The Green Planet Monitor: Recent Episodes
David Kattenburg
GPM # 78Bacteria are Earth’s most ancient creatures.
And there are lots of them, with a total mass a thousand times more than all humans.
Microbes — both prokaryotic and eukaryotic — make planet Earth go round. Some of them are dangerous pathogens. Most of them aren’t. Indeed, some bacteria are great kitchen companions.
Anna Sigrithur has been harnessing microbial magic, fermenting food and drinks for years. She’s also a writer and artist, focusing on food cultures, food preservation, fermentation, microbiology, sensory perception and human/non-human relationships.
Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Ferments in process
Since the dawn of civilization, nothing has fascinated humans more than the diversity of life around them. Aristotle was among the first natural historians. Naturalis Historia, by Pliny, is the Roman Empire’s largest surviving work. The collection, description and preservation of living things has come a long way since then. Today, biologists use fancy tools to collect creatures, and DNA barcoding technology to identify them.
Here’s a story about DNA barcoding. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Dutch barcoder Kevin Beentjes and his barcode reader (David Kattenburg)
Earth’ surface is a little over one degree warmer today, on average, than it was at the start of the industrial revolution 200 years ago.
That doesn’t seem like much. Under the Paris Agreement, governments agreed to limit temperature rise to two degrees. At present emission rates, that target will likely be exceeded.
In a landmark report published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists, back in 2018, researchers warned that a two degree rise in global surface temperature may actually exceed a critical planetary threshold, pushing Earth down a cascade of tipping points into “hothouse” mode, unlike anything this third rock from the sun has experienced since the mid-Miocene epoch, fifteen million years ago.
The GPM spoke about the report with its lead author, Will Steffen. A native of Norfolk, Nebraska, Steffen emigrated to Australia in the 1970s, where he took up a position at the Australian National University in Canberra. He served as the Executive Director of the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme, a ground-breaking initiative aimed at studying the chemical, physical and biological processes governing Earth as system. His name came to be associated with a host of ideas about our planet, and humanity’s fate. Steffen’s Great Acceleration curves helped corroborate the idea, first proposed by Dutch chemist Paul Crützen, that Earth has entered a new Epoch, the Anthropocene.
Will Steffen passed away in January 2023.
Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
GPM # 77This past September 11 – an indelibly dreadful date — thirty-four Palestinians were killed in a pair of Israeli airstrikes on a school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, in central Gaza.
Twelve-thousand were sheltering there at the time, most of them women and children. Among the casualties, six aid workers with the UN Relief & Works Agency, UNRWA.
Founded in 1949, UNRWA provides humanitarian aid, protection and social services to millions of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, and is mandated to do so until a “just and durable solution” to the plight of the Palestinian people is found.
In theory, that solution would involve fulfillment of the UN-mandated right of the Palestinian people to return to their homes inside present-day Israel, or be compensated for their losses.
Not surprisingly, Israel has had a hate-on for UNRWA since its inception.
Indeed, the Swedish diplomat responsible for the agency’s formation, Count Folke Bernadotte, was gunned down by Zionist militants shortly after his plan for Palestinian refugees driven from their homes in the course of Israel’s founding was tabled at the United Nations.
Bernadotte’s vision and plan lived on. So has Israel’s hatred for the agency he helped create.
Seventy-five years after Bernadotte’s brutal assassination, in the course of its seemingly genocidal war on Gaza, Israel has killed at least 220 UNRWA staff with US bombs and missiles.
For thoughts on Israel’s September 11 attack on the Nuseirat school, the GPM reached out to former UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness, now the Executive Director of the Myanmar Accountability Project.
Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Count Folke Bernadotte
According to Wikipedia, Zionism is “an ethno-cultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a Jewish state through the colonization of a land outside Europe … a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism became Israel’s national or state ideology.”
In 1975, the UN General Assembly declared Zionism to be “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” In 1991, that resolution was revoked.
Anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism, Israel’s allies and advocates insist.
Tell that to US-based Jewish Voice for Peace, “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world.”
North of the border, Independent Jewish Voices Canada has just declared itself to be anti-Zionist. For thoughts on that stance, the GPM reached out to IJV founding member Sid Shniad.
Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
GPM # 76It’s a staggering statistic. Covid killed almost seven million worldwide. The number is likely higher.
Meanwhile, a potentially deadlier pandemic sweeps the planet — Bacterial infections antibiotics can’t cure.
According to one UK government study, by 2050, ten million may die annually, infected by multi or pan-resistant microbes no drug will kill.
Drug resistance is the ineluctable result of antibiotic overuse or misuse – to treat viral infections, for example. What doesn’t kill infectious bacteria makes them stronger. So, science searches for new ones.
The trouble is, Big Pharma isn’t interested. There’s no profit to be made developing drugs that will end up on the top shelf, reserved for emergencies, when no other drug will work. Big Pharma wants to produce drugs that billions will use, all the time – precisely how antibiotics can’t be used, or else they’d become useless!
So, academic researchers are picking up the slack.
At McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario a team of scientists are screening thousands of hopeful candidates, totally new kinds of antibiotics, that bugs have never seen, and are unlikely to become resistant to.
And, for hot tips on what will work and what won’t, they’re turning to artificial intelligence, neural networks and machine learning.
Jon Stokes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus
Since ancient times, nothing has fascinated human beings more than the diversity of life around them. Aristotle was among the first natural historians. Naturalis historia, by Pliny, is the Roman Empire’s largest surviving work.
The identification and description of living things has come a long way since ancient Greece and Rome. Today, biologists use DNA barcodes to identify living creatures.
a DNA barcode is a small fragment of DNA that’s characteristic for a species. A half-dozen standardized barcodes exist for different groups of organisms. COX1 is used to identify animals. Botanists use a chloroplast gene. The ‘Internal Transcribed Spacer’, or ITS barcode, is used to identify fungi. Bacteria have their own barcodes too.
Within any broad group, that standard barcode varies from species to species. A digital device reads it, just like a supermarket scanner reads the barcode on a can of soup or a roll of toilet paper. Predictably, DNA barcode readers are getting small.
Here’s a story about that. Listen to it in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Dutch biologist Kevin Beentjes and his barcode reader (David Kattenburg)
Men are from Mars, women from Venus, John Gray famously wrote, back in the nineties.
Science says it’s true – sort of: male and female brains are wired differently.
Sandra Witelson is a veteran brain researcher, with a collection of over a hundred brains she’s been gathering for years. Albert Einstein’s was the first. The differences between male and female grey matter – especially in the language and speech regions – interest Witelson greatly.
Witelson’s studies revolve around brain lateralization – anatomical and functional differences between people’s right and left cerebral hemispheres just above the ears. And, how male brains get sexualized. At the tender age of five weeks, male embryos get doused in testosterone, changing them and their brains forever.
Sandra Witelson is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry & Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Sandra Witelson (David Kattenburg)
GPM # 75Humanity has never faced a more monumental challenge. After two centuries of burning fossil carbon, trashing the atmosphere, pushing Earth systems to the edge of collapse, industrial societies need to develop other sources of energy that are renewable and clean.
The prospects are frightening, but climate angst has an antidote.
Wind and solar, for sure.
There’s another vast storehouse of energy on half the world’s doorstep — Earth’s oceans.
Covering three quarters of the planet’s surface, they store colossal volumes of heat, that can be tapped.
So can the kinetic energy from ocean waves and tides.
This past spring, in the Dutch capital of Den Haag, several hundred entrepreneurs and engineers came together to showcase innovative devices for doing just that, at the annual gathering of Ocean Energy Europe.
Listen to some voices the GPM gathered. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Alejandro Marques de Magallanes Crespo, founder of Magallanes Renovables
Talking about the energy of ocean tides — rising and falling like clockwork, under the influence of the moon — no better place to tap this colossal energy resource than the Shetland Islands, on the northern tip of Scotland, and in the Bay of Fundy, between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, in eastern Canada, home to the highest tides in the world.
That’s what a company called Nova Innovation is doing. Simon Forrest is founder and CEO. In a quiet spot on the margins of last spring’s Ocean Energy Europe conference, in The Hague, the GPM sat down for a chat with Simon.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Petit Passage, on the Bay of Fundy, where a Nova turbine will soon generate tidal energy
Conferences are fun. Lots of interesting people to meet and sessions to attend.
