HELLO HARD TIMES

Welcome my friends. Yes we're going to cover the coming crisis - again this week.

We'll travel to Brazil, to find out about those deadly floods, more signs of climate change - you know - the words former awareman Barrack Obama was afraid to mention in his State of the Union address! Not once. Our interview is with Kiko Brito, communications director for Greenpeace Brazil. He grew up in the worst hit area.

You will hear an interview with the man Christopher Hitchens loves to attack, Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed. Nafeez has a new book, with an important concept: a model for the interactions of the many crisis we face. Sure we have a climate movement, a peak oil movement, foodies and economic critics - but how do these forces of decline interact? Find out in our interview.

Despite all this, I'm starting to develop a weird sense of hope.

Noam Chomsky says it's over, we are just, quote "kissing each other goodbye". I don't agree, and I'll tell you why.

But first, this....a rant about the blatant corporate take-over of the American government in Washington.

Finally! Free enterprise and free government have become one and the same!

There is a label for that though.

Before World War Two, the inventor of Fascism, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, described it:

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."

Read More - with a lot of quotes, commentary and essential links!

Music this week:

clip of "He Looked A Lot Like Jesus" (but was from the FBI) by an unknown Earth First! singer

underbed music - "Clubbed to Death" by Rob Dougan

occasional underbed music by Dana Pearson.

Transforming Power - Judy Rebick

Floods and extreme snowfall events, once in a hundred years, are almost every year. No matter what the season, we keep on pumping up more carbon into the Earth's thin atmosphere.

The actors on the scene, most voices and talking heads, learned and ignorant, are mostly white men, the silver-backs. What about women? And aboriginal people pushed to the fringes?

Welcome to Radio Ecoshock. I'm Alex Smith.

In the radio broadcast (click the title above) you hear a powerful speech by Judy Rebick, as she describes lessons from the women's movement, and the transition from anti-globalist protests - to climate action.

Rebick concludes that anti-globalist protests, like that in Seattle in 1999, were supressed in North America, in the anti-terrorist, super police binge following 911. But anti-trade, pro-job rallies continued in Europe.

Many of these activists have now recognized climate change as the supreme threat to the existence of humans and other species, much less our civilization.

Her background is interesting - and it's good to get a woman's point of view, after so many male scientists and experts. In our current failure to deal with the crisis, certainly we need other voices.

Judy Rebick is a Canadian feminist and broadcaster, now committed to save our climate for future generations. She rose to national attention as president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women from 1990 to 1993. In the late 90's, Rebick co-hosted the prime-time debate program "Face Off" on Canadian Broadcasting, plus a women's talk show "Straight From the Hip".

Judy Rebick moved early into electronic broadcasting, as she helped found a multi-media discussion and distribution site for independent Canadian producers on the Net. It's called rabble.ca

Currently the Chair of Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University in Toronto, Rebick's latest book is "Transforming Power: From the Personal to the Political."

This speech, "Transforming Power, Effective Action for the Planet," was recorded at the Spirit of Red Hill lecture series in Hamilton, Ontario on November 3rd, 2010. It was first broadcast by independent radio journalist Maggie Hughes, as part of her on-going programs called "the Other Side - of the News" on CFMU, McMaster Campus Radio in Hamilton, Canada.

I'll just add two closing comments.

I liked this speech, but don't agree with all of it.

I'm worried any trend returning to superstition when confronted with giant challenges like climate change. The worst case scenario, in my opinion, just happened when long-time "doomer" and operator of the Peak Oil news site "Life After the Oil Crash" - just quit to devote himself to Astrology. I'll stick to science, and modern knowledge, thank you.

Second, my thanks and appreciation to Maggie Hughes for keeping up the good fight. Maggie has specialized in finding a voice for the voiceless. She specializes in poverty and disability issues. Maggie also takes on the world, with climate change, and social justice. She's one of the best of independent, volunteer radio journalists. Find her web site at www.oside.ca. Thanks Maggie, for all that you do.

That's it for Radio Ecoshock this week. Find all our past programs, as free mp3 downloads, at ecoshock.org. And write me any time. The address is: radio [at] ecoshock.org.

Alex

Legacy: David Suzuki

This week on Radio Ecoshock, we are listening to a speech by famous geneticist, broadcaster, and author David Suzuki. For almost 50 years, he hosted the Canadian Broadcasting TV show "The Nature of Things", published 40 books, won awards. This is his "legacy" speech - before the release of a biographical film "David Suzuki - Force of Nature," at the Toronto Film Festival.

This talk was recorded by Alex Smith, at a standing room only auditorium at the Kitsilano High School, Vancouver, on September 17th, 2010. Dr. Suzuki tries to place humans in proper perspective, in the real world. I think you are going to learn, and like it.

