Hot Minds in Motion

SUMMARY: The coming unstable tropics, seen through an ancient world. From the UK, Dr. Jessica Whiteside. Former NASA scientist James Hansen says 2 degrees warming is unsafe and "crazy" to set that as a goal. Huge Canadian rainforest on cusp of mega-deal to save it. Activist Valerie Langer. Radio Ecoshock 150701.

I begin with the voice of James Hansen, one of the world's most respected climate scientists. He spoke recently on Radio National in Australia. I have more on this mega-warning of the developing climate emergency later in this blog entry.

We'll also investigate a Canadian deal to preserve ancient old-growth forests in an area the size of Ireland. Is The Great Bear Rainforest agreement a model for the rest of the world? Our guest is long-time campaigner Valerie Langer from Vancouver, Canada.

But first, let's bust the myth that the tropics won't change much as the climate rearranges. Businessmen and government leaders keep rattling on about our future with 1000 parts per million or more of carbon dioxide. New science explains that even big dinosaurs couldn't live in that kind of world, ravaged by swings of climate so huge that plant life was unstable and unpredictable in the tropics.

Welcome to Radio Ecoshock. I'm Alex Smith.

Download or listen to this program in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

Or listen right now on Soundcloud!



BREAKING NEWS: July 1st: MASSIVE FIRES ACROSS WESTERN NORTH AMERICA, from California to Alaska, and all Canadian western provinces.

The Western half of North America is breaking into massive fires. In Alaska, over a million acres have been burned in just the month of June. The real fire season is yet to start.

Fires in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan are so large, satellite pictures show smoke blowing all the way down through the central United States, as far south as Missouri. Air quality is hazardous in some cities in Saskatchewan and nearby Manitoba. There are, at last count, over 200 large wildfires burning in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, including some near Fort McMurray, home to the infamous Tar Sands.

The coastal Province of British Columbia has major wildfire problems, already burning ten times what was consumed by fire all of last year - again with the hot summer still to go.

Major wildfires are also burning in Washington State and Oregon.

Nobody is even reporting on the monster fires in the Canadian Arctic. Some parts of Siberia were up to 6 degrees C hotter than normal this Spring. Deadly fires are already common there. At what point do we acknowledge that great parts of the Northern Hemisphere will burn, releasing all that carbon, every year as climate change develops?

Stay tuned next week for a replay of our in-depth program on fire risk: "The Age of Super Fires".

ECOSHOCK NEWS

My climate action song "Time of Trials" has been selected this week by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in their on-going series of climate inspiration music leading up to the 2015 Paris climate talks in December.

You can find their write up in Spanish here. I'll be adding the English version shortly.

You can listen to "Time of Trials" right now on Soundcloud here.

COMING TROUBLE IN THE TROPICS: JESSICA WHITESIDE

Businessmen and gloomy scientists have predicted our fossil-powered lives mean carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will reach 1,000 parts per million or more. What would such a world look like? We can get a glimpse by going way back, hundreds of millions of years, to a troubled hothouse world.

Our tour guide will be Dr. Jessica Whiteside, a lecturer in Ocean and Earth Science at the University of Southampton in the UK. She's the lead author of a new study that's been getting a lot of press. The title is "Extreme ecosystem instability supressed tropical dinosaur dominance for 30 million years." - as published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One of the strange things about "land" is that it actually floats around on the Earth's hot core. A group of scientists travelled to New Mexico, where they found rocks that were much earlier in the tropics. There was no North America, or Europe - just one big continent on the earth, known as "Pangea".

Scientists investigating the history of dinosaurs were always puzzled when no bones of the giant herbivores (picture a Brontesauraus) were found in rocks formerly in the tropics. What kept them out for around 30 million years?

Now, through a series of methods cross-checking one another, this new paper suggests the climate of the tropics was far too unstable to grow the vegetation necessary to support very big herbivore dinosaurs. Over millions of years, the tropical climate swung violently from huge droughts to very wet periods. The vegetation would build up during wet times, and then burn with very hot wild fires during dry times. The scientists found carbon deposits from fires that burned at around 600 degrees - enough to sterilize the soil. Nothing grew back afterwards for a long time. I noticed with special interest the very hot fires that burned in that ancient tropical world. A Canadian fire expert on Radio Ecoshock told us about fires current fires so hot they sterilize the soil. More on that next week.

At that time the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were 4 to 6 times modern levels, running from 1200 to 1600 parts per million CO2. Our guest Jessica Whiteside notes that is the expected level, on our current course, in the next one or two hundred years.

This extreme instability was stronger in the interior of the continent of Pangea, away from oceans that might modify conditions. That's very much like what is expected in the interior of North and South America, as well as the interior of Russia and China.

I asked Jessica if humans could have survived in the conditions of these ancient tropics. She says that is doubtful, because the average temperature was ten degrees C higher than today.

We also discuss the lag time between higher CO2, and large climate changes. More conservative scientific thinking attributes "only" a 1 degree C rise for every doubling of CO2. But this is contradicted by studies of ancient climates (paleo-climatology) which saw 3 or even 5 degrees C of average temperature rise with each doubling of CO2.

The scientists doing this study were well aware that the high carbon past they looked at might serve as an analog, almost a prediction, of what we will experience with a lot more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Dr. Jessica Whiteside in CD Quality of Lo-Fi

JAMES HANSEN: 2 DEGREES IS NOT A GOAL - IT'S "CRAZY"

Let's get to that disturbing new interview with James Hansen. He's the former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He's also the scientist who warned the U.S. Congress about the dangers of climate change in 1988. If only we'd listened then.

On Tuesday May 5th, 2015, Hansen was interviewed for the Australian breakfast show on ABC Radio National. Here's what happened.

ABC RADIO NATION INTERVIEW WITH HANSEN

Here is the key passage:

HANSEN: "I refused to sign the Vatican Declaration which had the 2 degree limit and the reason I do not sign that is that the 2 degrees is actually a prescription for disaster. That’s actually well understood by the scientific community.

We know that the prior interglacial period about 120,000 years ago – it’s called the Eemian in Europe –but it was less than 2 degrees C warmer than pre-industrial conditions and sea level was a least 6 to 8 metres higher, so it’s crazy to think that 2 degrees Celsius is safe limit.

The only thing you can argue is that, well, it might take a while for the sea level to rise that much, but we know that it would happen because once the fossil fuels are burned to reach that level they are not taken out of the systems for millennia, and it does not require millennia for the ice sheets to disintegrate.

RN: If you say it would be crazy to shoot for two degrees but that is exactly what we are going to be shooting for in Paris at the global climate talks

HANSEN: That number (2 degrees) was chosen because it was convenient and thought that well that will give us a few decades so we can set targets for the middle of the century.

Actually what the science tells us is we have an emergency, this is actually a global crisis and the science for that is crystal clear. It’s not obvious to the public because the climate system responds slowly, the ocean is 4 kilometres deep, these ice sheets are 3 kilometres thick. They only respond over time scales of decades to centuries, but once the processes are started it’s going to be extremely difficult if not impossible to stop them.

So what the science actually tells us is that we should reduce emissions as fast as practical, bearing in mind the economic consequences, but in fact the actions that are necessary are not economically harmful. You just have to make the prices of fossil fuels honest."

FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE.

Note that James Hansen, just in the last few years, believes we need more nuclear power to stop climate change. The Australian pediatrician and activist Helen Caldicott pretty well demolished that argument in her book "Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer to Global Warming or Anything Else." If Helen missed anything, it was shouted out to the world by the triple melt-down of three reactors at Fukushima Japan in 2011. If you want to bet on nuclear power, you are gambling with terrible stakes for the present and the future, in my opinion.

That said, James Hansen is one of the world's greatest heroes of the science of climate change. Now he's saying that on our present course, within 40 or 50 years, the seas will rise several meters, demolishing the capacity of many of the world's great cities along the ocean. I hope New York, London, Shanghai and all the rest are listening. Hansen also says it is not too late, even yet, to prevent that kind of disastrous outcome.

THE GREAT BEAR RAINFOREST: SEALING THE DEAL

There are not many truly wild places left in this world. Environmental activists have been fighting to save one of them for 18 years. It's known globally as The Great Bear Rainforest.

Situated on the central and northern west coast of Canada, this rainforest is home to giant trees, some thousands of years old. In countless coastal inlets, a rich mix of plants and animals thrive, including the iconic white bear, the Kermode or spirit bear.

