If You Love This Planet

Originally aired 09/27/10

This week, we hear a repeat of Dr. Caldicott’s October 2010 interview with Bill McKibben about global warming, alternative energy and the growing need for more localized economies. Author, educator and environmentalist McKibben was described in 2010 by the Boston Globe as “probably the nation’s leading environmentalist” and Time magazine described him as “the world’s best green journalist. McKibben’s books include Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, Deep Economy, Fight Global Warming Now and The End of Nature. In 2009 he led the organization of 350.org, which coordinated what Foreign Policy magazine called “the largest ever global coordinated rally of any kind,” with 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (Loading)

Dr. Helen Caldicott interviewed by Bob Herbert about her latest book, “Loving This Planet”

Renowned journalist Bob Herbert interviews Dr. Helen Caldicott at The New School in New York, November 2012. Dr. Caldicott discusses her latest book, Loving This Planet (The New Press, Oct. 2012) which features 25 interviews from “If You Love This Planet,” as well as the state of the earth and U.S. presidential election (held two days before this interview). Among the topics covered are the urgency of addressing global warming, permanent-war mentality in the Pentagon and how the American public no longer thinks of peace, the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Sandy, the 1980s nuclear weapons freeze movement spearheaded by Dr. Caldicott and Randall Forsberg, and the study Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy. Listen to Dr. Caldicott’s interview with study author Dr. Arjun Makhijani. Dr. Caldicott explains how nuclear power contributes to climate change and mentions her book Nuclear Power Is Not The Answer . Herbert asks Dr. Caldicott about her interview with filmmaker Michael Madsen and the problem of nuclear waste. They also discuss Fukushima and what it would mean for Japan if the damaged Building 4 collapses, and how one million people have died as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. Listen to Dr. Caldicott’s interview with Dr. Janette Sherman-Nevinger. Dr. Caldicott mentions her forthcoming trip to Japan. Watch a short video of her November press conference in Tokyo. Herbert mentions Dr. Caldicott’s conversation with Maude Barlow about the problem of global water supplies. Herbert and Dr. Caldicott also touch on America’s weaponization of space to dominate space. Listen to Dr. Caldicott’s interview with Dr. Craig Eisendrath. Dr. Caldicott talks about how American culture and corporations have taken over the world and destroyed healthy cultures. Herbert points to the fantasy thinking and lack of political engagement among American citizens. Dr. Caldicott also mentions the problem of plastic waste polluting the oceans. Listen to her interview with Capt. Charles Moore. Relevant to this interview is the December 2012 article US War Machine Leaves Ugly Imprint in Afghanistan. Watch the complete conversation between Dr. Caldicott and Herbert here. Listen to Dr. Caldicott’s 2012 interview with Bob Herbert here and her 2009 interview here.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (Loading)

Subhankar Banerjee on global warming’s threat to forests and native peoples

Subhankar Banerjee is an Indian-born American photographer, writer and activist. Over the past decade he has been a leading international voice on issues of arctic conservation, indigenous human rights and global warming, and over the past five years he has also been focusing on forest deaths from global warming. His photographs and writing have reached tens of millions of people around the world through exhibitions, publications and public lectures. His new book is called Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point. Note: At the start of this interview, Dr. Caldicott refers to a September 2012 report of a massacre of members of the Yanomami Indian Tribe of the Amazon. A week after this program was recorded, the report was found to be false. Read the September 11 article,Campaign group retracts Yanomami ‘massacre’ claims. For more information on the work of Subhankar Banerjee, check out climatestorytellers.org and subhankarbanerjee.org. Longer show description to follow.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (Loading)

Marion Pack on the many safety risks at the San Onofre nuclear power plant and how a Fukushima-type meltdown would contaminate Southern California

In this conversation recorded in June, Dr. Caldicott talks with California anti-nuclear activist, Marion Pack. Pack is one of many members of the Orange County community who highlight serious safety issues with the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, located a few miles south of San Clemente, California. If San Onofre were to melt down, it would contaminate Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, and make large regions of southern California uninhabitable forever. As background, read Shut down San Onofre: The continuing nuclear threat to southern California and Bad Vibrations: San Onofre steam generators cannot safely be repaired – new Fairewinds video and report. Topics addressed in the interview include nuclear waste, the 1980s Nuclear Freeze movement, the present public apathy toward nuclear war, and the many recent safety risks and radiation leaks at the San Onofre nuclear plant between San Diego and Los Angeles, where whistleblowers have been threatened. They examine a terrifying close call which brought the plant close to a major accident, and how San Onofre’s position on three major earthquake fault lines, right on the coast, makes it a sitting duck for a major meltdown like Fukushima. Later in the program, Dr. Caldicott stresses the urgent need for civil disobedience around nuclear issues and global warming, in the face of political inertia. She refers to Kumi Naidoo, head of Greenpeace. Read Civil Disobedience Needed to Win Action on Climate Change, New Greenpeace Chief Says. She also refers to Peter Finch’s famous scene in the film Network in discussing the level of outrage the public should exhibit toward threats to the planet. For a recent update on San Onofre, read the November 30 Friends of the Earth press release: San Onofre: Laguna Hills meeting no substitute for formal court hearings about the local utility’s plans to restart one of the crippled reactors. For more information, seesanonofresafety.org.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (Loading)