Suzuki takes us back 4 billion years, as time travelers, to see how we would do without the services provided by the web of life. We don't last long.

Then he examines how our cultural lens - shapes our vision of Nature. Contrary to all previous humans, and continuing aboriginal societies, OUR myth is that all the other living things are "commodities" that we can use, abuse, or kill off at will. That could be our death myth.

But I won't try to put words in the mouth of Canada's most famous environmentalist, and a master communicator. I've heard David Suzuki before. This speech moved me more than any other. It is, as he says, his legacy. Please, take in the wisdom for yourself.

Dr. Suzuki went on to say his real legacy may be his children - all environmentalists - and the David Suzuki Foundation - which has been very active in many environmental problems, especially climate change. Find out how you can help, at davidsuzuki.org

Our close-out music for the show was "350 Getdown" by May Earlwine - from the 350.org web site.

Thanks for joining us again this week.

Our own web site almost broke the servers this past month, with listener downloads, of green mp3 audio. More than half a terabyte heading out into the ears of the many, every month!

Thanks to some show volunteers, we've taken steps to strengthen our delivery system - meaning go ahead! Grab our free audio. Make CD's up for your friends, neighbors and citizens. Spread it around.

Maybe, eventually, enough people will understand the triple crunch, and take action to save - ourselves, our future, and the Planet for all the living creatures. That is the dream.

Get the free audio at ecoshock.org - still, the Net's largest green audio download site.

Alex

Top Down or Bottom Up? Brand Vs. Korten

Should the very rich control our climate? Our food?

In the Radio Ecoshock for last week, I may suprised listeners with a very different point of view. Former Whole Earther Stewart Brand came out swinging for nuclear power, genetic engineering, and geoengineering as the new "green." I'll reply in just a minute.

Our main speaker this week is a refreshing antidote to Brand. David Korten was recorded at the University of British Columbia. He's a well-travelled specialist in the economy and cultural systems, author of the book "When Corporations Rule the World." Korten has a much better idea, in my opinion.

We'll finish up with an example of corporation concentrating functions as Stewart Brand says is inevitable. This time it's our enslavement of animals, in Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operations. There's a set of two new books out - we'll talk with editor Daniel Imhoff.

This week we offer you a new talk by author David Korten. He describes where phantom wealth comes from, and how it distorts our world. Then he has some options of how we can re-build community a better way.

Korten's books "When Corporations Rule the World" and "The Great Turning, from Empire to Earth Community" have set the pace. His latest book,"Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth" (A Declaration of Independence from Wall Street) - couldn't come at a better time. This new talk was recorded September 27th, 2010, by the presenters, the UBC Reads Sustainability program.

But I begin this week’s program with a rant about Stewart Brand. His new “eco-pragmatism” reeks of the old conservatism, in my opinion. To be fair, I ran his recorded conversation last week, with little comment. This week, I tell you what I really think, in this piece:

"What’s the Matter With Stewart Brand?" Click on "Read more" below to find a link to that rant in print....

We end this week’s program with an example of what happens in the country, when big business takes over our food system. Daniel Imhoff is the editor of two companion books on CAFO - Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. Earth Aware publishers have just brought out two new books on "The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories". There is a CAFO Reader<, and a big, big book of companion photos, that should frighten you.

READ MORE - Including a raft of supplemental audio for this program....

Post Climatic Stress Disorder - Climate Psychology

Friends did a month of rain that fall last night? Did rivers flood in the Fall? Did you know 214 all-time heat records were set in the U.S. September 24th?

It was 30 degrees in Toronto, feeling like 37 with the humidity - the heat of the human body. And just lately, Los Angeles hit an all-time high of 113 degrees - in late September!

Worried about your kids?

You might have Post Climatic Stress Disorder. PCSD is a serious condition. But don't worry, professional help is on the way....

This week on Radio Ecoshock, it's Climate psychology 101 - with psychologists Robert Griffin and Joseph Reser. Plus new film on the grand-daddy of the double bind, Gregory Bateson.

How does that make you feel?

What if humans are not capable of conceiving a slow-moving global problem. Maybe, we do not have the mental equipment to "see" climate change. If that were so, we may go extinct, due to a disability in our minds - and evolution works too slowly to fix such things. Do we have what it takes? Are we too stupid or psychologically challenged to survive?

BUT FIRST, MY OWN PSYCHOLOGICAL WORK: ALEX GET'S PUBLISHED....

Before I get into the debate and our guests - my own article on controversial psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich was published this Summer in the literary journal "The Centacle." Just click on the cover to get an Adobe .pdf file of this issue. "Wilhelm Reich, The Life and Death of a Social Pioneer" opens the issue.