Better still, heading out into the field. Especially if it’s North Holland. That’s where the GPM went, last spring, on a bus trip organized by the Dutch Energy From Water Association, together with forty ocean energy innovators from around the world.
Our first stop: Den Helder, at the manufacturing facility of Symphony Wave Power, to see their wave energy demonstrator. Fred Gardner is Symphony’s founder.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Rik Siebers, Director of REDstack, showing small-scale model of reverse electrodialysis
Of all the forms of energy readily available to coastal communities around the world, none is more intriguing than salt.
To be more precise, salt gradients. Wherever fresh river water flows into salty ocean, that freshwater gets infused with sodium, calcium, chloride and sulfate ions, and salt gradients form. Make this happen across a plastic membrane, under controlled conditions, you generate electricity.
Reverse electrodialysis, it’s called. No better place to see this in action – indeed, the only place – than the Afsluitdijk. Check it out on a map. It’s that long highway, built on a dike between the Dutch provinces of North Holland and Friesland, separating the freshwater Ijsselmeer from the salty Waddenzee.
Afsluitdijk
Right in the middle of the Afsluitdijk, a company called REDstack is bringing fresh and saltwater together, and putting electricity into the Dutch grid. RED stands for Reverse Electrodialysis.
The first voice you’ll hear is Peter Scheijgrond, Chairman of the Dutch Energy From Water Association, our tour leader last spring. Then Rik Siebers, REDstack’s Managing Director and Michael van Oostrom, Head of Market Development.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
GPM # 74Five weeks shy of the first anniversary of October 7, 2023 and the launch of Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza, the GPM sat down with one of the conflict’s most astute observers, Mouin Rabbani.
Rabbani shared his thoughts about Israel’s genocidal war, the Palestinian people’s depleted, divided and leaderless ‘national liberation movement’ (a state of affairs much to Israel-USA’s liking), and about the much touted ‘Axis of Resistance’ — a coalition of independent parties that know how far to push Israel, ostensibly on behalf of the Palestinian people, without damaging their own interests.
Shifting perceptions of the self-declared ‘Jewish State’ in Europe, the US, and within Israel itself, and recent groundbreaking developments at the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court, all point towards an uncertain future for Palestinians and Israelis alike, Rabbani tells the GPM in this interview.
Mouin Rabbani is a Dutch-Palestinian researcher, analyst, and commentator specializing in Palestinian affairs, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and contemporary Middle East issues. He’s served as the head of political affairs with the Office of the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, and as Senior Middle East Analyst and Special Advisor on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group.
These days, Rabbani is a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, and co-Editor of Jadaliyya.com.
The GPM spoke with Mouin Rabbani in The Hague. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Mouin Rabbani (David Kattenburg)
GPM # 73“It’s the economy, stupid.”
In search of US presidential campaign slogans summing up what concerned voters, this was the catchiest Bill Clinton strategist Jim Carville came up with, back in 1992.
“Change vs. more of the same” and “Don’t forget health care” were much less memorable.
Thirty-two years and eight presidential campaigns later, another pressing issue is on the minds of those who’d likely vote for Kamala Harris, if she gets on the right page — an arms embargo on Israel, and a US-enforced halt to the Gaza genocide.
The GPM spoke about the Harris campaign and Israel-USA’s ongoing Gaza genocide with Medea Benjamin, co-founder and tireless guerilla activist with the American feminist antiwar group, CODEPINK.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above or go here.
Gaza (Tasnim News Agency)
Here’s another slogan – ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall be Free’.
Sounds righteous, no? Calling for freedom … or an end to non-freedom?
According to allies and advocates of the ‘Jewish State’ of Israel, this popular slogan is horridly antisemitic – a vulgar rallying cry for racial hatred and genocide.
In the Federal Republic of Germany, shouting out this phrase can land you a stiff fine, or get your fired.
Earlier this month, a Berlin court slapped a 600 Euro fine (about 600 US dollars) on a young German-Iranian woman for shouting out this two-phrase declaration at a Berlin rally, four days after Hamas’ assault on southern Israel.