Supposed enemies met to find a solution. Dedicated green activists including Greenpeace, Forest Ethics and the Sierra Club met in marathon negotiations with executives of giant forest companies, First nations leaders and stakeholders preserve this great legacy. Eventually the government of British Columbia made a promise. Now, almost a generation later, that government is within 60 days of sealing the deal - a model of multi-party efforts to conserve nature that has inspired hope, around the world.

To help us understand what's at stake, we have reached one of the long-term campaigners to save the Great Bear Rainforest, Valerie Langer. She's the Director of BC Forest Campaigns, for ForestEthics Solutions, and works for the convervation and markets group called "Canopy" as well.

Valerie Langer

Here's the thing: the Great Bear Rainforest is an area the size of Ireland - much of it untouched by modern civilization. Canadian and American-owned logging companies wanted to log the whole thing. They had to be stopped.

Why would big forest companies give up some of the most valuable timber in the world, just to accommodate a few environmentalists? Because of activism from all three groups making this rainforest wood untouchable in the market place. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts were cancelled. Companies like Home Depot swore they would never buy the wood from the Great Bear. Other companies pulled out of British Columbia altogether.

Feeling the heat, the forest company executives agreed to something they had never considered before: meeting with the environmentalists to make a deal. Some major foundations kicked in money to keep the negotiations going.

One of the major problems was to keep the Great Bear without leaving First Nations (aboriginal) communities in poverty, without even logging jobs. Private foundations and donors raised $60 million dollars, matched by $30 million each from the Federal and Provincial governments, to help the First Nations communities create their own alternative economy. Eco-tourism was just a part of that big picture.

All this had never been done before. It took 18 years to get it this far: the next 60 days are the final period for public comment, before the Great Bear deal is made into law.

The fight isn't completely won yet. There is a rogue company logging in the Great Bear at a furious rate, trying to get as much as possible before the government gives final approval. It's called Timber West. The Province of British Columbia needs to rein them in, but the province has laid off most of it's enforcement staff. Public pressure on Timber West is still needed.

Still, a deal involving all parties, settled peacefully with dialog, stands as a model for other endangered forests all over the world. Valerie Langer is a powerful speaker and power-house campaigner, so give this interview a listen.

Download or listen to this interview with Valerie Langer in CD Quality of Lo-Fi

STUNNING COURT VICTORY IN THE NETHERLANDS

I can't wrap up this show, and this season, without a few words about a stunning court victory in the Netherlands. Regular listener and green radio journalist Mark Beekhuis brought this to my attention. Mark writes, quote:

"This week a climate campaign group won a case against The Netherlands. A judge ordered the government to reduce carbon emissions by 20% relative to 1990 - by the year 2020. This is a first in the world. The main legal argument is that the State should protect all of its citizens - also the ones not yet born."

Imagine, a government must protect future citizens, our grandchildren and descendants! In their ruling, the judges said:

"The state should not hide behind the argument that the solution to the global climate problem does not depend solely on Dutch efforts,"..."Any reduction of emissions contributes to the prevention of dangerous climate change and as a developed country the Netherlands should take the lead in this."

The current Dutch government is a coalition, where Beekhuis tells us, one party appears to accept this ruling, while another hopes to overturn it.

The Dutch environmental group "Urgenda" has put all it's legal documents on the Internet. They have been translated into English as well. The group wants other countries to follow their lead in the courts. Activists in Belgium have already done it, and groups in Norway are working on it. This could be a world-wide movment to force governments to do their job protecting the future for all to come.

Here is a link to a story on American National Public Radio about this case, so you can listen in to that. The Guardian write up is here.

COMING UP THIS SUMMER

This program concludes the first half of my 2015 season. I'm hard at work collecting some of the most powerful interviews for a "best of Radio Ecoshock" series. Since we have not resolved or really responded to the climate threat, the science and the activism going back several years is still very valid today. I hope you'll keep listening through the summer, as we go deep into the issues we all face, with a wide variety of voices.

At the end of the summer, in the Northern Hemisphere, I'll return with a whole new energy, and a whole new series of programs.

Of course that's assuming I can keep quiet even for a little while. Right now it's 107 degrees, about 42 degrees Celsius, in any shade you can find, outside my studio walls. That's in Canada, with summer barely started. Scratch, that, its gone up to 111 degrees F in the shade, 44 degrees C!!! This is insane!

We may have to begin with replays of our powerful interviews with top fire experts. There's lots more to come on Radio Ecoshock, so please say tuned.

I'm also working on more new climate music to help spark the Paris climate talks. Watch the Radio Ecoshock page on Soundcloud for that.

I'm Alex Smith. Thank you for listening, and thank you for caring about your world.

Carry On Through the Crash

Economy and energy blogger Nicole Foss from The Automatic Earth; J.B. MacKinnon co-author of the 100-Mile diet: what nature was, is now, and will be. South Dakota youth organizer Jenna Grey Eagle looks for a Power Shift.

Are you checking Google News or the stock market to see if the economy has crashed yet? Even the mainstream talking heads and investment managers say it's hasn't felt this ominous since the Titanic.

Download/listen to this week's Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

FUKUSHIMA FUNNIES #1

But first... It's time for the Fukushima Funnies!

It's a barrel of laughs at Fukushima Japan, the site of the world's first triple nuclear melt-down. The lost reactor cores were already flooded with runaway groundwater. Now the whole place is drowning as a series of tropical typhoons wash over Japan. According to the Japanese weather Fukushima weather station, they got 6.9 inches of rain in September, with lots more developing in October.

After the leak of 400 tons of highly radioactive water in August, on Tuesday October 1st the operator TEPCO admitted four tons of contaminated rainwater spilled out during a transfer between holding tanks.

The same day, a Japanese fast food company Yoshinoya Holdings announced they would grow vegetables only 60 miles from the leaky nuclear plant, smack-dab in the middle of countryside doused with Cesium and Strontium from the exploding reactor buildings and fuel pool fires. That land will be radioactive for hundreds of years. Mmm, tasty food, and it's already hot!

The very next day, Wednesday, more water spilled out of make-shift storage tanks with rad readings up to 200,000 becquerels per liter. That's about 6700 times higher than the legal limit, which is 30 becquerels. The underpaid workers, likely hired because they owed money to Japanese mobsters - true story! - they didn't notice the latest leak for 12 hours because, quote... "it was raining!"

No worries. With highly radioactive water pouring into our Pacific Ocean, TEPCO had a high-tech solution: they dumped some sand bags into the drain.

The contaminated water tanks are already 98% full. It's typhoon season. Each typhoon adds another 1400 tonnes more water.

No worries. Bloomberg news quotes Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga at a press conference, saying of Fukushima, "Overall, we believe things are under control".

NICOLE FOSS: ECONOMY WILL CRASH SOONER THAN THE CLIMATE

You've seen the numbers. Over 48 million Americans on food stamps. One in three Italians lives with their parents. Austerity in the UK fails to halt growing debt. Canadians run up record debt. Hidden behind government figures, unemployment is going up in many developed countries.

How long can our economic system last? That's the big question - and Nicole M. Foss has been travelling in Europe, North America, and Australia to warn us. She was previously editor at the Oil Drum Canada, and a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. Nicole holds degrees in biology and law, and she blogs as "Stoneleigh" at one of the world's top financial blogs, "The Automatic Earth".

Listen to/download this Radio Ecoshock interview with Nicole Foss (25 minutes) in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

We talk about Nicole's recent tour of Australia and New Zealand. She's spent a few months there giving talks over the past couple of years. Then we do a quick peek at the economy of the Netherlands (in trouble), the UK (drowining in debt) and Canada (drowning in debt and in a surreal real estate bubble).

But Foss recently wrote up the experience of Detroit. She says that's the "poster-boy" for a lot of coming municipal bankruptcies, as Merideth Whitney famously predicted. Watch that on this 2010 video from CBC News.

Whitney may have been early in her call, but not wrong, says Foss. Nicole has written this detailed case study of Detroit as a model of the future. Don't miss it.

Even though climate change is arriving earlier than we thought, and dragging billions of dollars in losses out of the productive economy - Nicole Foss is certain an economic crash will come much sooner. That's the big one to watch, she says. Prepare now.

J.B. MACKINNON - NATURE AS IT WAS, IS, AND WILL BE

On November 25th, 2010 at the Museum of Vancouver, I recorded this public presentation by Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon. It was five years after their book that became a social movement, "The 100-Mile Diet".

My transcript notes for this talk are here.

I wondered what independent journalist and author J.B. MacKinnon was up to in 2013. Wonder no more. Through the magic of the mail slot came a symbol of the ancient world of knowledge, a paper-based book called "The Once and Future World".

Listen to/download this Radio Ecoshock interview with J.B. MacKinnon in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Here is a good book review and sneak preview of the new book at Harper's Magazine.

