Podcasts

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Kevin Anderson: Talk to the Oxford Climate Society, ONE of TWO

By MariaFebruary 26, 2019Newest Podcasts

On Jan 25, 2019, Professor Kevin Anderson, the chair of energy and climate change at the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering (MACE) at the University of Manchester spoke at the Oxford Climate Society.
He is one of the rare academics with a background in mechanical engineering even worked on oil platforms as a young man. I addition to producing peer reviewed research he engages with European governments on issues ranging from shale gas, aviation and shipping. He also brings a strong sense of justice and equity into his recommendations on how to prevent climate chaos.
He said that it’s twenty-eight years since the IPCC’s first report on climate change and over a quarter of a century since the 1992 Rio [ . . . ]

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

Kevin Anderson – A Rule Book for the Climate Casino

By MariaFebruary 19, 2019Newest Podcasts

Even though climate scientist Kevin Anderson has given up flying he attended, via train and ferry, most of the annual COPs, the Conferences of the Parties. They are held under the auspices of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change. And, as Deputy Director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in the UK, he contributes to the science.
Kevin Anderson says that we have known since 1990 about the need to end fossil fuel use. However now, 28 years later, emissions of greenhouse gases are still going up and are now a staggering 65% higher than in 1990.
The economists Thomas Piketty (in “Carbon and Inequality”) found that only 10% of world population are responsible for 30% of CO2 emissions. [ . . . ]

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

Professor Peter Wadhams – The Fate of the Ice Sheet on the Top of the World

By MariaFebruary 12, 2019Newest Podcasts

In early 2019 news about accelerated melting in Arctic and Antarctic made me return to trusted sources. For the Arctic I returned to Prof. Peter Wadhams, the UK’s most experienced sea ice scientist, professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.
As opposed to the Antarctic, a continent of mountains and valleys covered in ice, the North Pole is an ocean covered with an ice sheet that touched the coast lines of Greenland, Canada, Alaska and Siberia for 100.000 years. In only 30 years the retreat from the coast lines during the Arctic summer accelerated and an ice free Arctic in September may [ . . . ]

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

NASA Scientist Eric Rignot on Melting Glaciers in Antarctica

By MariaFebruary 5, 2019Newest Podcasts

A collaboration between Radio Ecoshock and TUC Radio archive Even mainstream media reported at the beginning of February, 2019, a sensation in sea level rise. NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, confirmed that a huge cavity — two-thirds the size of Manhattan and almost 1,000 feet tall — has melted into the bottom of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. This glacier is about the size of Florida, and is currently already responsible for about 4 percent of global sea level rise.
Thwaites is sometimes called a culture changer since the collapse of that one glacier would raise the oceans by two feet, threatening so many centers of civilization that are built on the coast lines of the world.
Eric Rignot of [ . . . ]

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

Happy 16th Anniversary, Seniors for Peace

By MariaJanuary 29, 2019Newest Podcasts

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 [ . . . ]

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

Mary Oliver

By MariaJanuary 22, 2019Newest Podcasts

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 [ . . . ]

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

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

By MariaJanuary 15, 2019Newest Podcasts

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 [ . . . ]

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

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

By MariaJanuary 8, 20192018, Newest Podcasts2019

The material for this program literally landed on my doorstep with a personal challenge – would TUC radio and you who have listened over time be open to hearing arguments that there is no evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections?
Given the speaker, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who I met and recorded before, beginning with the opposition to the war on Iraq; and given the expertise of the group of colleagues around him, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, VIPS; and given that this group expressed their doubts about Russian interference already in December of 2016; and given that no major TV or print media have given them a voice – I picked up the challenge and am [ . . . ]

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

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

By MariaJanuary 1, 20192018, Newest Podcasts

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)

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

By MariaDecember 23, 20182018, Food & Water, Newest Podcasts

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 here for over 10,000 years.
When the report was published in the science magazine of record, Nature, it caused an international scandal. Apparently under pressure from the Biotech industry, the magazine attempted earlier this year to pressure Chapela to withdraw the story. This is Chapela’s story and the story of corn that needs to remain intact so future generations will be able to eat.
For more information:
https://food.berkeley.edu/about-us/affiliates/
https://www.nature.com/articles/35096714

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

The Soul of Soil – John Jeavons

By MariaDecember 19, 20182018, Newest Podcasts

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 [ . . . ]

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

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

By MariaDecember 11, 20182018, Newest Podcasts

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 [ . . . ]

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

Vandana Shiva: Soil Not Oil, Special

By MariaDecember 4, 20182018, Newest Podcasts

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 [ . . . ]

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

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

By MariaNovember 27, 20182018, Newest Podcasts

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 [ . . . ]

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

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

By MariaNovember 20, 20182018, Newest Podcasts

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 [ . . . ]

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