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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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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The Energy Nightmare of The Internet – Jane Anne Morris

This is an update and adaptation of an interview with Jane Anne Morris on the program “Corporations and Democracy” on KZYX radio in Mendocino, CA. She began by expressing her surprise why everybody calculates the impact on the environment of raising beef for a Hamburger while nobody seems to calculate the impact of an internet search or upload.
Jane Anne Morris began searching for that number over ten years ago. She wrote an article on “The Energy Nightmare of Web Server Farms” in 2008 and – in 2012 calculated how many bicycles would be needed to keep the internet supplied with green power. That article is: “Eat, Sleep, Click: The Bicycle-Powered Internet.”
Numbers are now easier to come by and they are [ . . . ]

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A Talk by Jane Anne Morris & Richard Grossman – Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy

The Rio Earth Summit of 1992, also known as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development was the first time the world on the scale of the UN was paying attention to patterns of production — particularly the production of toxic components, or poisonous waste and radioactive chemicals. The first time that alternative sources of energy were called for to replace the use of fossil fuels, and the role of fossil fuels in climate change was acknowledged.
A small group of thoughtful individuals had come together – just before the Earth Summit – and asked: Who are the most powerful players in global economics that might prevent action to stop climate change. And the members of the group, that took [ . . . ]

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Jane Anne Morris: Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy

How “Free Trade” Is Stealing Our Democracy – Long before the 2010 Supreme Court Decision in Citizens United ruled that corporations as persons are entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government, Jane Anne Morris had written, spoken out, and campaigned on the decades long efforts of US corporations to use the Supreme Court to expand and solidify their power. She likens the US Supreme Court to the infamous unelected panels that today, in international trade, are empowered to overrule the laws of entire countries – even the size of Canada and China – when they are putting restrictions on corporate trade, or have the audacity to protect the environment and labor.
Jane Anne Morris was one [ . . . ]

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Jane Anne Morris – Democracy Theme Park

Jane Anne Morris was one of the primary researchers, writers and workshop leaders in POCLAD the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy. They came together in the early 1990’s to try to better understand why all of our activism against corporations that are causing harm to people and nature was so ineffective.
The website Democracy Theme Park dot org is Jane Anne Morris’ precious gift to us. She died on May 28, 2019 in Madison, Wisconsin. And this program is a tribute to her. Here is the way she wanted us to enter her site. She wrote:
“I first brought up the idea of the Democracy Theme Park — the place where we play at pulling the levers of democracy, only to [ . . . ]

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Richard Grossman: Dismantling Corporations – Archive Part TWO of TWO

Remembering his work and life – Richard Grossman said: “.. corporations don’t have rights. Rights are for people. Corporations only have privileges, and only those that we the people bestow on them.” In a nutshell that was the essence of his research and teaching.
Grossman said that we need to remember that the American revolution was fought less against the King but against the crown corporations, the Hudsons Bay and East India Corporations. In his work with POCLAD, the Project on Corporations, Law and Democracy and CELDF, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund he drove home the point that corporations are chartered by sovereign people. He said that based on that sovereignty people have the right to take that charter away [ . . . ]

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Richard Grossman: Dismantling Corporations – Archive Part ONE of TWO

Ralph Nader called Richard Grossman the preeminent historian of corporations. In his writings and teaching Grossman warned us that unchecked corporate power would lead to the destruction of democracy. He said that the American revolution was fought less against the King but “against the crown corporations, the Hudsons Bay and East India Corporations.” And he believed that it is time to remember that fight and assert sovereignty of the people over corporations and the corporate state.
In this speech Grossman provocatively calls for dismantling “the thousand largest corporations off the face of the earth.” Richard Grossman’s research showed him that in the original intent of American revolutionaries corporations did not have rights, they only had privileges, and only those that we [ . . . ]

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Prof. Don Huber: The Impact of GMOs and the Herbicide Roundup on Crops, Animals, People and the Environment, Part TWO of TWO

Archival TUC Radio, updated June, 2019
A revolution in our food supply and in agriculture has taken place in the last 20 years that has remained unknown, secret or unrecognized – depending on your point of view. However the efforts to label genetically modified organisms by consumers and the forceful resistance to the right to know what we eat by corporations that produce the genetically engineered corn, soy, beets, alfalfa etc. have triggered a fundamental question. If GMO plants are nutritious, safe and ecologically sound – why are corporations not proud to label their GMO foods?
Dr. Don Huber, Professor Emeritus of Plant Pathology, Microbiology, and Soil-borne Disease Control came out of retirement to speak out on the dangers of glyphosate and [ . . . ]

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