If You Love This Planet, Dr. Helen Caldicott

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During an October 2009 book tour throughout the U.S.,
Dr. Caldicott was interviewed in Oakland, California by TUC Radio host Maria Gilardin. Dr. Caldicott’s latest book, If You Love This Planet, was published in September 2009 by W.W. Norton. The fully updated and revised edition of the volume first issued in 1992 covers all the major world environ-mental crises, such as global warming, toxic pollution, ozone depletion, defores-tation, species extinction, and radiation. In this in-depth interview, Gilardin asks Dr. Caldicott about many of the topics addressed in If You Love This Planet, and how the world ecological situation has changed since 1992. If You Love This Planet also covers the growth of corporate power in the 20th and 21st Centuries, and how transnational corporations and complicit mass media are allowed to destroy the planet by equating unrestrained free enterprise with freedom and democracy.

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Dr. Caldicott’s guest this week is Dan Hirsch, President of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a non-profit nuclear policy organization founded in 1970 which focuses on issues of nuclear safety, waste disposal, proliferation, and disarmament. He has been active in addressing the contamination at the Santa Susana field laboratory, site of a partial meltdown just north of Los Angeles, shutting down the Hanford nuclear reactor and in stopping U.S. plutonium production, as well as ending the dumping of radioactive waste into the oceans, improving nuclear-plant security against terrorism, and stopping the space nuclear component of the missile defense program. Hirsch also teaches Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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In the first segment on this week’s program, Dr. Caldicott interviews Canadian columnist Graham Thomson of the Edmonton Journal about the environmental and economic impacts of the Alberta tar sands project to drill for oil, and the fallacy of carbon capture and storage as a solution to global warming. Thomson is the author of the peer-reviewed report, Burying Carbon Dioxide In Underground Saline Aquifers: Political Folly or Climate Change Fix? for the Munk Centre for International Studies. For more information on the topics in this segment, see Thomson’s Web page, the Greenpeace report False Hope: why carbon capture and storage won’t save the climate, and the Greenpeace page, Stop the Tar Sands.

In the last third of the program, Dr. Caldicott plays an interview she conducted in 2005 with writer William Rivers Pitt as part of Pacifica Radio’s The New Nuclear Danger series. Pitt is a regular contributor to the Truthout blog and the author of House of Ill Repute: Reflec-tions on War, Lies, and America’s Ravaged Reputation and War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know. Dr. Caldicott and Pitt discuss the 2003 Iraq war as well as the right-wing think tank that provided the blueprint for the Bush Administration and its military agenda. The Project for the New American Century (now the Foreign Policy Institute) advocated U.S. military domination of the globe and continuous wars to achieve such power.

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This week, If You Love This Planet plays the last in a series saluting popular programs from 2008 and 2009, before we launch a whole new season of shows next week. Here is Dr. Caldicott’s July 6, 2009 interview with Dave Sweeney, one of the key voices in Australia educating people about the environmental and public health dangers of uranium mining. Sweeney works with the Australian Conservation Foundation, a 40-year-old organization that liases with the community, business and government to protect and sustain the Australian environment. In this interview with Dr Caldicott, Sweeney talks about the plans that are underway for a massive expansion of the uranium industry in Australia, and the push to build the first Australian nuclear power plants.

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If You Love This Planet continues to replay some of our most popular programs from 2008 and 2009, as well as offering some new episodes. In mid-March
2010, we will start a whole new season of programs.
Here is Dr. Caldicott’s September 7, 2009 interview with Carole Gallagher, author of American Ground Zero: the Secret Nuclear War (MIT Press, 1993). Gallagher’s book documents the effects of nuclear testing in Nevada on those living downwind, the test site workers themselves, and atomic veterans who were exposed to the bombs at very close range. The U.S. government program to expose soldiers to the bomb was an experiment to see what a man could withstand emotionally and physically on the “nuclear battlefield,” should a full-scale nuclear war occur, or during more limited nuclear exchanges. After living in Utah for seven years to work on the book, Gallagher returned to New York in 1990 because she was being harassed by locals, even receiving death threats. Gallagher is also a successful artist/photographer, and has exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally. In 1983, Gallagher began documenting the effects of nuclear testing in Nevada on Utahans, and on U.S. veterans made to walk over Ground Zero shortly after each bomb was exploded. Dr. Caldicott says she was “flabbergasted” to read the shocking personal stories and see the accompanying photos in American Ground Zero, and urges all listeners to buy the book.