2018

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.

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

Special 29 min. edit of the 2015 60 min. TUC program As forests 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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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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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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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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Professor Ilan Pappe: The Idea of Israel

A History of Power and Knowledge
The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe spoke on September 14, 2018, at the City Club of Cleveland.
Attempts were made to prevent Prof. Pappe from speaking, however the President of the Board of Directors of the City Club explained why they did not retract the invitation. She said that a forum devoted to freedom of speech will use this as an opportunity to reflect on the role the City Club plays in the community. We believe, she said, that our work requires us to listen and learn.
As the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continues, many question the very representation of the Zionist state. Ilan Pappe, Ph.D., Professor of History and Director of the European Centre for Palestine [ . . . ]

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Michael Parenti, The Supremely Political Court

Archival, updated 2018 to reflect Trump’s Supreme Court – In his extraordinary 26 minute history of the Supreme Court Dr. Michael Parenti warned us in 1995 that this partisan, aristocratic institution might one day empower an autocratic president. It seems that time has come and two Trump appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, can push the scales of justice in favor of their politics. Unless there is a groundswell to question and change the legal rules of that institution. Why is so much power being given to 9 unelected, non term limited judges.
Michael Parenti was born into a working class Italian family in East Harlem, New York City. He went on to receive his Ph.D. in political science at Yale [ . . . ]

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Jeremy Corbyn with Yanis Varoufakis (TWO of TWO)

Rescuing Democracy by Reviving Socialism
A Conversation at the Edinburgh Book Festival, August 20, 2018
Rescuing democracy from autocracy has become an world-wide challenge: how to curb the power of corporations and banks; and the parallel fights for education, housing and health, and the resistance against privatization across Europe and the Americas. And how to stem the tide of right wing movements be they in the US, Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Greece, Hungary and too many other places.
Familiar names show up in an effort to create a cross border countervailing movement to support democracy and rescue the values and traditions of socialism as countervailing force to capitalism.
Yanis Varoufakis is a Greek economist, academic and politician. He was a Syriza member of the [ . . . ]

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