Bad timing. According to a court spokesperson, the slogan “could only be understood as a denial of Israel’s right to exist.” All the more reprehensible, Judge Birgit Balzer sniffed, given Germany’s responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust, and its sacred obligation to be perpetually penitent.
Staatsräson, it’s called. Reason of state. To learn more about Staatsräson — and the hazards of calling for Palestinian liberation in Germany, especially if you’re a person of colour — the GPM reached out to Wieland Hoban, Chairman of Germany’s Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East — Jüdische Stimme.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above or go here.
Listen to our complete conversation here:
Konrad Adenauer, architect of Staatsräson
And … Shout out about to another Harbinger Media Network podcast you might be interested in — Cyborg Goddess: a Feminist Tech Podcast. Host Jennifer Jill Fellows interviews researchers about the effects of technology. From bicycles to vibrators, birth control to fitbits, social media to chatGPT, Cyborg Goddess unpacks it all from a feminist intersectional lens. Check them out here.
GPM # 72Seventy-nine years ago, on August 6, 1945, the US dropped a uranium-enriched fission bomb, code named ‘Little Boy’, on the Japanese port city, Hiroshima.
Three days later, they dropped a second bomb, a plutonium-implosion device — Fat Man — on Nagasaki.
When the dust settled, between 130 and 225,000 people were dead or dying. To this day, casualty numbers vary widely. One thing is clear: they were almost all civilians.
Thousands more would sicken and die in the years to come.
America’s public rationale for its nuclear bombing of Japan: avoiding the huge casualties that supposedly would have resulted from putting boots on Japanese ground.
Other, more cynical reasons would emerge in time.
Here’s a story about America’s development of the bomb, adapted from a documentary produced by Clive Baugh, Ed Reece and David Kattenburg back in 1986. It takes its name from a prose-poem by the American Trappist monk, theologian, mystic and writer Thomas Merton.
The story features interviews with German-American nuclear physicist Hans Bethe, the head of the theoretical physics division of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where America’s first nuclear ‘device’, Trinity, was developed, and the winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics. We interviewed Bethe in his office at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. A memorable conversation.
You’ll also hear Martin Johns, late Professor Emeritus of physics at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, and researcher at Canada’s Chalk River nuclear facility. Johns joined the McMaster faculty in 1947, and helped manage its small experimental particle accelerator. He shares the history of Canada’s involvement in the development of America’s nuclear bombs (The Canadians were indeed involved. Listen to Hans Bethe).
And Rosalie Bertell, late anti-nuclear campaigner and authority on the effects of ionizing radiation. Bertell was a sister of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart, and author of the 1985 work No Immediate Danger – Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth. She won the 1986 Right Livelihood Award — the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ — for “raising public awareness about the destruction of the biosphere and human gene pool, especially by low-level radiation.”
Thanks to Brenda Muller for her cello and Michael J. Birthelmer for his guitar. And to the Firesign Theatre, America’s counterculture comics.
Listen to all these voices in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Almost eighty years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the real reasons for America’s hideous assault have been unearthed by a small army of scholars. Among these – a guy named Glenn Alcalay. Alcalay is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, at City University of New York.
Back in the mid-1970s, Alcalay spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Marshall Islands, just north of the equator, in the Central Pacific. The US carried out 67 nuclear tests there, between 1946 and 1958.
The biggest was Bravo, its first deliverable hydrogen bomb, detonated at Bikini Atoll, in the central Marshalls, on March 1, 1954. Alcalay spent those two years on a small atoll downwind from Bikini. Inspired by that experience, he began researching the impacts of US weapons testing on the Marshallese people — and the true history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The stuff you won’t learn about from the blockbuster film, Oppenheimer.
Listen to our conversation with Glenn Alcalay. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Old observation tower pad on Bikini Island (David Kattenburg)
It’s a sobering truth – that few know. Having dropped those two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, eighty years ago, America would probably not have become the most powerful nation in the world had it not been for a string of atolls in the central Pacific, and the hospitable islanders who let it test its arsenal there.
