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Katie Singer is the author of “An Electronic Silent Spring, Facing the Dangers and Creating Safe Limits”; and the forthcoming “Our Web of Inconvenient Truths: The Internet, Energy Use, Toxic Waste and Climate Change – How on Earth Do We Shrink the Internet’s Footprint?”
She is a consultant with the EMR Policy Institute, and presented her concerns about the Internet’s footprint at the 2018 UN Forum on Science, Technology & Innovation and on a January, 2019, panel with climatologist Dr. Jim Hansen. She was interviewed at the Jan 25 to Feb. 3, 2019, conference of the the Hippocrates Health Institute by Ben Zeitlin. In her first book, The Electronic Silent Spring, Katie Singer wrote on EMR’s health effects. She told me that now [ . . . ]
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UPLOADED A DAY EARLY due to Fire in our area: First broadcast November 2018
As California tries to come to terms with the largest and deadliest fires of 2019, 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 [ . . . ]
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Late in the evening of September 24, 2019, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson surprised the UN General Assembly in New York City when he stepped to the podium. He gave an extraordinary – even poetic – description of the digital surveillance age. He said that digital authoritarianism is not the stuff of dystopian fantasy but of an emerging reality.
Devra Davis earned a PhD in science studies at the University of Chicago. She founded the non-profit Environmental Health Trust in 2007 to provide basic research and education about environmental health hazards and promote constructive policies locally and internationally. She is currently visiting Professor of Medicine in Israel and Turkey.
She was interviewed by podcaster David Wolfe about 5G and Mobile Phone [ . . . ]
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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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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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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 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.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 19.9MB)
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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