One of the most interesting aspects of this fabulously well-written book: MacKinnon drills down into the ways humans deny what we have done. He takes the examples of animals hunted to extinction in the past couple of centuries. We've denied creatures like the Dodo bird ever existed. Or explain to ourselves the once plentiful Sea Auks on the East Coast were simply "too stupid to survive". There are all kinds of memory tricks we play - and all of them could apply just as well to denial of our role in climate change.

We get an update on the way the 100-Mile Diet has changed the way the world operates. MacKinnon is happy this shows change is possible, but he also worries some people have made it into a kind of green snobbery, a way of become a "status consumer".

Read James MacKinnon's blog at jbmackinnon.com.

JENNA GREY EAGLE - POWERSHIFT

We often hear the original inhabitants of the Americas were more in tune with nature. Considering they flourished and did not damage the natural world, I think it's true.

So I am especially pleased to reach Jenna Grey Eagle. She grew up near the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, as a member of the Ogala Lakota people. Jenna has been working with youth, and is planning a delegation to the Power Shift conference in Pittsburg, starting October 18th.

Listen to/download this Radio Ecoshock interview with Jenna Grey Eagle (10 minutes)

We really need younger people to step up now, even though they didn't start the fire of climate change. We talk about what young Lakota people saying and doing about this issue.

Jenna writes passionately about the burdens carried by so many First Nations people. It is hard to get past the stereotypes, even among other climate activists.

We also discuss the blight of "man camps" - the male-only camps springing up all around the oil and gas industry in the United States and Canada. Separated from their families, working crazy hours for big money, these camps can be a real threat for residents nearby, who are often aboriginal people.

These days, Jenna is working for the Energy Action Coalition. Check out their web site for sure.

To get a different perspective on this "energy boom" - Jenna Grey Eagle recommends these sites:

Honor the Earth (featuring the work of long-time aboriginal activist Winona LaDuke)

...and Moccasins on the Ground: Activist Training for Sacred Water/Mother Earth Protectors.

COMING UP ON RADIO ECOSHOCK

Next week on Radio Ecoshock we'll get back to the story of the millenia, human-induced climate change. I've got a global emerging threats analyst Robert Marston Fanney lined up. Plus guest scientist Alex Rogers on the State of the Ocean 2013.

Thank you for all your tips - talk to me. The email address is radio @ ecoshock.org - or use the contact form on our web site, ecoshock.org I like to hear what is happening in your area, and your country.

My special thanks for those who contribute regularly, through our monthly membership. Join the program at our web site, and keep it call coming.

From the boundary, I'm Alex Smith, for Radio Ecoshock.

Tough Transition

From "The Farm" in Summertown, Tennessee, deep green thinker and activist Albert Bates on Tough Transition. Then one of the pioneers of localization and sustainable community, Dr. Mark Roseland. Alex reports on new ocean/climate movie to save... us. Rob Stewart's film "Revolution". Radio Ecoshock 121003.

Download 1 hour program in CD Quality (56 MB)

or faster download/lower quality Lo-Fi (14MB)

Radio Stations: Ecoshock 121003 Part 1 29 min and Part 2 29 min

This week we're still talking about social change to save the environment and ourselves. From "The Farm" in Summertown, Tennessee, deep green thinker and activist Albert Bates on Tough Transition - how to make a local community work - even if people can't agree on why it must.

Then we're going to one of the fathers of movements like Transition and localization, Dr. Mark Roseland in his 1992 book "Toward Sustainable Communities" became a handbook for local and regional politicians, non-profits, and citizen groups. Now it's out in a Fourth Edition, with a goal of providing, quote "Solutions for Citizens and Their Governments."

We'll get a call for Revolution from the maker of the movie Sharkwater. Rob Stewart says the species we need to save now is us. I've just seen his new film "Revolution". It's the ultimate challenge, literally our do or die time to save ocean life, and all life, from mass extinction. Our coverage of the dying oceans continues.

All coming your way this week, on Radio Ecoshock. I'm Alex Smith.

ALBERT BATES - TOUGH TRANSITION

Just like organisms, there are simple people. Others, like Albert Bates, are complex. He's a former attorney, a designer, bio char expert, author, speaker, and an international and local organizer. Albert has lived at the famous intentional community called "The Farm" in Summertown, Tennessee since 1972. His book "Climate in Crisis" was published back in 1990, with more following, like "The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook" in 2006, and "The Biochar Solution" in 2010.

In last week's program, we heard from successful Transition Towns in New England. That's easy enough with progressive voters. Albert, can it be done in a conservative "Red State" like Tennessee?

I've called up Albert to ask him about forming a Transition community in the rural Republican South.

When "The Farm" began in 1971 - it was part of the hippie movement. Bates tells us when the collection of school buses arrived from Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, in rural Tennessee - to local residents it seemed like Martians landing. Over the course of a generation, there has been a general acceptance and interaction between The Farm and its surroundings.

You can learn more about "The Farm" in Albert's book "Voices from The Farm" (1998) co-authored with Rupert Fike.

TRANSITION IN A RED STATE

One sign of that was when Hohenwald Tennessee became the 25th Transition Town in America. That was accepted by all the local politicians, County Commissioners and so on - even though, as Bates tells us, practically none of the locals accepted the human-induced climate change or Peak Oil.

So how did they do it? The Farm organized a regular film and speaker night. Sure they showed "An Inconvenient Truth", but one of their most successful nights (garnering 130 people from a population of 4,000) was about "Financial Permaculture". In a very hard economy, people wanted to know how to improve their financial situation, and learned about permaculture almost as a side subject.

In fact Hohenwald had many Swiss settlers from the late 1800's. The Transition organizers were able to draw on a common community value of "frugality". It's frugal not to waste things, and so recycling and other ways to avoid waste are acceptable. It's a fantastic lesson: find out what your community values, and help deliver that as a road to transition.

In a bit of humor, one of their speakers was David Bloom, who explains how to make your own alcohol for energy and other uses. That was quite popular in rural Tennessee, where moon-shining is traditional. But the Transition group also brought in the Republican speaker Catherine Austin Fitts, who is quite aware of things like the energy decline.

Albert wrote an excellent book on the subject "The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook".

In Lewis County Tennessee the Transition group set up a community kitchen and a business incubator. Bates suggests it's better to fund local small business with funds raised in the area, instead of depending on big banks headquartered far away. They initiated their first local currency, namely "Chamber Bucks" which could be spent at any business that was a member of the Chamber of Commerce.

Now with Peak Oil and a rotten economy, we're seeing a surge of very different folks, some with guns and deep basements. Is "the great change” going to work with such different actors? Even the publishers of Mother Earth News have noticed an increase of survivalists and preppers in their readers. They want to grow their own food and make things themselves, in preparation for collapse.

ECOVILLAGES VERSUS TRANSITION TOWNS

I ask Albert Bates about the relationship between the Eco village Network, where he has been a leader, and Transition Towns.

First, let's look at what Wiki says about Albert and the Eco village Network:

"Bates has played a major role in the Eco village movement as one of the organizers of the Global Eco village Network (GEN), and served as GEN's chairman of the board (from 2002 to 2003) and president (from 2003 to 2004). He was also the principal organizer of the Eco village Network of the Americas and served as its president (from 1996 to 2003). In 1994 he founded the Eco village Training Center, a "whole systems immersion experience of Eco village living."[1] He has taught courses in sustainable design, natural building, permaculture and technologies of the future to students from more than 50 nations."

Bates is one of the teachers in Eco village training at The Farm, as well as teaching at Gaia University.

Essentially Bates suggests the Eco villages are like living laboratories. People experiment with ways to live together, sharing skills, learning how to produce locally. Some of the valuable lessons from those social experiments are applied more broadly in Transition Towns.

THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE

Albert is one of the first to point out there are no islands of security, even in an intentional community. If the rest of the society is falling apart, or even suddenly starving, they will come to take what you've got. It's a long-time point of discussion, which Bates labels the "Zombie Apocalypse" problem.

When I lived in a community of back-to-the-landers in the early 1980's, we often talked about what to do with starving city refugees. One local intentional community - a group of Russian Catholic nuns, decided they would put away lots of extra food and clothing, to welcome people who arrived.

For what it's worth, the historic record in Soviet Russia in the early 1930's, when the cities were starving, didn't work out that way at all. Instead, the army sent out trucks to take away all the grain, including the seed stock for the following year, plus any livestock and food they could find, hauling it back to the cities. The farmers and rural communities starved to death by the millions. It's in the Robert Conquest book "The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine" published in 1986.