This week’s guest is Tom Engelhardt, creator of theTomDispatch.com website, a project of the Nation Institute, a non-profit media center based in New York, where he is a fellow. Englehardt is the author of two collections of his TomDispatch columns: The United States of Fear and The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, as well as The End of Victory Culture, a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. Another of his recent books Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare 2001-2050, which he co-authored with Nick Turse. Longer show description to follow. Note: This particular interview was recorded in summer 2012, before the November election.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts [00:59:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (Loading)

Holly Barker on the devastating ongoing effects of mid-century U.S. nuclear weapons testing on the Marshall Islands

This week’s guest is Holly Barker, author and teacher at the Anthropology Department at the University of Washington in Seattle. Barker worked for the Republic of the Marshall Islands Government’s Embassy in Washington D.C. for 17 years, helping conduct research in the Marshall Islands about the effects of nuclear testing from a Marshallese perspective. She was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Marshall Islands from 1988-1990, and lived on a remote outer island with a Marshallese family for two years while teaching in a local elementary school. Barker is the author of Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial World (which just came out in second edition), and co-authored with Dr. Barbara Rose Johnston an award-winning book called Consequential Damages of Nuclear War: The Rongelap Report. During the interview, Barker mentions the activism of Dr. Neal Palafox. Listen to Dr. Caldicott’s 2011 interview with Dr. Palafox. Dr. Caldicott recommends listeners watch the documentary film Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts [00:59:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (Loading)

Brian D. Victoria on Buddhism’s role in Japan and on freeing societies from tribalistic thinking

This week’s special guest is Brian Daizen Victoria, Professor of Japanese Studies and director of a program at Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio titled: Japan and Its Buddhist Traditions. Apart from numerous journal articles, Victoria’s major writings include Zen at War; Zen War Stories; an autobiographical work in Japanese and a translation of The Zen Life by Sato Koji. In this discussion, Dr. Caldicott and Victoria look at the evolution of Buddhism in Japan including its role in Japan’s militarism in World War II, how individuals in societies can be gripped by tribalistic thinking or embrace a universalist point of view, death and dying, why men kill, and the moral choices we all face in a time when nuclear war still threatens everyone, and other profound questions. Victoria refers to the filmJoyeux Noël [note: the website has a clickable English-language version].

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts [00:59:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (Loading)

Jay Harman on the enormous promise of biomimicry to create more efficient technologies

This week’s guest is Jay Harman, entrepreneur and inventor. Harman has taken a hands-on approach to his lifelong fascination with natural fluid systems. In the process, he has grown companies that design innovative products, ranging from prize-winning watercraft called the WildThing and the Goggleboat, to a medical research company that developed a non-invasive technology for measuring blood glucose, to his latest company, PAX Scientific. Born and raised in Australia, Harman’s love of nature began as a boy swimming in the ocean near his home. He began his career as a naturalist with the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, but he quickly demonstrated talents as an inventor. While still with the Australian government, he designed, built, and licensed a set of crustacean measuring gauges as well as a range of hovercraft. Harman is at the leading edge of biomimicry, following nature’s models to design more efficient products and devices. He is the author of the forthcoming book The Shark’s Paintbrush in which he explains his many developments in biomimickry. Harman appears in Prince Charles’s documentary Harmony: A New Way of Looking at the World

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts [00:59:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (Loading)

Kathy Kelly on America’s resource domination agenda in Afghanistan and Iraq, and its increasing use of drones to kill civilians

This week’s guest is Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, an organization which has steadily researched consequences of drone attacks, night raids and aerial bombings in Afghanistan. Risking imprisonment, they frequently protest U.S. government plans to continue U.S. military presence in Afghanistan until 2024 and beyond. Drawing from recent experiences living for a month at a time in Afghanistan, Kelly frequently speaks and writes about perspectives of Afghan Peace Volunteers. They have told her and her companions their thoughts about prospects for their future in relation to NATO and the U.S. 21st Century military. Kelly previously lived alongside ordinary Iraqis whenever she and other Voices activists traveled there to break the U.S./UN economic sanctions against Iraq. They remained in Iraq throughout the Shock and Awe bombing in 2003 and during the initial months of U.S. occupation.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts [00:59:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (Loading)

David Freeman on the urgency of fighting the nuclear, gas and coal industries to save the Earth

Dr. Caldicott’s guest this week is David Freeman, a senior advisor with Friends of the Earth’s nuclear campaign. Freeman has more than four decades of experience directing federal, regional and local energy policies. He was appointed chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, where he stopped the construction of eight large nuclear power plants and pioneered a massive energy conservation program. Subsequently, Freeman served for two decades as general manager of several large public power agencies including the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the New York Power Authority and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. He is a renowned expert on clean energy, efficiency and the risks of nuclear power.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts [00:59:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (Loading)