My thanks to Raymond and his wife - of SpiritPlants Radio! - for patiently transcribing from my reading of this piece, buried on the Radio Ecoshock web site. I wrote it years ago, and then lost the printed version. Better to read it than listen, because as my first recording, I sound like an answering machine. It took me a while to find my radio voice.

Wilhelm Reich began the sexual revolution, and worked for a woman's rights to her own body, decades before the 1960's made it fashionable. He was heir apparent to Sigmund Freud, until his radical views got him kicked out of the Psychoanalytic Association, and Austria/Germany (thus saving his life from Hitler's goons).

But free thinking was no better loved in America, where Reich was among the first to criticize the radiation from nuclear weapons testing. For that, his earlier Communism (it was the McCarthy witch-hunt days), and his medical claims about "Orgone Energy" - the U.S. government arrested Reich and jailed him. This social pioneer died in American prison. Worse, in an under-reported example of American book-burning - the authorities burned all of his books- ironically including the classic "The Mass Psychology of Fascism". Read it and weep.

But on to our show on the psychology of climate change.

READ MORE (with notes on our guests, links to new climate psychology reports and audio - a re-think of how we approach the climate crisis....)

BE THE CHANGE Climate Conversion

This program explores how green leaders are converting to climate activism. And how you can move from spectator to citizen action.

You'll hear Forest Ethics co-Founder Tzeporah Berman in a moving speech, going to a new climate group Power Up Canada. United Church Pastor Bruce Sanguin gives us a new vision of Gaia-friendly Christianity. And Maureen Jack-LeCroix explains her calling to "Be the Change" - as host of the recent Be The Change Circles event in Vancouver. There's more... Arran Stephens of Nature's Path, and two conference guests - but first, here are some links to help you dig further.

BE THE CHANGE EARTH ALLIANCE
http://www.bethechangeearthalliance.org

You Tube video of founder Maureen Jack-LeCroix - why she devoted 10 years to Gaia and founded Be The Change Circles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smLyRHo7aS0

ECOSHOCK PROGRAMS ON CLIMATE, DRYING FORESTS AND FIRES

BURNING DOWN THE WEST Wildfires stoke the carbon load. Ecoshock Show 071116 (1 hr) Interview: Dr. Tom Gower, saying fires in N. Canada make positive feedback; speech by Temperate Rainforest activist Pas Rasmussen - why she is now a climate activist as well. Echoes by Andrea Reimer of the Wilderness Committee. New research on the Rockies burning by Lara Kueppers; were California fires climate change?
http://www.ecoshock.net/eshock/ES_071116_Show.mp3

CURRENT PLAGUES - FUTURE FORESTS Can forests keep up with global warming? Ecoshock Show 070706 1 hour
Dr. Clive Welham on ravages on pine bark beetle in Rockies; Dr. Del Meidinger speech "Future Forests" to 6th N.A. Forest Ecology Conference.
http://www.ecoshock.org/cfro/2007/ES_070706_Show.mp3

RISING SEAS, DRYING WEST Ecoshock Show 080815 Top IPCC organizer & U of Arizona Professor Jonathan Overpeck speech at Washington U. After updating the world climate report, Overpeck predicts climate impacts on North America. 1 hour CD Quality Lo-Fi 14 MB http://www.ecoshock.net/eshock08/ES_080815_Show_LoFi.mp3

Drying of the West with National Geographic author Robert Kunzig; the first Carbon Tax in North America in B.C. (and what it means for the U.S.); censored Canadian scientists - speech clip from Dr. John Fyfe, IPCC author. Oh yeah, and some hope. 1 hour. Ecoshock show 080222 Lo-Fi 14 MB
http://www.ecoshock.net/eshock08/ES_080222_Show_LoFi.mp3

TZEPORAH BERMAN SPEECHES

Climate Conversion - Tzeporah Berman speech Be The Change Un-Conference, Vancouver May 23, 2009. 16 minutes Lo-Fi
http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/ecoshock/ES_Tzeporah_Berman_090523_LoFi.mp3

A CLIMATE OF CRASH AND CHOICE Finance & elections. Mike Whitney on Wall Street mess -Bush's plan to grab the money & run. Voting for climate action. Brianna Cayo Cotter U.S. PowerVote.org; Tzeporah Berman speech introducing PowerUpCanada.ca. Also Rep Ed Markey web cast on new Green Jobs initiative. Plus some fun (e.g. George Carlin) and music. Ecoshock Show 080926 1 hour
Lo-Fi 14 MB
http://www.ecoshock.net/eshock08/ES_080926_Show_LoFi.mp3

Tzeporah Berman at Bioneers Conference October 2006. About 20 minutes.
http://www.ecoshock.org/cfro/ES_Berman_Bioneers_061021.mp3

POWER UP CANADA
http://www.powerupcanada.ca/


THIS WEEK'S ECOSHOCK PROGRAM BEGINS....

