2017

Restoring a Forest with Fire and Love – Dennis Martinez

By MariaDecember 26, 20172017, Newest Podcasts

Rebroadcast from the TUC Archives
The 2017 California fires were the largest in State history. How did the management of the California forests and wild lands contribute to the inferno?
When Spanish Conquistadors rode up the West Coast they were astonished to see that they entered forests that looked like parks with widely spaced trees. Church and military records show that in the early 19th century California’s forests were carefully tended. The catastrophic wildfires of today were extremely rare. California Natives used controlled fires to create these parks that in turn provided food and shelter to them and thousands of animals.
Dennis Martinez talks about Indian forest practice and restoration. He has worked for over 50 years in eco-cultural restoration specializing in tribal [ . . . ]

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

Evolution of Organic at the Grange

By MariaDecember 19, 20172017, Newest Podcasts

Community screening of the film by Mark Kitchell – In November 2017 Mark Kitchell brought his new documentary film, Evolution of Organic, to the Willits Little Lake Grange in Northern California. It’s a new film on the history of organic agriculture told by those who built the movement. Willits and the surrounding county of Mendocino have a rich tradition of organics and everybody in the audience was either a happy consumer of local food or a farmer/gardener themselves.
Gloria and Stephen Decater and Ruthie King are among those local farmer/gardeners and in addition they were important participants in the movie, Evolution of Organic. The Decaters began as students of Alan Chadwick’s in Santa Cruz, and founded in 1973 the Live Power [ . . . ]

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

“Evolution of Organic” by Mark Kitchell

By MariaDecember 12, 20172017, Newest Podcasts

A new film on the history of organic agriculture told by those who built the movement
After WWII industrial, chemical agriculture almost erased the memory of farming and gardening as practiced for millennia. Even before the 1960s back to the land movement put out a flamboyant reminder for safe food free from oil based fertilizers and insecticides individual, unknown farmers and organizations preserved the ancient heritage.
Director and writer Mark Kitchell, best known for his movies: Berkeley in the Sixties and his environmental film A Fierce Green Fire decided to document the many sources for the Evolution of Organic. The film is going into distribution in early 2018.
Kitchell’s goal was to cover the range of practices and ideals that inspired the resistance [ . . . ]

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

Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz on the Green Corn Rebellion (THREE of THREE)

By MariaDecember 5, 20172017, Newest Podcasts

This is the last of three programs on the Indigenous People’s History of the US. On October 11, 2017 Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz gave a talk at the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe New Mexico. In this last segment Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz makes inspiring comments on two questions asked by Nick Estes. He is member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, and doctoral candidate at the University of New Mexico.
First she remembers the forgotten history of the Green Corn Rebellion in Oklahoma. When Woodrow Wilson declared war in 1917 the poor tenant farmers in Oklahoma forged a coalition of Whites, African Americans and Indians. They were united by the recognition that the family would starve if they lost [ . . . ]

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

Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz: History and the Role of the Military in US Settler Colonialism (TWO of THREE)

By MariaNovember 28, 20172017, Newest Podcasts

In her talk at the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe on October 11, 2017, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz asked why the history of Native Americans is so rarely told. Some of that has to do with the wrongs inflicted on Native Americans throughout what is now the United States. She described the work done at the United Nations to define what constitutes genocide and to pass the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948.
Toward the end of this program Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz is joined on stage in conversation by her friend and colleague, historian Nick Estes. He is member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, and doctoral candidate at the University of [ . . . ]

Podcast (file2): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 19.9MB)

Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz on the Doctrine of Discovery (ONE of THREE)

By MariaNovember 21, 20172017, Newest Podcasts

In 1455 Pope Nicholas V issued to the King of Portugal the bull Romanus Pontifex, sanctioning and promoting the conquest, colonization, and exploitation of non-Christian nations and their territories. This became the Doctrine of Discovery that is amazingly still enforced today and enshrined in US Federal law. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz explains the doctrine in this Part One of Three programs. This program is based on a talk she gave at the Lannan Foundation.
The Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, apart from awarding grants, presents speakers of extraordinary intellect and passion – among them just in 2017 Terry Tempest Williams, Glen Greenwald, Arundhati Roy, Óscar Martínez and Marlon James. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz spoke on October 11, 2017. You may remember her from [ . . . ]

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

Dr. Helen Caldicott: North Korea, Donald Trump and the Threat of Nuclear War

By MariaNovember 14, 20172017, Newest Podcasts

Helen Caldicott is an Australian physician author, and anti nuclear activist. She led campaigns against nuclear power and nuclear weapons, nuclear testing and radiation from uranium weapons and mining to nuclear waste.
The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War invited Dr. Helen Caldicott to speak at their September 2017 conference in Basel, Switzerland. At that conference she expressed her grave concern about Donald Trump’s extraordinary messages against North Korea, threatening fire and fury and total annihilation.
And she is not alone with her concern. As I am recording this introduction on November 14, 2017, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is holding a public hearing on President Trump’s unlimited authority to deploy nuclear weapons. It’s the first time the Senate has [ . . . ]

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Helena Norberg Hodge: Big Picture Activism

By MariaNovember 7, 20172017, Newest Podcasts

Local Futures, also known as Economics of Happiness, is an organization founded by Helena Norberg Hodge. They are pioneers of the new economy movement, that is dedicated to the renewal of community, ecological health and local economies world wide.
In July 2017 Helena Norberg Hodge spoke at Schumacher College in England. She began her Earth Talk by recalling the experience that changed her life, her visit to the remote region of Ladakh, in northern India. Ladakh had escaped colonial domination until the late 1970. In 1975 Helena Norberg Hodge found an almost intact traditional culture. But by the late 1980s Ladakhi culture had been dramatically changed and many of their values destroyed – not by war or slavery but by the [ . . . ]

