The Green Planet Monitor copertina

The Green Planet Monitor

The Green Planet Monitor

Di: David Kattenburg
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  • No Immediate Danger

    No Immediate Danger
    Aug 13 2023
    GPM # 23 Seventy-eight years ago, on August 6, 1945, the US dropped a uranium-enriched fission bomb – ‘Little Boy’ – on the Japanese port city, Hiroshima. Three days later, anxious to test their second innovative device before the war ended, they detonated a second bomb — a plutonium-triggered implosion device called Fat Man — over Nagasaki. Why Nagasaki? Because Nagasaki lay in a bowl, surrounded by hills nuclear scientists figured would reflect neutrons. They wanted to check that out (listen to Glenn Alcalay here). When the dust settled, a couple hundred thousand lay dead or dying. Most were civilians. Thousands more would sicken and die in the years to come. America’s official rationale for dropping bombs on Japan: avoiding huge casualties a ground invasion of Japan would supposedly have incurred. Harry Truman’s non-mea culpa was immediately accepted by the American media and public. The real reason would emerge in time: one-upping the Soviets, setting the stage for global supremacy, with the bomb as gold standard. Gar Alperovitz has written a pair of books about the nuclear bombing of Japan. Alperovitz is a historian, political economist, activist and writer, and the author of two books about the nuclear bombing of Japan. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam was published in 1965. His 1995 work, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, updated the story. Alperovitz is also the co-founder of something called the Democracy Collaborative, a research centre on ecologically sustainable, community-based economics, and the Next System Project. Listen to my conversation with Gar Alperovitz. Click on the play button on top, or go here. ‘Bravo Shot’ over Bikini atoll, the Marshall Islands, March 1, 1954 Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just the start. Building bombs would become a booming business for America and the other four ‘Permanent Members’ of the United Nations (the ones franchised to possess nuclear weapons and to threaten their use), Russia, China, the UK and France. Nuclearism was a bonanza for the ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ of course, and for the Pentagon too. Each military service hustled for its own nukes. The Air Force had dropped their first two on Japan. Soon, the army had a growing arsenal of its own, mounted on missiles. So did the navy, to detonate at or below the surface of bodies of water. Hungry for their slices of protection, prestige and power, a half dozen other countries developed smaller but equally deadly arsenals. Here’s a great song about that. In the fields of the bomb, there was no shortage of profits to go around — digging up uranium in desolate, underdeveloped areas of the world inhabited by disenfranchised indigenous people; enriching it; selling it; designing warheads of the latest sort; testing nukes in the atmosphere or just below ground, spreading radionuclides all around the planet. Power plants put the peaceful atom to work. Their radioactive wastes got dumped in the seas, buried or processed into fertilizer to be spread on farm fields. Plutonium from spent fuel rods would be enriched and packed into warheads. Untold numbers of nuclear workers and innocent bystanders would die in the course of all this atomic industriousness, especially islanders and other First Nations people. Tens of millions more would perish (and continue to do so) in wars fought or engineered by the possessors of the ultimate weapon — the weapon that determines who wields bona fide power and who doesn’t. This is something I produced back in 1986. In order of appearance: Rosalie Bertell was a Canadian-American anti-nuclear activist and authority on the health effects of ionizing radiation. Bertell, a sister of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart, founded the International Institute of Concern for Public Health, in Toronto. Her book — No Immediate Danger – Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth — was published in 1985. In 1986, Bertell received the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Prize. Rosalie Bertell passed away in 2012. You’ll also hear two voices recorded at the ‘Crimes of the Official Terror Network Tribunal’, a four-day popular summit organized by the Alliance for Non-Violent Action, in Toronto, in June 1988: Al Draper, a Royal Canadian Air Force serviceman, was one of many US and Canadian servicemen recruited to observe US nuclear bomb tests in the Nevada desert, to see how it affected them. Ward Churchill was a professor at the University of Colorado at the time of this recording, and an activist with the American Indian Movement (AIM). Donna Smyth was an English professor at Acadia University, in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and an anti-uranium mining activist. Smyth’s 1986 work, Subversive Elements — drawing on her experience opposing uranium mining in Nova Scotia in the early 1980s — was described at the time as “a multi-generic, postmodern, ecofeminist, Maritime novel.” Thanks to ...
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    59 min
  • Poisonous Legacies

