Podcasts

Gabe Brown – Brown’s Ranch in North Dakota – Part Two

This is the last in a mini-series about protecting the soils of the world from erosion and poisoning by agricultural chemicals. Industrial farming techniques along with climate change are causing the loss of 75 billion tons of topsoils each year.
On May 4, 2020, Jesse Frost had a farmer to farmer conversation with Gabe Brown on Regenerative Agriculture. Jesse farms off grid in Kentucky and hosts the No-Till Market Garden Podcast. Gabe Brown’s 5,000 acre farm in North Dakota is now run by his son and his son’s fiancé. Most of the Brown Ranch is in crops and grazed by cattle, sheep and hogs with a small area in no till vegetables.
Gabe Brown is now a pioneer of the soil-health [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

Gabe Brown – Brown’s Ranch in North Dakota

Interview by Jesse Frost on the No-Till Growers Podcast On May 4, 2020, Jesse Frost had a farmer to farmer conversation with Gabe Brown on Regenerative Agriculture.
In the current emergency, that is caused by climate change and the Corona Virus pandemic, a movement among farmers brings inspiration and hope to those who are looking for healthy food and techniques of farming without chemicals.
Instead of adding to carbon dioxide pollution by industrial farming and animal raising techniques, farmers like Gabe Brown and Jesse Frost are exploring ways of actually bringing carbon dioxide down from the air and back into the soil.
Every year the Food and Agriculture Organization in the United Nations is celebrating World Soil Day on [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

In Memory of Robert Fisk — His Warning, in 2002, of the Pending War on Iraq

Robert Fisk, the award winning war correspondent and dean of Middle East journalists died in Dublin on October 30. He was only 74.
Robert Fisk won more British journalism awards than any of his peers, including British Foreign Reporter of the Year seven times and the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2002. The New York Times described him as “probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain.” And that in spite of his principle of speaking truth to power.
Fisk reported for the London Independent on Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, without sparing responsibility of the United States and his native Britain for so much of the carnage.
He became one of very few [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 39.8MB)

Soil is a Living Being – Dr. Christine Jones and Farmer Gabe Brown

In the preceding TUC Radio program Dr. Christine Jones was first introduced. Here is the self-contained conclusion of her presentation to Fibershed. She is an internationally known ground-cover and soils ecologist. She works with landholders to increase biodiversity and biological activity. They sequester carbon, activate soil nutrient cycles, restore water balance, improve productivity and create new topsoil.
Gabe Brown first started working alongside his father-in-law on the family farm in North Dakota. When a series of crop disasters put Brown and his wife, Shelly, in desperate financial straits, they started – from 1993 on – experimenting with a new type of farming: regenerative agriculture. Gabe Brown is now a pioneer of the soil-health movement and has been named one of the [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

Soil is a Living Being – Dr. Christine Jones

Christine Jones is an internationally renowned and highly respected ground-cover and soils ecologist. She has a wealth of experience working with landholders to enhance biodiversity, increase biological activity, sequester carbon, activate soil nutrient cycles, restore water balance, improve productivity and create new topsoil. She is passionate about reversing the decline of nutrients in food that is grown on the world’s depleted soils.
Jones has organized and participated in workshops and conferences throughout Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Canada, Central America, and the USA and has a strong publication and presentation record. She is a member of Arizona State University’s ‘Carbon Nation Team’ and sits on the advisory board of ‘The Carbon Underground’.
The non-profit Fibershed held a workshop with Christine [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

Hurricanes & Climate Change: Dr. Jennifer Francis

Jennifer Francis became Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center after being a research professor at Rutgers University’s Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences.
She gave an interview to Miami Herald reporter Alex Harris on Hurricanes & Climate Change a day after the beginning of the official annual hurricane season that goes from June first to November 30th, giving a forecast that in essence came true.
Live on Zoom this became one of the most detailed and fact-filled conversations about how natural phenomena such as El Nino and La Nina, and even dust storms from the Sahara desert, interact with warmer oceans and one foot higher sea levels and changes in the ocean currents that make hurricane seasons longer [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 39.8MB)

Fast Food World – TUC personal archive – Two of Two

Eric Schlosser, Vandana Shiva, Michael Pollan, Carlo Petrini and Wendell Berry
Fast Food World was organized by Orville Schell, Dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, and professor of journalism Michael Pollan. They had invited an international panel.
The goal of Fast Food World was to examine the economic, social and health aspects of worldwide food production and the role of food industries in promoting or destroying human welfare.
The first speaker is Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, followed by Vandana Shiva from India, activist and author of Monocultures of the Mind and Biopiracy. Also present and participating in the discussion, whether it is even still possible to feed the huge world population with healthy food are: Wendell [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 39.8MB)

Fast Food World – TUC personal archive – One of Two

Michael Pollan, Carlo Petrini and Wendell Berry
In the seventh month of Covid, September 2020, life for so many is coming into focus around the essentials – Home and Food. Including my home, threatened by the California fires, and my tiny garden with tomatoes and peppers. Meanwhile the whole world is bursting in with Covid news. And a conversation is beginning about how bes to rebuild the food web when Covid ends.
For me this brings back memories of an extraordinary on-stage conversation at UC Berkeley at the end of November 2003. The hall filled to capacity long before the beginning of the event. Who would have thought that a simple title such as “Fast Food World” would draw over [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 39.8MB)