They didn’t have much choice. America tested its first bomb, Trinity, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. It dropped its second and third bombs on Japan. A year later — having been handed the Marshall Islands as a Strategic Trust by the UN — the US set out to use it as the testing ground for its now burgeoning nuclear arsenal. In July 1946, the US set off Able and Baker at Bikini Atoll, in the central Marshalls.
Twenty-one more would follow, including the leviathan, 15-megatonne Bravo blast, on March 1, 1954. Forty-four bombs were tested at Eniwetok atoll, in the northern Marshalls. Read a detailed account of the history of the Marshall Islands here, written back in 2007.
Nothing much has changed since then. Bikini is still contaminated, and has not been resettled. Radiation monitoring continues. Health impact claims adjudicated and awarded by the new defunct Nuclear Claims Tribunal have yet to be paid. Trust funds administered since 2016 by Bikini leaders have reportedly been squandered.
A third Compact of Free Association between the US and the Republic of the Marshall Islands is on track to be approved this Fall.
The Marshalls faithfully vote the way Washington tells them to at the UN — most famously, alongside neighboring Pacific island states, in opposition to UN resolutions condemning Israel or calling for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.
The US continues to fire missiles at Kwajalein Atoll from California and Alaska, and nearby Ebeye is still packed like a sardine can.
Not surprisingly, the Marshallese people are as friendly as ever. Diabetes and heart disease kill more of them than nuclear-related cancers.
Listen to this story about the Marshall Islands in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
GPM # 71On July 19, the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, issued a historic ruling.
In an 83-page Advisory Opinion, addressed to the UN General Assembly, the UN’s top court declared that Israel’s 56-year belligerent occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza is unlawful, and that Israel must terminate it in short order.
The self-declared ‘Jewish State’ must also stop building settlements, the ICJ advised the UN, evacuate all its settlers, allow Palestinians to return to their lands, and compensate them for the losses and damages they’ve suffered.
The last time the ICJ issued an Advisory Opinion on the so-called Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’, back in 2004, it focused on the Separation Wall Israel was building, largely on Palestinian land. The Wall was illegal, the court declared, an infringement of the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination in their historic homeland, and had to come down.
Israel ignored the order, and the international community hasn’t enforced it. ICJ Advisory Opinions are non-binding. They do carry enormous judicial authority, however.
Item 7 of the court’s July 19 Advisory Opinion, passed by a vote of 12-3, declared that “all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
Will the UN’s most powerful member states honor that obligation, and cut Israel off? The US certainly won’t. How about steadfast US and Israeli ally Canada?
In search of wisdom on this thorny question, the GPM reached out to Peter Larson. Larson is an Ottawa-based researcher and blogger, Chair of the Ottawa Forum on Israel/Palestine, and author of a weekly newsletter called CanadaTalksIsraelPalestine. He’s also taught a course about the Middle East at Carleton University, and has taken groups of Canadians on tours up and down occupied Palestine, guiding them through the ‘complexities’ of Israel-Palestine’s so-called ‘conflict’.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
U.S. and allied aircraft at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, July 19, 2023
An astonishing fact: In the 248 years since the United States of America became an independent republic, the US has only been at peace for about eleven.
The United States of War, you could call it. David Vine does. Vine is a Professor of Anthropology at American University, in Washington D.C., and the author of a trilogy of books about permanent war as an American way of life, and about the role military bases play in its warfighting pursuits – across North America, at first; then around the world. The latest, published in 2020 by University of California Press, is entitled The United States of War – a Global History of America’s endless conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
GPM # 70Guess what? Mobile phones are covered in germs.
Duhh … You talk into them. You spit on them. You touch them with hands you just sneezed or coughed into! You take them into the toilet!
The GPM spoke about the dark, dirty side of smart phones with Lotti Tajouri, Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics at Bond University, in Robina, Australia.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast, or go here.
The US anti-abortion movement portrays itself as ‘pro-life’, ‘pro-family’, and conventionally conservative – whatever that may mean.
Close to the surface, something darker bubbles: a wellspring of misogyny, racism, hatred toward immigrants and antipathy for personal freedom of all sorts. Among these, the freedom of a woman to control her own body.
