If You Love This Planet, Dr. Helen Caldicott

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Miriam Pemberton

Before hearing from this week’s guest, Dr. Caldicott gives a short Fukushima update recorded mid-week, laying out the “terribly serious” facts that seven nuclear reactors at Fukushima have melted down. Next, she brings on this week’s guest, Miriam Pemberton, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, writing and speaking on demilitarization issues for its Foreign Policy In Focus project. She has recently published a report, Military vs. Climate Security: Mapping the Shift from the Bush Years to the Obama Era. Some of the topics they discuss include runaway U.S. military spending in the face of massive unemployment and economic collapse, U.S. wars in the Middle East, global warming, and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

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Susan Greenfield (Guardian/UK)

Dr. Caldicott provides a new eight-minute Fukushima update recorded April 20, describing how the multiple meltdowns in this unprecedented nuclear disaster are starting to sicken people in Tokyo. She then conducts an interview with Baroness Susan Greenfield, the former Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. She is a writer, broadcaster and Professor of Pharmacology at Lincoln College at Oxford University. Greenfield argues that we should be increasingly wary of how the changing technological environment is affecting the minds of the young. For background, read Social websites harm children’s brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist and Computers could be fuelling obesity crisis, says Baroness Susan Greenfield: Computer games, the internet and social networking sites may be promoting obesity by changing the way the brain works.

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Subhankar Banerjee

Once again, before interviewing this week’s guest,
Dr. Caldicott provides another update on the perilous situation at Fukushima, Japan, where four reactors are compromised in an accident that will likely surpass the effects of Chernobyl. Next, Dr. Caldicott welcomes Subhankar Banerjee, an Indian-born American photographer, writer and activist. He is the founder of ClimateStoryTellers.org. 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. See his photographs and learn more about his activism at subhankarbanerjee.org. In this interview with Dr. Caldicott, Banerjee discusses the effects of global warming on the Arctic region, his efforts to protect wildlife in the region, his photography, the corporate greed for oil, gas and coal that threatens the largest wildlife habitat in the world, and how to fight the economic and political forces ravaging the planet. In his writing, among many other topics, Banerjee has discussed the Arctic permafrost and the potential displacement of Alaskan communities due to the effects of global warming. Read four 2011 articles by Banerjee, Extreme Weather Report From Home: The Thong Will Drop, Earth Activism: What We Don’t Want, From Toilet to Planet: A Brief Journey of Survival and Tim DeChristopher Is Convicted: We’re Blowing This Moment, Too.

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Lexi Shultz (LCVoter)

Before interviewing this week’s guest, Dr. Caldicott provides a short update on the situation at the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant, explaining how the accident is far more dangerous than news media are reporting. She elucidates what will happen if there is an explosion at the facility. Read Dr. Caldicott’s April 11 article in The Guardian, How nuclear apologists mislead the world over radiation - George Monbiot and others at best misinform and at worst distort evidence of the dangers of atomic energy. Also see the April 11 news article Japan Raises Severity of Nuclear Crisis to Chernobyl Level. After the update, today’s program features a discussion with Lexi Shultz, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ (UCS) director of advocacy for the Climate and Energy Program. Shultz provides direction for US federal climate and energy policy work. Her efforts are focused on advocating for practical, science-based solutions to climate change, while helping translate climate science information to coalition partners, decision makers and the general public. For background, read the January 24 Union of Concerned Scientists’ press release, GOP Efforts to Defund Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change Is Foolhardy, the February 21 article House Republicans Cut Funding to Nobel Prize-Winning UN Climate Science Body, and the March 4 article Republicans Attack Obama’s Environmental Protection From All Sides. Also see the January 9 article Canadian Study Sees Global Warming for Centuries.

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Arnie Gundersen

In this special program about the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant, we present two interviews recorded last week followed by a speech about nuclear radiation given by Dr. Caldicott in 2009. In the first 20-minute segment, If You Love This Planet’s Australian producer Jasmin Williams chats with Arnold Gundersen, energy advisor with Fairewinds Associates Inc., and former nuclear engineer. Gundersen explains the events that have crippled the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan following the March 11th, 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Helen Caldicott, M.D. (William Lauer, AP)

In the next 20-minute segment, Williams interviews our host, Dr. Helen Caldicott, about the alarming increase in radiation from the Fukushima reactor. Dr. Caldicott lays out the health consequences now facing the people of Japan and the rest of the northern hemisphere. Read Dr. Caldicott’s April 11 article in The Guardian, How nuclear apologists mislead the world over radiation - George Monbiot and others at best misinform and at worst distort evidence of the dangers of atomic energy. In the last 20 minutes, we hear part of a presentation Dr. Caldicott gave in Berkeley in June 2009 about the dangers of nuclear power and the nuclear fuel cycle, including but not limited to radioactive isotopes. This segment is courtesy of TUC Radio, which recorded the lecture (the complete speech can be ordered on their Web site). As Ms. Williams says in her introduction, the major media in their coverage of the Japanese nuclear accident are not offering much information about the health effects of nuclear energy. For more information, read Dr. Caldicott’s books Nuclear Power is Not the Answer and Nuclear Madness: What You Can Do. And view the material on the Web site of The Helen Caldicott Foundation for a Nuclear-Free Planet.