Anyway, unless there is a massive solar flare knocking out the grid, I don't expect Western civilization to collapse that quickly. It's far more likely our over-extended system will decline more slowly.

THE FARM AND CLIMATE CHANGE

As Bates knows all too well, the American South is experiencing record numbers of super-hot days, and recurring droughts. I ask what is the The Farm doing to prepare for a changed climate?

Albert describes the various ways they are collecting water, and more importantly, preparing their soil to hold more water and use it intelligently. This includes experiments with the Keyline system of agriculture, and using bovines to enrich both soil and water following the ideas of Allan Savory. It's also called "Mob Grazing". To learn more, listen to my 24 minute interview with Allan Savory in 2011 here.

The Farm is expecting 50 or more days where the temperature climbs above 100 degrees each summer - the range where plants stop growing and just go into a defensive dormancy. In the future, the Farm may see 5 or 6 months without rain. They are trying to get ready for all that, for the plants, the animals, and themselves.

Bates does travel around. He speaks at a lot of green fairs, to conferences, and international gatherings. Albert learned about global warming when he was researching deep injection of chemicals into the ground, in his former incarnation as an attorney. He spoke to his young Senator for Tennessee, one Al Gore, and then published his book "Climate in Crisis" in 1990, making Bates another of the pioneers of climate change.

To offset some of the carbon produced in traveling, way back in 1985 he established The Albert Bates Forest.

GETTING MORE BATES

In general, Albert thinks the Transition Town movement in America has been held back by media fog and mistaken ideas of making everything "American" instead of learning from other parts of the world. There are many more Transition Towns and Eco Villages in Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world than in the U.S. It appears Sri Lanka alone has more Eco villages than the U.S.A.

Follow Albert Bates on Twitter @peaksurfer and his blog is peaksurfer@blogspot.ca.

You can find a lot more Albert Bates links, including some of his fascinating past writing and interviews, here.

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TOWARD SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES - DR. MARK ROSELAND

We've been talking about Transition, from Europe through New England to the American Deep South. There is more to come, we can't stop talking about what to do, except to get busy doing it.

This wave has been building since at least 1992. As we'll hear, the few expert pioneers have become a big network of community builders, around the world. I'm going to challenge you to tune in, with a slightly different language, with new ears, to one of the pioneers of localization and sustainable community, Mark Roseland.

It's a messy world. We are bombarded by negative stories. Big governments fail to make our lives better, or save us from threats like climate change.

Many of our Radio Ecoshock guests say only local governments are worth your political attention. That's why you need to hear Mark Roseland. He's been advising local governments how to build on a human scale, for cities that can keep going through many challenges.

Dr. Mark Roseland is Director of the Simon Fraser University Centre for Sustainable Community Development, and he is a Professor in the Resource and Environmental Management Program.

Roseland came to world attention back in 1992 with the release of his best-selling book, "Toward Sustainable Communities: Resources for Citizens and Their Governments." That book is being released in a Fourth Edition by New Society Publishers in September 2012.

Mark Roseland on You tube

RIO +20 ROSELAND PROJECTS

IS ROSELAND PART OF A U.N. PLOT FOR WORLD DOMINATION?

We talk for a minute about the strange resistance to becoming more sustainable. Unbelievably, in rural America, and even a few people in the Occupy movement in the United States, are afraid any move toward sustainability is just part of a United Nations plot to take over the world. They think everything is part of "Agenda 21" which came out of the first Rio Conference in 1992.

I ask Dr. Roseland point blank: "Are you part of a plot to take over the world?"

Then we both laugh. It's such a weird distortion. The United Nations has hardly managed to do anything, except a lot of good charitable work in the poorest countries. There is no U.N. army ready to conquer the world. In fact, in some U.N. sanctioned military actions, it's the U.S. Armed Forces in command.

That doesn't stop fringe talk show hosts like Alex Jones from drumming it into weak minds that the U.N. is out to take their liberties and the environmentalists and "sustainability" is out to take away their freedom.

One of the alleged villains is something called the ICLEI - the International Council For Local Environmental Initiatives. That is a vehicle where local governments can talk to one another to find out what works. Perfect for localization, and yet some Americans who allegedly want independence have convinced their governments to stop paying for membership!

I think some paranoid Americans are missing a chance at their best allies. They attack Transition Towns as a communist plot. But the same people call for local action, participation in local governments, and prepping for disasters.

Roseland knows where this attack on sustainable communities is coming from: the Tea Party movement (partly funded by the notorious fossil fuel billionaires the Koch brothers) and the Republican Party itself. Back in January 2012 the Republican Party targeted ICLEI as villains to be defunded and fought off if they are elected. It's a political ruse, working against the best interests of America and Transition.

SUSTAINABILITY IS NO LONGER A PIONEER MOVEMENT

When Roseland published his book "Toward Sustainable Communities" back in 1992, it quickly became THE handbook for local governments, NGO's and interested citizens. There were only a few academics and institutes working on sustainability.

Now in unstable economic times, topped up with rampant energy costs and climate disruption, there are literally thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of non-profits, local governments, academics, college-level courses, and resources of all kinds on making sustainable communities.

Roseland realized the movement was so big, and growing so fast, no resource book could hope to keep up. That is partly why at the Rio+ 20 Conference he announced PANDO. That's a kind of combined database and network for the sustainable community movement. Find it here.

PANDO is named after a giant community of aspen trees in Colorado that are all linked as one big organism by their joint root systems. It may be the largest single organism on land, and it's quite resilient.

UNIVERcity

As a long-time Professor at Simon Fraser University, in Burnaby Canada (part of Greater Vancouver) - Mark Roseland has been a guiding light in the redevelopment of the mountaintop where that university is situated. Amid some controversy, the University decided the system of staff and students living elsewhere, requiring giant parking lots, needed to be converted to a livable and sustainable community.

Now there are residences, a school, and other services right around the University, called "Univercity". Mark tells us about one day-care center which is not just net zero, but actually contributes more to the environment than it takes. Is that more expensive? No, it cost less than a conventional building.

There is a lot more to this interview. It's not in the usual activist language you hear on Radio Ecoshock, but it cuts exactly to what we are all really trying to accomplish in the real world: creating sustainable communities.

Look for Mark's new Fourth Edition of his classic "Toward Sustainable Communities: Solutions for Citizens and Their Governments." from New Society publishers.

REVOLUTION - THE FILM

During this show I play brief clips from Neil Young's song "Rumblin'" that's from his 2010 album "Le Noise", and earlier clips from Brian Eno's instrumental "The Big Ship", in the album "Green World".

There is a rumbling'. That kind of low noise of something big coming, but we can't quite tell what. The mass media news is one big distraction. As the headlines scroll by, I have this creepy feeling there are big stories not being told.

One of them is pretty simple. We have built a consumer machine that is chewing up the planet, spitting out toxic waste. Most of the greenhouse gases we pour into the sky are being sucked back into the ocean. Radio Ecoshock guests like paleoclimatologist Peter Ward have made one thing clear. The ocean makes the oxygen we breathe, the ocean determines the weather, and in the big picture, the state of the ocean dictates the big biological clock of abundance or mass extinction.

FROM SHARKWATER TO REVOLUTION

Today, I saw more graphic evidence the ocean is far more disturbed than our weather. Rob Stewart set out to save the sharks from the lunacy of shark fin soup. His audience, and then the ocean experts, told Stewart he's missed the big story.

Despite the success of his first film "Sharkwater" Stewart had to battle to make his second. He spent another four years travelling to the biological hot spots of the ocean, and to the dead zones. What he learned inflamed him. Stewart found out what we all know in our hearts: we need a big fast change in our economy, culture, and hearts to save not the sharks, not the polar bears, but ourselves. He's calling for nothing less than Revolution. That's the title of his new film.

The movie has just been released at the Toronto Film Festival, and again at the Vancouver Film Festival. It's a full-length bundle of astounding underwater photography, followed by a quest to find out who can stop our civilization from self-destructing.

We are introduced to creatures hidden below the waves. Like a relative of the Octopus that is smarter than your house cat. Crazy and adorable animals that only Nature could dream up.

Their world is dying. The ocean is becoming acidic. It's getting hotter, and it's filling up with plastic and chemicals. The single biggest threat to all sea life, greater even than deforestation, is the way we dump fossil carbon into the atmosphere. Estimates range from 33 up to 50% of all the carbon dioxide we emit goes into the ocean. Everything that makes a skeleton, from tiny plankton through coral to all fish and sea mammals, are endangered by ocean acidification. If we can't control our emissions, quickly, we can't save life in the sea.