The GPM spoke about the history of women’s reproductive rights with Lauren MacIvor Thompson, Assistant Professor of History at Kennesaw State University, in Kennesaw, Georgia, and a historian of early-twentieth-century women’s rights and public health at Georgia State University College of Law’s Center for Law, Health & Society.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast, or go here.
GPM # 69Wheat: genus Triticum. It’s a grass, a cereal, cultivated around the world for its grain, across vast swaths of land.
Alongside maize and rice, wheat is the food staple for human beings here on Planet Earth.
Wheat has come a long way since humans began cultivating it, 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent. Of the dozens of species, Triticum aestivum is the most commonly grown these days.
Since the launch of the Green Revolution, sixty years ago, Triticum has come to be bred for a half dozen traits best suited for mass production — yield being the most crucial. The payoff has been huge. Wheat accounts for an estimated fifth of the calories Earth’s eight billion, 123 million people consume.
Wheat field in Ukraine
But success also breeds frailty. In a warming world, inbred wheat is poorly adapted to heat stress, and stressed wheat is more vulnerable to pathogens and pests.
Now, plant geneticists are combing through wheat’s huge genetic source code — its genome — in search of useful traits lost by the wayside over the past hundred years of hybridization and inbreeding, and the genes that code for them.
At the John Innes Centre, in the UK, researchers are drilling down into the DNA of wheat varieties gathered from fields around the world, by a very inquisitive man named Arthur Watkins. It’s a genetic gold mine, now fully sequenced by scientists in China, led by Professor Shifeng Cheng at the Agricultural Genomics Institute in Shenzhen.
Read their research study here.
The GPM spoke with Simon Griffiths about the Watkins Collection and its DNA sequencing. Griffiths is Group Leader at the Delivering Sustainable Wheat Programme of the John Innes Centre, in Norwich, England.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Ethiopian farmer Birtukan Kebede shows off some prize grains of heritage wheat (David Kattenburg)
This past Friday, the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, issued a landmark ruling.
In an 83-page Advisory Opinion, addressed to the UN General Assembly, that solicited it, the UN’s top court declared that Israel’s 56-year belligerent occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza is unlawful, and that Israel must terminate it in short order.
The self-declared ‘Jewish State’ must also stop building settlements, the ICJ advised the UN, evacuate all its settlers, allow Palestinians to return to their lands, and compensate them for the losses and damages they’ve suffered.
The last time the ICJ issued an Advisory Opinion on the so-called Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’, it focused on the Separation Wall Israel was building, largely on Palestinian land. The Wall was illegal, the court declared — an infringement of the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination in their historic homeland — and had to come down.
Israel ignored the order, and the international community hasn’t enforced it. ICJ Advisory Opinions are non-binding.
They do carry enormous judicial authority, however. Days before the release of the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on the ‘Legal Consequences’ of Israel’s prolonged occupation, the GPM discussed its significance with Michael Lynk, a Canadian legal scholar, retired faculty member at Western University, in Ontario, and former UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in occupied Palestine.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Bethlehem protest against Israeli occupation (David Kattenburg)
GPM # 68The pollution of Earth’s atmosphere by fossil fuel burning is just one of the insults our planet faces in this human-engineered age of ours – the Anthropocene.
In their relentless hunger for food, fiber and fuel, humans have transformed an estimated three quarters of the planet’s vegetated land surface, and a quarter of its natural productivity.
Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production, or HANPP, this is called. Fridolin Krausmann is an authority on this phenomenon and metric. Krausmann is professor of sustainable resource use at the Institute of Social Ecology, at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, in Vienna.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Credit: Andrew S. Wright
It’s something human beings take for granted. The World is a very human place.
Covered by concrete and tall buildings; cars racing this way and that; food from all corners of the planet.
Some green space — for us humans.
Earth’s human age has a name – the Anthropocene. Dutch chemist Paul Crützen coined the term, twenty years ago. The Anthropocene, Crützen said, should be declared a new ‘Epoch’ in Earth history, terminating the one we’ve been in for the past 12,000 years, the Holocene.
Last year, a panel of scientists recommended that Crützen’s idea be moved up a notch, formally designating the Anthropocene in the geological community’s official time scale.
That idea got deep-sixed earlier this year by higher geological authorities. The Anthropocene idea is too political, they argue.