    Poisonous Legacies
    Aug 20 2023
    GPM # 24 The mining, milling, processing and enrichment of uranium for use in nuclear bombs, the testing of those bombs, their actual or threatened use against people, the use of uranium in power reactors and the extraction of weapons-grade plutonium from those reactors has poisoned relations between states, polluted environments, stunted First Nations societies, sickened and killed countless millions and alienated humans from the rest of the living world. Consider little Niger. The north African nation is the world’s seventh largest uranium producer. Massive volumes of uranium ore have been extracted over decades from an open pit mine operated by the state-owned French company, Orano, in the northern Nigerien town of Arlit, and from an underground mine nearby. Niger’s minority stake in Orano’s operations likely provides its military with a healthy income – certainly with a quantum of power when dealing with the French, who they claim to hate, and whose military they’ve reportedly expelled. Ordinary Nigeriens get poisonous mine tailings, polluted air and water and radioactive buildings. I speak about uranium mining in Niger with Bruno Chareyron, a researcher with the French NGO CRIIRAD (Commission de Recherche et d’Information Indépendentes Sur la Radioactivité). Listen to our conversation. Click on the link above or go here. Courtesy: Aghirin’man While Nigeriens cope with the radioactive legacy of uranium mining, eleven thousand kilometers to the east, Vietnam continues to confront the toxic legacy of what they call the American War. Between 1961 and 1971, in an attempt to eliminate forest cover and food supplies for North Vietnamese forces, the US Air Force dropped an estimated seventy-five million liters of the defoliant Agent Orange across the southern end of what was then South Vietnam. Almost 30,000 square kilometers of forest and some 5 million acres of farmland got drenched. So did lots of Vietnamese soldiers and peasant farmers. Agent Orange is a mixture of the herbicides 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. Within that ugly brew, traces of dioxin – a toxic chlorinated organic compound that persists in soils and sediments, and accumulates in fish that people eat. Up to four million Vietnamese were exposed to America’s toxic defoliant. To this day, dioxin ‘hot spots’continue to be cleaned up. There were initially four of these across southern Vietnam: former US airbases at Danang, Bien Hoa and Phu Cat, where Agent Orange was stored in drums and loaded onto planes, and sections of the A Luoi Valley, near the border with Laos. Cleanup at Danang was completed in 2018. In late 2022, the US government allocated $29 million to remediate a mess four times that size, at Bien Hoa. The whole job is expected to cost a half-billion and take a decade to complete. Meanwhile, in the minds of many Vietnamese (and American experts), the health effects of the American War have transcended generations. These include a host of cancers, Vietnamese health authorities insist, and the most shocking birth defects. Of course, American servicemen and women were exposed too. Read about that here. Listen to this story about the legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Click on the link above or go here. A Luoi valley, near Vietnam’s border with Laos (David Kattenburg) Human beings have transformed Planet Earth’s surface — geologically. Dutch Chemist Paul Crützen captured this idea in a single word: the Anthropocene. This past July, in Lille, France, a scientific panel announced its own definition of the Anthropocene: when it began; how Earth’s new time unit should be ranked in the geological time scale, and where humanity’s overwhelming impact is best observed in Earth’s sediments, as a reference standard for other spots of the same age around the world. The panel’s choice for that one spot: Crawford Lake, in southern Ontario. It’s key human ‘signature’ of humanity’s presence: radioactive plutonium from atmospheric thermonuclear tests that peaked in the mid-1950s. The panel will present a detailed proposal to the body that commissioned it, this coming Fall. Crawford Lake core (courtesy: Patterson lab) Jan Zalasiewicz was the first chair of the Anthropocene Working Group. Zalasiewicz is an Emeritus Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester and a member of the Anthropocene Working Group. Listen to our conversation. Click on the link above or go here. Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.
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    59 min
  • Bosses Old & New