Dear extra-terrestrial visitor,

Things are past serious here on Planet Earth. Our top scientists, the people who study and measure, warn the web of life is headed toward utter catastrophe, possibly in just ninety years. The ocean, source of our oxygen and mother of most life, is turning acid due to our carbon pollution. Our once stable climate, the basis of our agriculture and civilization, is undergoing violent change.

As I record this, smoke from forest fires - hundreds of miles away in the mountains, is filling our great city. I can smell the distress, and it's only June, not even fire season yet. Last night, as we watched TV news, a reporter showed the tinder dry conditions on Vancouver Island. "My God" said my companion, "that is the rain forest. The rain forest, untouched by fire for a thousand years or more, could burn."

It's only a matter of short time. The great pine forests of the Rocky Mountains have been killed by global warming. They stand dead, valley after valley, each long trough visible from space, waiting to burn. Each great tree is a tower of carbon taken from the atmosphere. Now it will go back, in great bursts of fire that nothing can stop. A burp of carbon worse than the Indonesian rain forest fires of '97-'98. Greenpeace predicted this in 1994, in a report called "The Carbon Bomb". Now, it's happening. Here in the Rockies, all from California right up to the Yukon. Even the boreal forest, clothing the North, is burning out more carbon than new trees can gather. Vast forests will convert into grasslands or scrub deserts.

We don't know how far all this new carbon, coming in the next decade, will push the climate.

The carbon whirlwind is still of our own making. Will you be a witness? Or will you be the change we need?

This is Radio Ecoshock. I am your host, Alex Smith.

READ MORE

Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves

Welcome to Radio Ecoshock. Today you'll hear two green broadcasters meet on air. Matt and Alex ask how cities can work in the climate energy crunch. Should you get out - and what can we learn from the back-to-the-land movement of the late '70's. I'll toss in the mental survival tips I use to survive the awful knowledge of climate change.

Matt and I also talk about Derrick Jensen and so-called "Eco-Terrorism". Non-violence hasn't worked (our life support system is going into the crapper) - do we need to go further?

We'll top that off with 15 minutes from the master. Al Gore's latest testimony to the House Energy Subcommittee April 24th. The last minute American hope to save the climate.


I'm Alex Smith, wading through the deep green with green broadcaster Matt. His long-running show "Healing the Earth" runs out of the University of Guelph in Canada - but his guests - some of them controversial - come from all over the world.

I hope you enjoyed that exchange with Matt. It's not easy doing radio about a gorgeous ecosphere under attack, in decline. My hope is lame, but it's still there. Maybe hope is built into us, the ultimate survival trait.

Here's someone who never gave up: Al Gore. We go now to his testimony to the House Energy Subcommittee, chaired by the remarkable Ed Markey of Massachusetts. As the Obama Administration rounds up the evidence for the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, Chairman Markey gets the best, keeps it moving. You can find the whole 2 hour video on C-Span.

Here's Al. (The key 15 minutes of testimony, 4 MB)


Next week we'll interview climate scientist and activist Bill Hare. His new report says the world may have to stop using fossil fuels completely in just 20 years - or face a drastic climate shift. The latest science, the most alarming.

I'm Alex Smith. Thank you for caring about your world.

TRIPLE THREAT

Final admission by Int Energy Agency: oil is running out & climate change is real. Speech by Fatih Birol at Council of Foreign Relations on IEA report, with my analysis.

Interview with Christine MacDonald on book "Green Inc" claiming big enviro groups greenwashing.

Short Testimony to Congress by Van Jones on Green Jobs to rebuild minorities.

Plus my climate & economic news.

Ecoshock 090123 1 hour CD Quality 56 MB or Lo-Fi 14 MB

Production Notes: Music bed for quick local Station ID at 29:41-30:30. If more time needed, cut end song at 58:13. Song "Good Planets Are Hard to Find" by Steve Forbert.

A RAY OF HOPE

Ecoshock show 071102 (59 min)

Paul Hawken at the Long Now Foundation, June 8, 2007, on his new book "Blessed Unrest." He finds we are the world's largest undiscovered movement.

Plus Canadian author/activist Maude Barlow's vision of hope, even in the darkest hour. Recorded by Radio Ecoshock October 30th. Her speech on the world water crisis will be in next week's show.

This is a program to inspire.

Production notes: No station ID's. 30 second music bed 29:40-30:10; other insert points at 39:35, 50:45. Cut last song at 57:04 if you need more time, or have no license.

Song: Paul Simon "One Man's Ceiling Is Another Man's Floor."

Alex Smith
your host
at Radio Ecoshock