John McNeill was an advisory member of the Anthropocene Working Group, and a colleague of Paul Crützen’s. McNeill is associated with the idea that the Anthropocene began in the mid-20th century, at the start of something called the Great Acceleration, when the scale, scope and pace of humanity’s impact on Planet Earth started to skyrocket.
John McNeill is a professor of environmental history at Georgetown University, in the US. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
GPM # 67Israel’s assault on Gaza – plausibly genocidal, according to the International Court of Justice – is now into its tenth month. Almost 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by American bombs and missiles, half of them women and children. Unknown numbers lie dead and rotting beneath the rubble.
Ninety thousand have been injured.
Apartment blocks, schools, universities, hospitals, places of worship, cultural institutions and most of Gaza’s sewage treatment infrastructure are now in ruins.
Hunger and infectious disease are rampant.
Late last month, the UN-affiliated Famine Review Committee announced its latest appalling figures:
In north Gaza, 45% of households are in an ‘emergency’ food security situation, a number projected to rise to 50% by the end of the summer. Twenty percent face catastrophe.
Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, in central Gaza, and southern Rafah, fare slightly better.
Backing off projections issued in late March, the Review Committee said that famine, as formally defined, has yet to emerge – but it may well in the months to come.
The Israeli government and its lobbyists quickly jumped on this, arguing that the situation in Gaza is better than everyone says.
Tell that to the International Criminal Court.
In late May, Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan announced he’ll be seeking arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders.
Topping the crimes the British barrister says Netanyahu and Gallant bear criminal responsibility for: starvation as a method of warfare.
A panel of ICC judges are expected to rule on Khan’s application later this summer.
Three weeks from today (July 26), British lawyers will submit a brief to the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber, urging it to reject Khan’s application. The tightest of Israel’s tight friends (indeed, the intellectual authors of the Zionist state’s creation, and parallel dispossession of Palestine’s indigenous people), the UK will argue that Netanyahu, Gallant and other Israeli leaders are immune from prosecution under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
In search of wisdom about hunger and starvation as weapons of war, the GPM reached out to Alex de Waal.
De Waal is the Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation, and an authority on human rights, governance, peace-building and global response to food crises. His books include The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa, and Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine, both published by Polity Press. Alex de Waal teaches a course on Conflict in Africa at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, in Boston.
Listen to our conversation with Alex de Waal in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Listen to our complete conversation here:
Forcible starvation and infectious disease are famous dance partners. From colonial America’s genocidal western expansion to Darfur to Democratic Kampuchea, engineered starvation and infection have gone hand in hand.
Now Gaza: reduced to rubble; a million and a half of its people displaced, half of them children; no safe place to rest their heads and eat a healthy meal; packed into crowded tent camps, on the floors of UN refugee centers (a favourite target for Israeli airstrikes), or on the street.
No better conditions for respiratory infection, diarrhea and hepatitis to spread, communicated by rats and mosquitoes, now breeding in open pools of sewage water.
To learn more about the gathering infectious disease crisis in little Gaza – nine months into Israel’s genocidal war – the GPM spoke with the global spokesperson for the World Health Organization. Margaret Harris is a physician, an epidemiologist and a former journalist.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Listen to our complete conversation here:
GPM # 66Back in late May, Spain, Ireland and Norway declared their formal recognition of Palestinian statehood. One hundred-forty five out 193 UN member states now do so.
In situations like this, Israel doesn’t just fulminate. It doubles down on its illegal activities — activities it knows it can carry out with impunity — all the while turning the screws on Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank.
One day after Spain, Ireland and Norway’s statehood recognition came into effect, the Israeli military announced that dozens of bylaws governing its administration of the occupied West Bank would be transferred to pro-settlement civil servants under the supervision of far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
The move consolidates Israel’s effective annexation of the West Bank, flagrantly illegal under international law.
In a subsequent move, Smotrich announced that five so-called ‘illegal outposts’ would be formally legalized.
Halamish settlement, in the northern West Bank (David Kattenburg)
An estimated 750,000 Jewish settler-colonists now live in hundreds of fully developed colonies up and down the West Bank. Among the most violent, those living in the southern West Bank city of Hebron.
