If You Love This Planet, Dr. Helen Caldicott

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Tom Engelhardt

This week’s guest is Tom Engelhardt, creator of the TomDispatch.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. Note: This particular interview was recorded in summer 2012, before the November election. Topics discussed include the (more…)

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Holly Barker

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

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Brian D. Victoria

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 film Joyeux Noël [note: the website has a clickable English-language version].

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Jay Harman

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, (more…)

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Wayne Getz

This week, Dr. Caldicott speaks with Professor Wayne Getz, and ecologist and population biologist with the Getz Lab at University of California at Berkeley. Students and postdoctoral students in the lab work on a broad range of theoretical and applied questions in population biology and behavior with application to problems in epidemiology and conservation and wildlife biology, particularly in Africa. This conversation was recorded in June, but has many important points relevant to Hurricane Sandy, which caused unprecedented destruction in the U.S. this week. Dr. Caldicott asks Getz to discuss the recent article the Getz Lab produced, Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere.