If You Love This Planet, Dr. Helen Caldicott

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Prof. Frances Fox Piven

In this episode, Dr. Caldicott interviews Frances Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the Graduate School, City University of New York. Professor Piven is also the president of the American Sociological Association and author of numerous publications, most recently Keeping Down the Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters (with Lorraine Minnite and Margaret Groarke, published by the New Press in 2009. Prof. Piven talks with Dr. Caldicott about her lifetime preoccupation with the uses of social science to promote democratic reform. Read the January 23 article Glenn Beck’s Attacks on Frances Fox Piven Trigger Death Threats and the February 8 article The Real Threat of Glenn Beck’s Fantasies: It’s harm not to myself, but to American democracy that I fear from the Fox News host’s paranoid theories of social collapse.

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Dr. Helen Caldicott

This week, we hear Dr. Caldicott’s November 2010 address to residents from the town of Port Hope, Canada. Much of Port Hope was built using uranium tailings from the nearby uranium refinery, posing potentially serious health risks for the town’s population. Dr. Caldicott outlines the medical consequences that residents may be facing. Read two Toronto Star articles about Dr. Caldicott’s activism around Port Hope: November 16, 2010: Sue government over toxic town, activist tells Port Hope and February 1, 2011: Activist urges Ottawa to examine Port Hope residents for radioactivity. Also read ‘Barred’ from Port Hope: An interview with Dr. Helen Caldicott.

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Drew Hutton

On this program, Dr. Caldicott interviews Drew Hutton, an environmental campaigner in his home state of Queensland, Australia. Hutton founded the Greens party in Queensland and was a co-founder of the Australian Greens in 1992. He is an organizer of the Lock the Gate campaign, an alliance of environmentalists and rural landowners opposing the environmental destruction by coal and coal seam gas mining in Queensland. He is also the author, with his wife Libby Connors, of A History of the Australian Environment Movement published by Cambridge University Press in 1999. Watch a 60 Minutes Australia segment on coal seam gas mining (2010, 13 minutes) . This episode also features an excerpt from Dr. Caldicott’s speech in Port Hope, Canada in late 2010. Read two Toronto Star articles about Dr. Caldicott’s activism around Pt. Hope: February 1, 2011: Activist urges Ottawa to examine Port Hope residents for radioactivity and November 16, 2010: Sue government over toxic town, activist tells Port Hope.

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Dr. Michel Chossudovsky

Dr. Michel Chossudovsky is Dr. Caldicott’s guest this week. Dr. Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (Emeritus) at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal, Quebec. He has been a visiting professor at colleges in Latin America, Western Europe, and Southeast Asia. Dr. Chossudovsky has also served as economic adviser to governments in developing countries, and consulted for international organizations including the United Nations Development Program, the African Development Bank, the United Nations African Institute for Economic Development, the United Nations Population Fund, the International Labor Organization, and the World Health Organization. From October 12 to 15, 2010, Dr. Chossudovsky had several extensive and productive meetings with Fidel Castro, discussing nuclear war. He talks about those meetings and other global issues in this episode of If You Love This Planet. Watch a four-minute segment on YouTube of Castro reading his statement against nuclear war, from the conversations with Dr. Chossudovsky (in Spanish, with subtitle translation).