Stewart rediscovers what I found out in 1990: the oceans campaign is the climate campaign is the oceans campaign.

So the shark man ends up at two U.N. climate conferences. Both fail miserably. Dependent on consensus, with a negotiations wrecker like Canada, out to promote the dirty Tar Sands oil, the talks go nowhere.

You and I aren't changing much either, even though we know. Stewart glumly tallies up his own carbon pollution, and it's too much. Just like me.

Who isn't invested in the climate death machine? The children. They will bear the ruined climate. Child activists are springing up all around the world. Stewart tirelessly reaches out to them, informing, warning, inspiring youth as our best hope.

COMING UP NEXT WEEK ON RADIO ECOSHOCK

Next week I'll bring you a full interview with Rob Stewart underground film-maker, and unlikely revolutionary.

We'll also hear from Lester Brown of the Earth-Policy Institute. He's got the facts on rising food costs at home, and food-less days abroad.

And we'll continue our Transition series, as guest Wes Regan describes food localization in the poorest neighborhood.

We opened Radio Ecoshock this Fall with Gareth Renowden. He and co-host Glenn Williams have managed a new edition of "The Climate Show" bridging the time gap between London and rural New Zealand. Check out the new program at theclimateshow.com

Another tip from the film Revolution: only you can educate yourself. Sorry, whatever school you went to didn't teach what we all need to know. The government won't tell you. Media plans to distract you.

As the hard facts roll away the delusions of a mass suicide pact, I encourage you to dig, dig, dig. You can get college level knowledge free in You tube and Google lectures. Watch the TED talks. Bulk up your list of blogs that tilt toward natural reality.

You can find every back show of Radio Ecoshock on our web site at ecoshock.org. Please tune in, and spread it around. Use those links, Facebook, Twitter, everything. Hand out copies to neighbors or on the street. Talk it up.

Some of the world's best experts teach us. We have to strip away layers of ignorance and greed. We need to know the truth, and then we need to act on it. Nothing else will save a livable future for our descendants. That IS the big story.

I'm Alex Smith. This has been Radio Ecoshock. Join us next week.

Looking For An End

Waiting for a resolution to the triple crisis of climate, energy and the economy? Alex interviews Gareth Renowden, co-host of New Zealand's "The Climate Show" on the big stories. From Beijing, Li Yan, Greenpeace East Asia climate coordinator on China's emissions and coal dependence. Plus "Tip of the Iceberg News" points you to important blog posts and audio you may have missed. Music from Deva Prewal. Radio Ecoshock 120905 1 hour CD Quality 56 MB or Lo-Fi 14 MB.

Radio Stations: Ecoshock 120905 Part 1 29 minutes

Ecoshock 120905 Part 2 29 minutes

Welcome back to another season of Radio Ecoshock! I am your tour guide, Alex Smith.

In this week's program we travel the world. From New Zealand, we'll hash out our disturbed weather, with the co-host of The Climate Show, Gareth Renowden.

Then it's off to Beijing, for a report straight from China. Greenpeace Asia Campaigner Li Yan is our guest.

We'll cap that off with "Tip of the Iceberg News" - my welcome back round up of world-shaking developments, pointers to great audio, blogs and articles, and four big trends in the alternative/activist scene.

Our music artist this week is Deva Premal. Find her at White Swan Records, or at her web site here.

HELP! IT’S A MAD WORLD… GARETH RENOWDEN

Coming back from my annual vacation, I find the world as mad as ever. So much happened, I need help just trying to grasp it all. Who better than Gareth Renowden, co-host of "The Climate Show" out of New Zealand? Gareth is a climate blogger, truffle specialist, farmer, radio personality, and now author of a new sci-fi book titled "The Aviator, the Burning World".

Gareth and I agree the top story is the record ice melt-back in the Arctic. We'll be doing a special on that next week, with super specialists like Jennifer Francis from Rutgers, and Mark Serreze from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Tune in next week for that on Radio Ecoshock.

We also talk about another under-reported story: the serial drowning of major cities in Asia by extreme precipitation events. In the Philippines, Manila suffered a major flood, and then Beijing China got six months of rain in 24 hours. Even the capital of the African country of Niger ended its horrible drought with half a year's worth of rain in a day.

I raise this question with Gareth? I've just been going through a study which shows humans tend to be pessimistic about other people, but optimistic about themselves. We worry about an unstable climate, but think it won't really affect me that much. That may be one reason why even developed countries refuse to plan for things like heavy rainstorms or rising seas. Do you see signs we are getting ready for what is coming?

Gareth replies, no, not for what he thinks is coming. But some countries are adding risings seas into their planning process - unlike legislators in one southern U.S. state which specifically prohibited including any global warming planning. New Zealand for example, is looking at how they might protect their coastlines from rising seas.

"The Climate Show" has been out of production since last spring. Co-host Glenn Williams, formerly a radio reporter for Radio New Zealand, has moved with his family to London England. His broadcasting gear has just arrived in the UK. Gareth expects they will work through the technology needed to hook up again (each in a different day, spanning the globe) to produce more Climate Shows. It will be tricky, considering the pair do both an audio and video recording at the same time, but all things are possible in the Skype world. Regular guest John Cook of skepticalscience.com will join them as well.

We move on to look at Gareth's new science fiction book. It's now on Amazon.com and amazon.uk, as well as Smashwords, with more outlets to come. From the book's web site:

"Here’s how cover designer Dylan Horrocks described The Aviator on Facebook.

"Gareth Renowden’s novel The Aviator is a light-hearted journey (by state-of-the-art airship) around a world transformed by climate change and subsequent political collapse. Rock God Evangelists, super-rich survivalists, back-to-nature primitivists, heavily armed luddites, goats with the secret of eternal youth, and a horny artificial intelligence with a taste for bluegrass and classic Hollywood films; The Aviator is a Gulliver-esque romp through a future we hope won’t come to pass. It’s out soon, with a cover by yours truly."

Find out more here.

I think science fiction is a great medium for trying to pull together a future no one has ever experienced. We are heading into decades of fundamental changes in our climate, our energy and resources. It's going to be hard to understand, and very disruptive to our economy, agriculture, everything we do.

SURVIVING IN NEW ZEALAND?

Toward the end of the interview, I ask whether New Zealand might be one of the best places to escape to, when climate change hits in full force. Renowden says their location, and the surrounding cooling sea currents, should keep their two big islands habitable. But no country is an island, as they say. If the rest of the world becomes destabilized, life in New Zealand will be hard as well. At least they still have a large farming industry. Maybe New Zealand could still feed itself.

Gareth says he thinks Al Gore may have started the idea that South Sea Islanders forced out by rising seas would relocate in New Zealand. There have been some discussions, but it's not as settled as that. However, just because of the economics, there are more New Zealand citizens on some Pacific Islands than original Polynesians. In any event, as the largest and wealthiest country in the region, it does seem likely people from atolls that flood as the seas rise will become climate refugees to New Zealand.

You can listen to/download my interview with Gareth Renowden (25 minutes) here.

GREENPEACE IN CHINA

It's hard to believe a hard action organization like Greenpeace could even exist in state-controlled China. But Greenpeace China has been there since 1997.

Let's face it. Emissions have dropped slightly in the former biggest polluter, the USA. The largest global warmer is now China. Maybe that's not surprising as the world's most populous country industrializes. Not only are they bringing their own people up into middle class lifestyles we all wanted here - there continue to be "the world's workshop" producing consumer goods as well.

What can we do? I had an illuminating talk with Li Yan. She's the East Asia coordinator for the Atmosphere and Energy Campaign, based out of Beijing.

I'm sorry I don't have time to transcribe this important interview. But you can download or listen to it separately here (20 minutes long).

Coal continues to be the big reason China's emissions are so high. Western media, and too many bloggers, keep plugging the meme that "China is opening one new coal plant a week". Li Yan says about 52 coal plants did open during the peak of electrification back in 2008 or 2009, making an average of one a week - but coal plant construction has dropped since then. It's no longer true.

The government is also taking steps to close the smaller and older inefficient coal plants. Those produced way too many emissions compared to the energy produced.

China has also become the world leader in production of alternative energy. They have installed more wind power than any other country on the planet. However, Li Yan says even though China is also the world's largest maker of solar panels, only about five percent of that production is installed in China. The rest is exported to Europe, North America and the rest of the world. Greenpeace is calling on China to install more solar power at home.

We had a fascinating discussion about the way state-run media reports on climate change. In North America, we hear lots about the strange weather, and weather disasters, while reporters and weather people studiously avoid saying the words "climate change" or "global warming". We even take bets when watching TV, to see if they can get through a whole story about the drought, or record heat waves and fires, without ever mentioning the underlying cause. Some of the talking heads we do get, especially on Fox, are only there to deny there is any climate change.

