Newest Catalog Items

Happy 16th Anniversary, Seniors for Peace

From the archives of TUC radio, recorded in 2003  I’m recording this introduction on January 29, 2019 after returning last night from a huge, heart-warming celebration of the Senior for Peace in Mill Valley, CA. They live in the Redwoods Retirement Community just North of the Golden Gate bridge. Every Friday from 4 to 5 pm, rain or shine, ongoing and for the last 16 years, they walk to the busy intersection with banners, posters and hand drums, Cymbals, guitars and a violin and amaze passing drivers and the student of the high school right across with their songs and message for peace and justice.
On their web site millvalleyseniorsforpeace.org they explain that they first came out in January 2003, when [ . . . ]

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

Mary Oliver

When the poet Mary Oliver passed in her 83rd year on January 17, 2019, the huge response revealed her as one of the most popular writers of our time. That despite her refusal to be famous or rich, and the rare interviews she gave. She wanted her poems to speak for themselves and came up with titles such as Owls and Other Fantasies, The Leaf and the Cloud, Wild Geese and the Truro Bear.
A dear friend wrote to me: “I can’t think of a contemporary poet who better than Oliver expresses such depth of feeling and thought about the natural world, and what it is to experience earth as an animal in the web of life. And I like the [ . . . ]

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

Ray McGovern – RussiaGate: The Absence of Evidence? (TWO of TWO)

Includes a clip from Noam Chomsky explaining his skepticism of the RussiaGate claims.
Ray McGovern served as a CIA analyst for 27 years, from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. His duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief to Ronald Reagan’s security advisers from 1981 to 1985.
After retiring he became a trusted source of information on the falsified intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that was used to bring the US into the disastrous war on Iraq.
For over two years McGovern has focused on what came to be dubbed RussiaGate and in part ONE you heard about his assessment of Julian Assange, and the so-called hacking of e-mails of the [ . . . ]

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

Ignacio Chapela: The Story of Corn -TUC Archives, October 2002 (TWO of TWO)

The contamination of the cradle of corn with genetically engineered seeds
Ignacio Chapela from the University of California, Berkeley discovered that genetically modified corn had contaminated the cradle of corn in the remote mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. The Zapotecan Indians have cultivated corn there for over 10,000 years.
In Part TWO Chapela questions why a biotech company can take out a patent on a living seed after making minor changes in the DNA. He also warns of horizontal gene transfer whereby an engineered gene from one organism may enter the genome of another species, including humans.
Ignacio Chapela is now (2018) associate professor of microbial ecology at UC, Berkeley.

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

The Soul of Soil – John Jeavons

This is part of a TUC Radio mini series on Soil, a response to the devastating forest fires in California in 2018.
John Jeavons is a master farmer, educator, researcher, author and Director of the non-profit Ecology Action. He has spent the last 43 years developing and teaching a way of farming and gardening that is free from fossil fuel chemicals; and instead of depleting the soils to grow food is actually enhancing and building the soil. When I first met him at KPFA radio in Berkeley 30 years ago he made the organic farmers uncomfortable by suggesting that they were still not sustainable as long as they imported huge quantities of compost from somewhere else.
John Jeavons gave me permission to [ . . . ]

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

Governor Jerry Brown. Last chance to do the right thing for Death Row

Mike Farrell, activist, humanitarian, actor, author, and president of Death Penalty Focus is appealing to Jerry Brown as he is getting ready to leave office at the end of December 2018. Farrell’s petition asks Brown to declare a moratorium on executions and to commute all death sentences to life in prison.
Today California has the largest population on death row of any US State. Of 747 condemned, 60% are people of color. Twenty US states have already abandoned the death penalty – why not California?
I heard Mike Farrell’s appeal on Thom Hartmann’s program on December 4 and got permission to quote from their conversation. I explained to the Hartmann’s that I had a rare recording of Jerry Brown from 1998, when [ . . . ]

