5 Bq/kg. In post-Chernobyl Belarus, at just 11 Bq/kg of internal cesium contamination children can be susceptible to heart problems. At 50 Bq/kg, children can start having permanent tissue damage.
Mary Olson is Southeast Regional Director of NIRS, the Nuclear Information and Resource Services. [ . . . ]

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

Steven Starr: Massive Radiation Contamination of Japan with Radioactive Cesium

By MariaApril 8, 20132013

Fukushima Symposium 2013 – Steven Starr says: “Long lived radio-nuclides such as Cesium 137 are something new to us as a species. Although they are invisible to our senses they are millions of times more poisonous than most of the common poisons we are familiar with. They emit radiation, invisible forms of matter and energy, that we might compare to fire. It’s not a fire that can be scattered of suffocated because it burns at the atomic level, it comes from the disintegration of single atoms”.
Starr gives an update as to what people in Japan are facing now and into the future. He explains how Cesium 137 is created in the Nuclear Power Plant and how it disperses and continues [ . . . ]

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

David Freeman: My Experience with Nuclear Power

By MariaApril 1, 20132013

Freeman served in Chief Executive positions at the largest power authorities in the world, including the New York Power Authority, the TVA in Tennessee Valley, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
In spite of, or maybe really because of, being the consummate insider in energy production, Freeman is one of the most brilliant, funny and knowledgeable critics of fossil fuels and nuclear power. Freeman closed down 8 nuclear reactor projects during his tenure as Chief Executive at the TVA, and one more when he was General Manager of the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District in California.
His 2007 book: Winning our Energy Independence, describes in detail the urgent need of weaning the U.S. from what he calls the “three poisons” [ . . . ]

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