Li Yan says state TV, radio and press accepts climate science, without a doubt. China has suffered terribly from drought, heat, and floods. In July, the capital city of Beijing got about 6 months’ worth of rain in just 24 hours a day. It was the heaviest rainfall in Beijing in 60 years, with 10 killed. The streets and homes were flooded. If this can happen in the most developed city in China, the capital, people there are wondering how bad it will get.

Climate change is often given as the reason for these weather disasters on state TV, but Li Yan say, they do not go all the way and connect the cause to coal burning. That could be improved.

Coal is one of the number one targets of Greenpeace's atmosphere campaign in China, and throughout Asia. The Chinese people are suffering from terrible air pollution, and coal is the main culprit. It also helps poison both the soil and the water. This localized pollution, as opposed to global warming, is one of the primary concerns of the Chinese people.

We hear a lot of third party opinions about China, and some outright hostile propaganda - so don't miss this chance to hear straight from Beijing, with Li Yan of Greenpeace.

TIP OF THE ICEBERG NEWS

Pointers to hot material you may have missed...

There's no way to do anything but skim over some world-shattering news, along with developments in the alternative movement. And so...it's time for..."Tip of the Iceberg News!...!!"

THE ECONOMY IS SINKING

The macro-economy is sinking. The United States is set for a leveraged buyout, Bain Capital style. That's where you raid a company, or country with a few million in campaign donations, load up the victim with unrepayable debt, while paying out big-time fees heading for a tax-free trip to the Cayman Islands.

Get the details from one of the best pieces of American journalism in a generation, Matt Taibbi's article "Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital" in the online version of Rolling Stone Magazine.

In Europe, Spain is going down. So far about 17% of all the money in Spanish banks has left the country. One bank has already been nationalized. The others bought billions in Spanish government debt with bail-out money poured in by the European Union.

Spain makes Greece look tiny in comparison. Spain's collapsed economy and real estate is a sink-hole threatening to drag down the even larger magnificent Ponzi debt scheme of Italy - and then it's a sleigh ride all the way down for the European Union.

China is holding a garage sale, and still can't get rid of overstocked warehouses. It seems their overseas customers are broke. The government has announced more money printing to save their economy once again. Production is down, people are losing their jobs. It's very serious - for China, and for the whole world economy.

In the U.S., helicopter Ben Bernanke has already offered bailout number 3 - billions more dollars hot off the government printing presses and into the hidden accounts of bankers and hedge funds. You know it's bad when the bailouts come. Don't sit up late waiting for your check.

Despite all that, I don't expect a big crash any time soon. Remember, even after the 50 billion dollar Ponzi fraud by Bernie Madoff was exposed and documented, it took another 8 years for the man to fall. See the documentary film "Chasing Bernie Madoff" with whistleblower Harry Markopolos. You'll see how the system never works to protect you.

Here's a link to the trailer.

THE CLIMATE

While the big news is about the melting Arctic, runner-up is the giant drought this year in America.

When the Mississippi dries up, so that barges can't make it up the river, you know we are in trouble. Cattlemen sold off their beef, as feed prices soared. Expect cheap meat now; stick it in the freezer, because next year is going to make you want to become a vegetarian. Do it! It's good for you, and good for the planet.

America is the world's grocery store for the over-populated poor. Even though food prices are already rising, the Obama administration has not changed the policy of diverting huge amounts of corn into ethanol production. We'll burn up some family's dinner, just getting to the corner store for a soda.

Get ready to grow your own, or at least make friends with farmers.

FUKUSHIMA NEWS

Hey, Fukushima is so yesterday. Except this Japanese triple nuclear melt-down just keeps ticking along, like a slow motion atomic bomb.

Check out this collection of You tube clips from the Japanese news service NHK. It's hard to believe how poorly the Japanese are responding to the world's worst nuclear accident.

This same source, listed as NibiruMagick2012 also does an interesting news update, which includes things like volcanoes, storms, and climate change news. Don't let his nickname throw you off. I've got some good tips from his You tube channel, with pretty well daily news blasts that ordinary news doesn't carry. His channel is here.

The Japanese government announced they will study the health impacts - great idea, starting only 18 months too late. The government is also going to allow foreign experts to offer ideas. They are negotiating with the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA is the body responsible for pushing nuclear power around the world, so they should unreliable. But it's better than just relying on Tepco and the government in Tokyo.

In a surreal move, various government agencies are already planning an alleged "clean-up" of the Fukushima region, even though radioactive cesium has a half-life of 30 years. The other elements released in the accident, up to an including both uranium and plutonium, last hundreds of thousands of years. We are already seeing artist's conceptions of green spaces and new industries in the radioactive hot zones. It's pathetic, a terrible lie for Japan.

According to nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds.com, the reactor cores are likely no longer molten, just brilliant hot metal blobs that ran way no one knows where. The 3 reactors buildings are still unapproachable without risking lives. They are still building up explosive hydrogen daily, and require nitrogen to be pumped in to avoid more explosions. An earthquake or any technical problem with the pumps, the gerry-rigged pipes, or the electricity supply, could still lead to more radioactive explosions.

Tepco, the operator, has attempted to strengthen the Reactor Four fuel pool building, also wrecked in the explosions. All that fuel, from 40 years of operation, plus the hot fuel bundle just removed before the accident, is still balanced dangerously several stories above the ground. Another major earth quake could drop all that fuel, likely poisoning central Japan, including Tokyo, and likely the whole northern hemisphere. They've had plenty of earthquakes since. The government is moving far too slowly to get the fuel out.

Radioactive water is still leaking all over the site, including into the turbine halls. We don't know how much has reached the water table, or the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese government either doesn't know, doesn't want to know, or doesn't want to tell you.

Other than that, Fukushima is doing fine. You must listen to a great radio podcast with anti-nuclear campaigners Helen Caldicott interviewing Arnie Gundersen, in the free August 20th podcast. Download it from ITunes, or from this page at radio4all.net Just right click the red arrow at the bottom of the page to download this essential podcast of "If You Love This Planet".

I play a short excerpt in this Radio Ecoshock show where Helen calculates up to 3 million people could die from the Fukushima accident radiation. Gundersen counters it might "only" be 1 million, since about two thirds of the radiation was blown out into the Pacific, instead of back on to the Japanese mainland. Lucky weather saved many Japanese people, but huge numbers will still die prematurely due to radiation. The damage will pass down through several generations.

And don't miss this article in Counterpunch. It details how the Japanese Yakuza - the gangsters - are providing disposable workers for TEPCO to help "clean up" Fukushima. According to the article, Japanese criminal organizations have been involved in the nuclear industry for a long time.

FOUR TRENDS I'M SEEING IN ACTIVIST SCENE

I'm seeing four big trends in the alternative/activist/Occupy scene.

A rising tide of people realizes climate change, energy depletion, and economic collapse are inevitable.

Trend One: there is a chorus of famous writers, bloggers, and scientists who are publicly mourning the passing of the Holocene age, and our descent into the Anthropocene - the age brought about by humankind. Many of our favorite plants and animals will not survive the change. Everything will shift underneath us, like a climate quake.

Author Chris Hedges, returning as I am from a summer get-away in Nature, has a touching piece titled "Life Is Sacred". Find it at the truthdig blog at the Rolling Stone Magazine web site. Or find the link in my blog at ecoshock.info. Hedges knows we are already on the path toward ecological destruction, at least in human terms. Like me, he fears for the times of his children.

Trend Two: As I've covered in past Radio Ecoshock shows, with guests like Paul Kingsnorth - there is an even louder chorus calling for a quick downfall of the industrial system. As one of my listeners wrote in email, many believe human extinction is on its way. We need to consider a hospice society, making the way out less painful, perhaps even more joyful.

Carolyn Baker of "Speaking Truth to Power" has written a great article on Collapse Fatigue. Lots of commentators on blogs like Zero Hedge are becoming jaded about any predictions of a financial collapse. The whole mad Ponzi system, which Max Keiser calls the "Casino Gulag”, just keeps on dancing in midair. Until, like Bernie Madoff, some outside force or even intervenes, and the music stops?

Trend Three: Some fairly famous figures and movement leaders are bailing out. It's not just that people are burned out, hitting their heads against the immovable wall of human insanity. They are going quiet, moving to rural areas in some cases, or just hanging out in cities. It's like an "Atlas Shrugged" - abandoned but not by industrialists, an extinct breed supplanted by corporate raiders - but by those seeking an alternative.