    Bosses Old & New
    Aug 27 2023
    GPM # 25 Senegal, on the western edge of Africa, has long been considered an anchor of stability. Today, tension fills the air. Senegalese opposition leader Ousmane Sonko, a would-be presidential candidate, is on life support following a three-week hunger strike, protesting his house arrest. Sonko supporters say he’s been targeted because he wants to change Senegal’s relationship with France, which many see as neocolonial. It’s a common theme across West Africa today, where the economic legacy of colonialism is a daily reality. Over a century ago, France banned the use of the cowrie shell as an exchange currency, imposing its own – the CFA . The meaning of the term has changed over the years. Between 1945 and 1958, CFA stood for Colonies Françaises d’Afrique — French colonies of Africa. Then French Community of Africa. Since the early 1960s, when Senegal and France’s other North African colonies became independent, the CFA has been taken to mean African Financial Community. Backed by the French treasury, the CFA is pegged to the Euro, and France enjoys a huge trade advantage. Inflation – and the dependency of France’s former colonies on imported commodities – fuel staggering poverty. Also violent extremism. Most of the coups in the Sahel over the past decade have been in former French colonies. Berlin-based journalist and correspondent Alexa Dvorson has lived and worked in Senegal. During her most recent trip, in 2022, Senegal won the Africa Cup of Nations football tournament for the first time, defeating Egypt on penalties. Euphoria – and hope for the future – filled the air. It didn’t last long. Here is her report from that trip to the Senegalese capital Dakar, on the Atlantic Ocean, Africa’s western tip. Listen to Alexa’s story. Click on the podcast button above, or go here. Dakar market (Alexa Dvorson) For those who don’t know a whole lot about global politics and international affairs, Canada is seen as a kinder, gentler, more enlightened country than its neighbor to the south – with a young, photogenic leader always talking about human rights, justice and international law. Yves Engler sees things very differently. Engler is a Montreal-based writer and political activist. His 2009 book, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, was short-listed for the Quebec Writers Federation’s Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction. His most recent work, Stand on Guard For Whom? A People’s History of the Canadian Military, was co-published last year by Black Rose Books and Red Publishing. Listen to our conversation with Yves Engler. Click on the podcast button above, or go here. Yves Engler Last week, one of the world’s longest ruling strongmen finally stepped aside — handing power to his son. Hun Sen has had a long and colourful career. During the Cambodian civil war, between 1975 and 1979, he served as a commander for the Khmer Rouge. Following his defection to Vietnam in 1977, and the downfall of the Khmer Rouge, he became Cambodia’s Foreign Minister in the Vietnamese occupation government, then Prime Minister in 1983. On August 22, Hun Sen finally stepped aside, handing the Prime Minister post to his 45 year-old son, Hun Manet. The move was rubber-stamped by the Cambodian Parliament, controlled by the Cambodian People’s Party, that Hun Sen continues to lead. Not much is known about Hun Manet, other than his military pedigree. Since graduating from West Point, he’s been Cambodia’s counter-terrorism chief and a deputy military commander. Western observers wonder if he’ll govern with a more liberal touch than his father, and whether Cambodian relations with China will continue to prosper. Washington is reportedly upset by Chinese plans to help develop Cambodia’s naval base in Ream, on the Gulf of Thailand. Cambodia mangrove forest (David Kattenburg) The fate of mangrove forests up the coast from Ream is likely not on the Biden Administration’s radar. Coastal mangroves are threatened all around the world. In Cambodia, they’ve been cut down for charcoal and replaced by shrimp farms. Government figures, military chiefs and their rich clients have had a hand in this for years. Their involvement in mangrove destruction, coastal sand dredging and the harvesting of upland timber species, for sale in Thailand, Vietnam and China, is well documented. Read this and this. Here’s a story I produced about this, back in 2008. Click on the podcast button on top, or go here. Cambodian village in the middle of the mangroves (David Kattenburg) Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his guitar instrumentals.
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    52 min
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