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

Dennis Banks left on his Final Journey

By MariaOctober 31, 20172017, Newest Podcasts

Dennis Banks, co-founder of AIM, the American Indian Movement, died on October 29, 2017. His family says that he started his journey to the Spirit World on the evening of that day. He was in his 80th year.
Dennis Banks is remembered for having organized, with AIM in a coalition of 8 indigenous nations, the 1972 “Trail of Broken Treaties.” They converged on Washington, DC, with 500 followers to protest Indian living conditions and lost treaty rights. They occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs for nearly a week, reading and confiscating documents that were later turned over to the UN (in 1977). There they formed the basis for the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
In 1973, Dennis Banks [ . . . ]

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

Renegade Economists Marilyn Waring, Kate Raworth and Elinor Ostrom (Part SIX)

By MariaOctober 24, 20172017, Newest Podcasts

Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems, Professor Elinor Ostrom
Elinor Ostrom is best known for her understanding and defense of the commons. As one of the rare political scientists who continued to study reality first and then come up with a theory she has personal experience with hundreds of community managed fisheries, forests and irrigation systems.
In 2009 she was the first and so far only woman who was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics, in large part in acknowledgment of her work on the commons. Some say that in the year of the most severe economic crisis in our recent past the Nobel Committee had a hard time finding male economists.
Elinor Ostrom was Professor of Political [ . . . ]

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

Renegade Economists Marilyn Waring, Kate Raworth and Elinor Ostrom (Part FIVE)

By MariaOctober 17, 20172017, Newest Podcasts

Kate Raworth: How modern economics has failed the poor and wrecked the earth while making a few people very rich
Kate Raworth spoke on October 4, 2017, at the Stockholm Resilience Centre on her new book Doughnut Economics. Published in the UK and US in April 2017 the book has already been translated into Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Japanese.
Kate Raworth says that economics dominate public policy and our decision-making for the future. It guides multi-billion-dollar investments, and shapes our responses to climate change, inequality, and other environmental and social challenges that define our times. However economic theories as taught today are centuries out of date. That’s why it is time, Raworth says, to revise our economic thinking for [ . . . ]

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

Renegade Economists Marilyn Waring, Kate Raworth and Elinor Ostrom (Part FOUR)

By MariaOctober 8, 20172017, Newest Podcasts

Marilyn Waring on War (Part TWO of Sex, Lies and Global Economics)
This film was a secret favorite for those who wanted to decode the economic system of perpetual, destructive growth. And for those who looked for an intelligent explanation of the connection between economics and war. Marilyn Waring was only 22 when she was first elected to the New Zealand Parliament. Re-elected three times she soon became chair of the prestigious Public Expenditures Committee, the sole budget, appropriations, and public accounts committee of Parliament.
This segment is about war. Under the GDP accounting system war is the biggest growth industry of all. When John Maynard Keynes and Richard Stone invented the GDP formula during WWII they explicitly designed is as a [ . . . ]

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

Renegade Economists Marilyn Waring, Kate Raworth and Elinor Ostrom (Part THREE)

By MariaOctober 3, 20172017, Newest Podcasts

Kate Raworth “Why it’s time for a new version of human prosperity”
Kate Raworth came to international attention in 2017 with the publication of her most recent book: Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st-Century Economist. She critiques the Gross Domestic Product system of accounting – including the so-called Green or sustainable growth models.
In Kate Raworth’ doughnut model the goal is to raise the well being of humans trapped inside the doughnut hole, while placing limits on climate change and pollution that are near or have crossed the outer circle of the doughnut.
Kate Raworth is teaching at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, and at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Over the last two decades she has worked as [ . . . ]

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

Renegade Economists Marilyn Waring, Kate Raworth and Elinor Ostrom (Part TWO)

By MariaSeptember 26, 20172017, Newest Podcasts

Marilyn Waring’s 30 Year Effort to Dismantle the GDP
Safe drinking water counts for nothing. A pollution-free environment counts for nothing. Even some people – namely women – count for nothing. This according to the United Nations System of National Accounts, the SNA, that sets the standard and imposes economic and budgetary decisions for almost 200 countries.
The SNA produce the GDP, the Gross Domestic Product that allegedly measures well being within a country. However war and catastrophes deforestation and mining show up as beneficial for the economy under the GDP.
Marilyn Waring, former New Zealand M.P., now professor of public policy at Auckland University, writer, and goat farmer, explained this in her book: Counting for Nothing. She gave a 30 year update [ . . . ]

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Renegade Economists Marilyn Waring, Kate Raworth and Elinor Ostrom (Part ONE)

By MariaSeptember 19, 20172017, Newest Podcasts

This is the beginning of a TUC Radio mini series on how to resist the demands of permanent economic growth and protect the earth, indigenous communities, local agriculture and women. Here first is the archive edition of Who’s Counting, Marilyn Waring on sex, lies and global economics based on the audio of the film by Terre Nash.
Marilyn Waring was shocked and dismayed when she learned that all countries that are members of the UN are forced to keep their books and design their budgets under the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA). This GDP system counts only cash transactions in the market and recognizes no value other than money. This means there is no value to peace and to [ . . . ]

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