Vandana Shiva: The Future of Food and Farming in a Pandemic World – Part TWO of TWO

This the conclusion of a masterclass on this theme taught by Vandana Shiva to students at the University of British Columbia on August 17, 2020. This program also includes a rare bonus-track of a TUC Radio recording of Shiva’s keynote at the Fast Food World conference at UC Berkeley on November 24, 2003.
Before earning her PhD in quantum theory Vandana Shiva had been training in India in the atomic energy commission. She credits the Chipko Movement, where she volunteered, with teaching her about biodiversity. Chipko was a nonviolent ecological movement in India in the 1970s started by rural villagers, mainly women. They were protecting trees and forests slated for government-backed logging by embracing the trees and stopping the chainsaws.
Vandana [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

Vandana Shiva: The Future of Food and Farming in a Pandemic World – Part ONE of TWO

On Aug 17, 2020, the University of British Columbia in Canada invited Dr. Vandana Shiva to hold the first on-line Masterclass with students from UBC’s Faculty of Land and Food Systems. Vandana Shiva gave a presentation and then the students self-organized the lively and warm Q and A period.
Vandana Shiva remembers with fondness her time as a student in Canada. She was trained as a physicist before shifting to interdisciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy. She earned her PhD in quantum theory at the University of Western Ontario.
Currently she is based in Dehra Dun, India. She has authored over 20 books, including The Violence of the Green Revolution, Monocultures of the Mind, Soil not Oil and Oneness [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:59 — 39.8MB)

Chris Hedges: Challenging Corporate Power – Chevron VS Donziger

On September 5, 2020, Chris Hedges talked to attorney Steven Donziger. Donziger battled the corporate oil giant, , over environmental pollution and destruction in Ecuador and won a settlement of $9.5 billion for indigenous communities.
Since then Chevron has waged a campaign against Donziger to destroy him economically, professionally and personally. Their goal is to prevent the settlement to be paid out for the urgently needed cleanup.
Chis Hedges is an investigative journalist, New York Times best selling author and former staff, and television host of On Contact. This is the September 5 interview with Steven Donziger.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 39.8MB)

In Memory of Glaciologist Konrad Steffen

Professor Steffen was a renowned scientist who did research at the world’s two largest ice sheets, Antarctica and Greenland. His 30-year study of Greenland proved to the world that the ice sheet melting is accelerating. Glaciers are both losing mass and sliding into the ocean faster. On August 8, 2020, Konrad Steffen fell into a crevasse that had opened next to the research station that he had founded in 1990. He was 68 and had gone out on a routine data collection walk.
Professor Konrad Steffen began his studies in the Arctic in the 1970s, founded Swiss Camp, the Lab and dining room for scientists and students in 1990 and worked there almost every year. He was also a professor of [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

Witness To The Melting Of The Greenland Ice – TUC Archives

An Inuit Elder Speaks
Ithluk was recorded by Cien Fuegos in July, 2007, during a rainstorm in the Valley of the Ancients on Greenland.
When I first heard his voice in 2007 I wished I could move radio stations to play this recording every day to show that voices like his can reach us and inspire us to recognize our common future and save Greenland from melting. But even though there is enough water bound up in the Greenland ice sheet to raise sea level by 21 feet and drown the cities of London and New York this program had a limited reach.
And now, in August 2020 a headline in the British Guardian read: Greenland ice sheet lost a record 1 [ . . . ]

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

Richard Wolff and Nomi Prins: The Federal Reserve’s Rigged Money Management

On August 10, 2020 Economics Professor Richard Wolff invited Nomi Prins, the former Wall Street executive turned whistle blower, author and investigative journalist, on his weekly show: Economics Update. They discussed the consequences of the increasingly larger infusions of cash that the Federal Reserve injects when there is a crisis. First for the dot com of 2000 – then the subprime of 2008 and now the covid 19 crisis. Professor Richard Wolff began with his ten minute news segment.
Nomi Prins has written for The New York Times, Fortune, Newsday, Mother Jones, The Guardian, The Nation and other publications. She was also a member of Senator Bernie Sanders panel of top economic experts to advise on Federal Reserve reform.
Richard Wolff is [ . . . ]

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Podcast (file2): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)

Dr. John Campbell: Coronavirus, Community testing and diagnosis

In his August 7, 2020, presentation the British retired Nurse Teacher Dr. John Campbell used his daily Covid briefing to present what might be a breakthrough in testing.
Given that testing all over the world is inadequate or even impossible at the scale needed, he described a new COVID Symptom Study and App. It was developed by a consortium of scientists with the goal of collecting information to help healthcare workers, researchers, and public officials to address the COVID-19 outbreak. This initiative was led by Professor Tim Spector in the UK and Dr. Andy Chan in the US, and was covered by the journal Science in March and peer reviewed in Nature.
This App collects daily information from individuals in the community [ . . . ]

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