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

Vandana Shiva: Soil Not Oil, Special

With Material from TUC Radio’s Archive – As we are becoming more aware that industrial agriculture is a major cause of greenhouse gas emissions that bring about climate change – Vandana Shiva and others are now making the case that restoring the soil, and recovering organic agriculture around the world can not only dramatically limit climate change but even has the capacity to sequester carbon back into the soil, that has been emitted in the past.
This is a 29 minute special based on the keynote speech by the Indian physicist, ecologist, seed collector, anti GMO and anti-Monsanto campaigner, and teacher of organic agriculture at the Soil not Oil conference in September 2015. Vandana Shiva is also an acclaimed author and [ . . . ]

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

Paul Stamets: Mushrooms, Bees, and Saving the World, 2018

Special 29 min. edit of the 2015 60 min. TUC program As forest burn across the US and misguided attempts to prevent fires by clear-cutting or raking the forest floor are being proposed, TUC Radio remembers the mycologist and author Paul Stamets. He is calling attention to the fact that old growth forests contain organisms that can heal us, feed us, or kill us.
More than any other scientist practicing today, Paul Stamets has dedicated himself to the life of fungi and that of their underground support system, the mycelium. Stamets says that the mycelia are soil magicians. They give rise not just to mushrooms but form an integral part of the forest ecosystem. The mycelia are disassemblers, creating the debris [ . . . ]

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

Fire and the Underground Life in the Forest – Peter Wohlleben and Suzanne Simard

As California tries to come to terms with the largest and deadliest fires of 2018, attention falls on forests. Logging companies want more clear-cuts. Donald Trump says the forest floor should be cleaned with rakes.
Indigenous elders and visionary foresters say that nobody is asking the trees what they want and need. Especially now as the heat is rising, water becomes scarce and winds are fiercer.
Peter Wohlleben is the author of: “The Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel, How they Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World”. He is a German forester who became disenchanted by the technologies he was expected to employ. He now manages a 4000 year old beech tree forest in Germany. He was interviewed by Steve Paikin [ . . . ]

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

Restoring the Forest – the Indian Way, Dennis Martinez

Edited Archival – Re-released on Nov. 13, 2018 – on day six of the fire that destroyed Paradise
Maria’s introduction: Even though the so far most deadly fire of Northern California is over 100 miles away it fills the air with an acrid smoke that has obscured the sun for days now. The town of Paradise went up in flames.
It’s a little over 20 years ago that I recorded the documentary that you will hear again. My visit to Mountain Grove, Oregon, opened up a part of Native American history and culture and forest practice. That gave me hope that maybe we could undo and heal the damage that Western European settlement and industrial forest practice had done to the peoples [ . . . ]

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

The Story of Aaron Swartz – ONE self contained 29 min. program

 
ARCHIVE for the 5th annual Aaron Swartz Day, November 10, 2018
This program is based on the soundtrack of the 2014 movie: The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz. His death at age 26 on January 11, 2013, made the internet light up with grief and also anger at a judicial system that haunted and hunted him. He was facing 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines for bulk-downloading from a site, JSTOR, that was freely available to Massachusetts Institute of Technology students.
“Aaron’s story touched a nerve with people far beyond the online communities in which he was a celebrity” said director, Brian Knappenberger. “This is the story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. From [ . . . ]

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

IPCC report, October 2018, How did the media in the UK cover this report

Only 12 years left to save ourselves – The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, representing 195 countries, met in South Korea to discuss and then release to the public the IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 ºC above pre-industrial levels.
In the preceding TUC Radio program you heard examples from the very limited media coverage in the US  – in  this program you will hear excerpts from the extensive coverage in the UK, produced by the news departments at Sky News, the BBC, Channel 4, and ITV. They also paid attention to Donald Trump. The program ends with an extensive interview with Myron Ebell from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He was environmental adviser to Donald Trump [ . . . ]

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

IPCC Report October 2018 – Only 12 years left to save ourselves

Even though the October 8, 2018 release of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report was meant to jolt humanity into action to bring down carbon dioxide releases within 12 years to avoid global catastrophe – a stunned silence fell upon most of the world media.
Two scientists, who have been on TUC Radio before, are imploring us to notice that the IPCC’s report is not urgent enough. They are Professor Peter Wadhams, Emeritus Professor of Polar Ocean Physics, Cambridge University; and Professor Kevin Anderson from the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester.
My thanks go out to Stuart Scott, with the United Planet Faith and Science Initiative and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now for giving them a [ . . . ]

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