Extinction Rebellion – How to Repair Democracy

Citizens’ Assemblies with Linda Doyle The Extinction Rebellion movement that started in the UK in late 2018 and spread across the world has brought attention to the problem of climate change in a way that has only been achieved by the school strike movement. XR’s huge outdoor assemblies and performances, road and bridge closures, their acts of non-violent civil resistance and disobedience and willingness to be arrested are meant to compel governments to finally act to end the use of fossil fuel by 2025 to prevent the collapse of the world’s ecosystems.
Among their top three demand is for governments to tell the truth and to set up Citizens’ Assemblies that are chosen at random to represent the population in class, [ . . . ]

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Helen Caldicott and Michael Madsen: Into Eternity TWO of TWO

From the TUC Radio Archives: This is the conclusion of a conversation between Helen Caldicott and Michael Madsen whose film, Into Eternity, premiered in the US in February 2011. Helen called Madsen “One of the more extraordinary people I’ve ever interviewed”. This is a thought provoking exchange between the veteran campaigner, Helen Caldicott, who dedicated her life to alerting us to the nuclear danger, and the young Danish artist. He introduces thoughts about civilization, language, danger and eternity.
Into Eternity is a documentary about the building of the world’s first permanent repository for nuclear waste in Finland. It shows not only the construction under way that will take 140 years, but introduces the people involved, the scientists, regulators and corporate executives [ . . . ]

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Helen Caldicott and Michael Madsen: Into Eternity ONE of TWO

From the TUC Radio Archives: This is a conversation between Helen Caldicott and Michael Madsen whose film, Into Eternity, premiered in the US in February 2011. Into Eternity is a documentary about the building of the world’s first permanent repository for nuclear waste in Finland. It shows not only the construction under way that will take 140 years, but introduces the people involved, the scientists, regulators and corporate executives who oversee this project. None of them will be alive when Onkalo, as the repository is called, will be finished in 2120; and they must expect this repository to remain intact and untouched by future humans for at least 100,000 years. Such is the danger and longevity of waste from nuclear [ . . . ]

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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.

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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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