Michael C. Ruppert was the subject of the movie "Collapse".

Last April Ruppert left the online community he helped found, at collapsenet.com. Collapse Network is still going, check it out. I subscribe to their pay news service, and find it really handy.

Now Ruppert has gone to Colorado with his dog. Mike hasn't exactly gone silent. He still has his popular radio program at PRN on Sunday evenings. But he's out of here.

I know others. It's a really bad sign when activists and leaders decide it's futile.

Trend Four: Related to all the above, many people are now seeking out spiritual practices as way to cope with the unbearable weight of knowing. Ruppert is trying a mix of American Indian shamanism and Alcoholic Anonymous.

Two leaders from Transition US, Michael Brownlee and Lynette Marie Hanthorn are proposing "Deep Transition". They are seeking ways to digest our lurch into mass suicide. It is really a new beginning, a hard evolution into a type of humanity that can live in nature?

Download that Lifeboat Hour show on Deep Transition, September 2nd edition guest hosted by Carolyn Baker here.

I'm worried, in our distress, some people will turn away from science and activism, toward ancient superstitions that took us centuries to overcome. There's a lot to talk about here, and we will, in the coming season of Radio Ecoshock.

WHAT IS COMING UP ON RADIO ECOSHOCK THIS SEASON?

In our next Radio Ecoshock show we hear three top scientists on the record melt-down of Arctic sea ice. One guest will be Jennifer Francis, the Rutgers University atmospheric scientist who leads observations on the way the sea ice melt is changing our climate, throughout the Northern Hemisphere. It's some of the most urgent science on the block, with your life in the balance.

We'll also hear from Dr. Cecelia Bitz, helping us understand how the Arctic climate works, and why it matters so much. Plus Mark Serreze, the Director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center - explaining the new record low levels of ice. It's the biggest story in many thousand years.

After that, you'll get a surprise special on the unbelievable tipping point developing as we air-condition the planet. Followed by a whole program on developments in what I see as our only response for now: the transition town movement.

Personally, I spent a month at our rural village retreat. We added more insulation, 120 Watts of solar power, a handy garden shed, and a large garden fence - six feet high to keep out the deer and other pests.

My most important time was spent getting to know more of my neighbors there. Small communities are still functioning, with people helping people. I like it, and hope to move there.

It's not much, but that's about all I can do at this point. I'm back in the city, diving through news, reports, and truly helpful tips from listeners like you. Write me any time. The address is radio [at] ecoshock dot org.

Gear up for another nail-biting season, with Radio Ecoshock.

I'm Alex Smith. As always, I thank you for listening, and caring about your world.

Still Walking Away From Empire

It's beyond the point where a few doomer voices says our way of life is rotten, that industrial civilization is driving straight toward catastrophe. Most of us can see the signs ourselves.

But we are addicted to fossil power, sliding back daily into the easy life. Why can't we change, or at least walk away?

Dr. Guy McPherson did just that. He left his position as a Professor of Natural Resources and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. Guy is now a focal point for people searching for survival, transition, and a reality-based way of life.

SOME LINKS FOR THIS PROGRAM

Before we get into this program, here are some helpful links:

Guy McPherson’s blog “Nature Bats Last”.

For the movie "Somewhere in New Mexico, Before the End of Time" on You tube, or Indiegogo.

Mike and Karen Sliwa were inspired by Guy McPherson, but decided to take a different route, touring the world working on organic farms. These labor exchange stays are called "WWOOFing" (World-wide Opportunities on Organic Farms). Mike and Karen talk about their encounter with Guy in this You tube video. Follow "Chasing A Different Carrot' for the WWOOFing adventures of Mike and Karen Sliwa. Mike Sliwa says he doesn't agree with McPherson about how soon the industrial system will fall, but knows an alternative society must begin to grow right away.

Guy tours around the U.S. giving lectures, mainly for college audiences. He is after all a well-known and respected Professor. For example, watch Guy McPherson lecture on the "Myth of Sustainability" at Muskegon Community College, Feb 15, 2012 here. (1 hour 23 min)

There are lots more Guy McPherson videos and audio interviews on the Net.

For years I've been a fan of McPherson's blog "Nature Bats Last". I almost made it to his experimental acres in the New Mexico hills. I hoped to interview him at home, as one of his tourists, but we ran out of time and gas money on the northern edge of Arizona. It was over 100 degrees there, 38 degrees Celsius in the shade, in early June. There was a huge coal plant nearby. My first question for Guy: can Arizona survive without air conditioning?

BODY TEMPERATURE AND FOSSIL FUELS

McPherson says Arizona will do just fine, but he has doubts that most Arizonans could make it without artificial cooling. Of course people could design homes to protect them from extreme heat, which includes things like lots of insulation, proper window placement and covering, fans and "swamp coolers" running on solar power, and the old standard: cool basements.

Forget about Arizona. With places like Chicago and Toronto hitting 35 degrees C. (95 F.) on the first day of summer, with super-high humidity and awful pollution - pretty well all Earthlings will have to learn the basics of staying cool in a heated world. Even the Arctic can get too hot for comfort during the summer.

Maintaining an operable body temperature is one of "the four basics" that Guy McPherson says we need. The others are clean water, safe and nutritious food, and a supportive human community.

I think the question of "body temperature" is one of the biggies in our fossil fuel dependency. In the South people need to keep cool enough. In the North it's a matter of getting through the winter. As far as I know it's not really possible to heat millions of homes in Chicago or Toronto with solar or wind power.

I have to wonder, can we really keep hundreds of millions of North Americans, Russians, or Northern Europeans alive without fossil fuels? I doubt it, and so does McPherson. Our cities are unsustainable when we factor in dwindling fossil fuels (appearing as higher and higher prices, with more and more environmental risk in production.

TOSS IN PEAK OIL

There are signs we are already past peak oil. For example we are forced into greater and greater environmental risks... like the Tar Sands, Gulf of Mexico spill from deep water rigs, Arctic drilling, gas fracking, and mountain top removal coal mining. If we had plenty of easy oil left in the big reserves, or were discovering major new fields, none of those risky and expensive energy plays would be happening.

Guy McPherson learned about Peak Oil in the early 2000's, when he was still a Professor teaching at the University of Arizona. But when he began to tell is students about the huge social risks of Peak Oil and climate change - he was asked to stop teaching.

HOW TRUTH-TELLING IS SILENCED IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES

Listen to the interview to hear a classic story of how truth-telling is silenced in American Universities. Professors have freedom of speech - as long as they don't use it to tell an anti-corporate narrative, or warn students about the big challenges coming.

The University started paying McPherson to stay home, without teaching - that is, to shut up. His own department banned him from teaching.

When McPherson became "Emeritus" (a former Professor), and moved to small acreage in New Mexico to experiment with "agrarian anarchism" - a strange rumor surfaced at other universities that Guy McPherson suffered from a mysterious brain disease. That disease was never named, nor was the rumor backed up by anything.

Guy says anyone leaving "normal" life is labeled crazy. But what happens when "normal" is crazy? When our daily actions contribute to a system that is driving a couple of hundred species into extinction every single day? That is melting the Arctic ice, wierding out weather beyond crop limits, killing off the bees, introducing more plastic than plankton into the oceans, and endangering entire nations with blown up nuclear reactors?

If we leave that dangerous "normal" behind - that makes us officially "crazy"? It all sounds like old Stalinist times to me. We know who the real crazy people are - the billions who pollute the Earth, driving mass extinction.

More than a decade ago, Guy McPherson began to suspect the trends and risks of extinction are so great that humans likely will not survive for many more generations.

COLLAPSE IS THE ONLY WAY LEFT TO SURVIVE THE INDUSTRIAL KILLING MACHINE

The only practical solution, McPherson says, is a wide-spread collapse of the global industrial system. Only a giant economic Depression, where trade stops and banks close, could possible cut emissions fast enough to save us. Only an end to the consumer society could save enough of the natural world to continue supporting large mammals like ourselves.

Keep in mind that McPherson is a published scientist with specialties in biology, the environment, and evolution. Find his blog "Nature Bats Last" at guymcpherson.com.

With his knowledge, to be able to "look at myself in the mirror", Guy left one of the most protected and financially rewarding jobs: being a tenured university Professor. For the last four years, he had to learn a whole new skill set.

LEARNING NEW SKILLS TO ADAPT OR SURVIVE

You may not be surprised to learn that a lifetime in academia teaches a person nothing about erecting small buildings, growing food, or caring for animals. Life many back-to-the-landers, Guy had to learn all that from scratch, with some help from neighbors who knew.

That is one reason I encourage listeners and readers to start learning those skills now. It takes time, and some mistakes, to learn how to provide off-grid shelter, to feed yourself and family, and to build community. Start now, as much as you can, where ever you are, even in the city. Grow in pots on your balcony. Become part of a community garden. Take those building supply company free courses, and volunteer where you can, building your repertoire of real survival skills. Given the instability of the financial world, starting in Europe, but maybe going global, now is the time to start.

You can learn a lot by just reading through Guy McPherson's blog. Go back through the years, looking the photos and videos, reading how he prepared gardens against pests, the outbuildings, the water sprinklers, the solar powered wells. Lots to learn there.

WALKING AWAY FROM EMPIRE

McPherson captured some his life journey in his latest (2011) book, "Walking Away from Empire: A Personal Journey".

The word "empire" is not accidental. In the interview Guy says his former city of Tucson is "at the apex of empire". Why? All the city's water comes in by canals through the desert hundreds of miles long. All the food is trucked in. The energy comes down long power lines. Without the whole industrial complex, Tucson cannot survive.

The energy supplies, and all the consumer products, depend ultimately on the vast network of military bases built up by America, now dedicated to protecting its corporations and their harvesting of both resources and cheap labor from around the world. That empire, now copied by many other nations, including Europe, Brazil, Russia, and China among many others - it a pattern of living that presupposes killing off the natural world as a consequence.

Personally, I don't see this as just an American empire. Canada has its own imperial activities. For example we direct major mining companies all over the world. Of course most of the European countries still have not just the history, but the corporate activities of empire as well. It's kind of an industrial mega structure, where half the world's people live in endless poverty, while we take their resources or even their working lives. What is the future of the industrial empire?

McPherson says there are other ways to live, and our needs are far less than what the average Western person demands. His experiment in living, along with his neighbors, is an attempt to live in a sustainable way.

The use of "clean" energy like solar power is just a bridge to true sustainability, says McPherson. When we add in the energy needed to make solar panels, and the toxic batteries, they are not a viable long-term solutions.

MCPHERSON'S TRANSITION SPREADS WIDELY

McPherson has become an inspiration to hundreds if not thousands of people. One visitor in 2011, Mike Sosebee, was inspired to make a film about Guy and his neighbors. The film "Somewhere in New Mexico, Before The End of Time" is due out this fall. I've played several clips from the movie in this Radio Ecoshock show.

One important clip is with Mary Burton Reisly. Several decades ago she purchased 18 acres of New Mexico highlands - with an all-important right to 2 acres of water - for about $68,000. You couldn't hope to buy it for that price now! Mary Burton allowed and participated in the development of a series of communal buildings and self-built homes on the property. It was developed as a land-trust as an ideal, until recently Mary Burton formed the land trust for real.

This communal experiment has really flourished. There was some debate about putting in electric power, but that was rejected, making everyone too dependent on a dangerous industrial system. You'll find out more about this in Mike Sosebee's film, but I do run one clip in the Radio Ecoshock show with Guy McPherson.

WHEN ONLY A COMPLETE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE WILL DO

Guy turns us toward the work of one of our previous Radio Ecoshock guests, Dr. Timothy Garrett from the University of Utah. Garrett has done studies and calculations showing only a complete collapse of our industrial economy can save us from a climate catastrophe.

We did two interviews with Tim. The first interview in 2010 is here. Or watch a You tube video version of one Garrett interview here (prepared by Khalid Hassan of Outfield Productions in Pakistan). In the second, he told us about doing more study, and writing a second paper, because he couldn't really answer a question I had asked him before. Even a humble radio interview can stimulate new science. Find that second Garrett paper here. That second Garrett interview is embedded in this Radio Ecoshock show titled "An Atmosphere of Crisis".

Here is an easy to understand lay summary of Garrett's theory in an article "Is Global Warming Unstoppable?" McPherson admits it is hard to call for the pain and suffering of what amounts to a Great Depression, and almost unimaginable social dislocation - as a good thing! But our current suffering, and the suffering of all the other species, is worse - and getting worser, if you'll pardon that abuse of English.

DO THOSE WHO LEAVE THE SYSTEM PRESUME THEY CAN RETURN FOR MEDICAL TREATMENT?

Now I'm going to ask a hard question. It is based on my own experience as a back-to-the-lander and self-sufficiency guy. In the late 1970's, I thought the whole thing would collapse or blow itself up with nuclear war. I had ten great years growing our own food and heat, without electricity. But the system carried on, killing off even more of the planet. What happens if industrial civilization surprises you too, if it keeps going another hundred years, while you are waiting out in the hills?

There is a lot of flexibility and wealth built into the Western-style industrial culture. Industrial society might last much too long, right until the horrible eco-crash. The other reason people leave rural self-sustainability is because they become old and need medical care. How will people in these off-grid communities handle that? Do survivalists, catastrophists, or self-styled "doomers" really count on the hospital system to somehow be there? These questions are hot button issues in many off-grid and experimental communities.

We don't have answers yet, other than to hope that better food, a lower stress life with regular exercise will mean less need for the old medical system. Many believe in alternative holistic medicine anyway. And we know hospitals themselves are dangerous places to be these days, with people catching diseases they didn't come in with.

TRANSITION VOICES

Guy McPherson also talks about Sherry Ackerman being in the film, along with others leaving "normal" lives. Sherry and Guy write for Transition Voice at transitionvoice.com.

Find Guy's regular columns at Transition Voice here.

His post for June 11, 2012 "The Age of Consequences" might serve as a good summary for the basis of this Radio Ecoshock interview. It begins:

"As we continue into the centuries-old, but only recently acknowledged era of destruction and extinction, it’s apparent the current model is not working. Largely too fearful of individual retribution to disrupt the industrial culture that's making us sick, making us crazy, and killing us, we hang tightly to the only system we’ve ever known. Pathetically reluctant to consider what lies beyond the omnicidal industrial machine, we cling to a system that has failed to nurture the living …"

AGRARIAN ANARCHY

Total communes are very rare in America. Most of the rural communities I've visited seem to be composed of self-contained homesteaders who meet up to exchange skills and produce. In our interview, Guy advocates and explains "agrarian anarchy". The agrarian part is pretty easy, but most Americans have been terribly propagandized against "anarchy".

Anarchy doesn't have to mean masked people breaking windows in some urban protest. Agrarian anarchy has a long history in practice, and in literature, in Europe, South America, and North America. Some agrarian anarchist names you may know are Henry David Thoreau, Edward Abbey, and the alternative historian Howard Zinn. Read Guy McPherson's defense of this way of life here.

WHY NOT JUST PARTY UNTIL THE END?

Part of my unpleasant job, as an alleged truth seeker on Radio Ecoshock, is to ask questions at the back of people's minds. Here is one. If the biosphere is crashing, along with the climate, as you say: why not just live the good life as long as we can? If it's so hopeless, why not party, or at least live comfortably, until we can't?

Guy says lots of people ask that question, and it's not easy to answer. We have to dig deep inside to decide what kind of people we are. Can we really live without a conscience toward the rest of the creatures, the Earth, and all future generations?

Anyway, McPherson points out, Americans are already leading pretty selfish "Hedonistic" lives. Most of us do whatever we want, no matter what the long term consequences may be. It's already the big party, the bonfire of the vanities, so maybe we need to try another option, like living sanely, alongside others trying to do the same?

It seems to me, part of the function of what Guy is doing, and his local community is doing, is to seed a lot of necessary ideas into the rest of the hive. People come, and they go, but they go with experience of living off the grid, with ways to grow our own healthy food, to make do if the corporations don't provide a pre-packaged life. Is your community a kind of transition nursery?

NO BUNKERS, GUNS AND BEANS FOR GUY MCPHERSON

One of the things I really like about Guy: he doesn’t stop communicating. There is a whole school of survivalists who sneak off to some secret bunker, while writing off all the blind ants living Wal-Mart lives. Guy has not given up on reaching the people still stuck in the dying paradigm. And he says he's not interested in the "Mad Max" fantasy of the future.

People suspect they are part of the killer system, maybe even keeping it going with their jobs. If they want to walk away, how do they start? We talk a bit about that.

In this feature length interview, we share time with a person I consider a kind of soul-mate, even though we have never met in person. Dr. Guy McPherson is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona, now living in rural New Mexico, experimenting to find a truly sustainable life.

Despite our shared pessimism about the industrial system, this turned out to be a positive encounter. There are alternatives, and Guy McPherson wants to do more than find them - he wants to live them, passing on what he discovers.

I'm Alex Smith, for Radio Ecoshock.