No one knows more about Israeli settler violence and land theft — aided and abetted by the Israeli military — than Atta Jaber. Jaber lives on a plot of land across Highway 60 from Kiryat Arba, a large settlement on the edge of Hebron.
Jaber’s family has owned the land for generations. Since the 1980s, his land and property have been steadily seized and destroyed. The GPM visited Atta Jaber back in 2022, in the company of Israeli activist Jeff Halper, founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).
Listen to Jeff and Atta in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Nine months into Israel’s assault on Gaza – widely described as genocidal by legal scholars; a position deemed “plausible” by the International Court of Justice – a top UN committee has just weighed in on the whole sorry affair.
The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel,” it’s called. More simply, the Pillay Commission, after its chair, South African jurist Navi Pillay.
Pillay, a South African jurist of Indian Tamil origin, has a lengthy resume: first non-white woman judge of the High Court of South Africa; UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014; former judge of the International Criminal Court, President of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and Commissioner of the International Commission Against the Death Penalty.
Established in May 2021, the Pillay Commission has issued a handful of reports and a host of press releases. This past June 12, it delivered its most recent report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Words were not minced. Israeli authorities, Pillay told the Council, are responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare, murder, intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects, forcible transfer, sexual violence and torture, and the crimes against humanity of extermination, gender persecution, murder, forcible transfer, and torture.
Hamas and six other Palestinian armed groups have committed plenty of war crimes themselves, Pillay went on.
Having been denied entry to either Gaza or Israel ‘proper’ (standard Israeli procedure for all UN agencies independent experts), the Commission based its findings on interviews carried out in Turkey and Egypt, and other documentary evidence.
The Commission’s assessment of Hamas’ October 7 attack, and Israel’s response, are contained in a 21-page report to the Council, and a pair of detailed companion reports about Hamas’ October 7 attack, and Israel’s response.
Listen to Navi Pillay in today’s podcast, speaking to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on June 12. Click on the play button above, or go here.
As Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza unfolds — drawing attention away from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War Two — thoughts turn to the First World War, the one that was supposed to end all wars.
On August 4, 1914 – almost 110 years ago — Germany invaded little Belgium. Three weeks later, in an orgy of destruction, German troops laid seven Belgian towns to waste.
The “Martyr Cities,” they came to be called. Leuven – Louvain, in French — was one of them.
Of all the acts committed by German troops in Leuven in August 1914, none sparked more international outrage than the destruction of Leuven University library, a treasure trove of European literature and art, torched by the Germans on the night of August 25, 1914.
Here’s a story I produced on the hundredth anniversary of that dreadful event – an event elderly residents of Leuven remember. Click on the play button above, or go here.
GPM # 65It’s a living web beneath our feet – a tangled network of microscopic tubes weaving through the soil, pulsating with nutrients, tying the roots of trees and other plants into vast networks.
Mycorrhizal fungi they’re called. Most plants rely on them entirely.
But, mycorrhizal fungi do more than just feed plants. They cycle carbon from atmosphere to soil and back again, regulating Earth’s climate – and they face a host of threats. Soil scientists have come together to protect fungal networks, and are calling on citizens to help out.
Listen to this story in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
http://www.greenplanetmonitor.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/20201209_plate40_15_gem.mp4Complex flows inside the hyphae of an arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (Credit: Loreto Oyarte Galvez, AMOLF + VU, Amsterdam)
Human emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases has warmed Earth’s surface temperature by about 1.1 degrees Celsius, relative to the late 19th century, at a rate of about three tenths of a degree per decade since 1980.
That rate is steadily rising.
As Earth’s surface warms, thermal expansion and melting ice sheets have raised sea levels by two tenths of a meter.
That rate is rising too.
Slow and steady for years to come? Think again.
In a recent report, a team of scientists warn about tipping points — points of inflection where Earth warming and the destruction of Earth’s living fabric become non-linear and unstoppable, and where Earth systems start shifting to new, potentially dangerous states.
Twenty-five tipping points have been identified. Five major ones may already have been transgressed. More could soon be tripped, potentially triggering a cascade of amplifying feedbacks across Earth’s interlocked climate system and biosphere.
Globalized human economies and societies will inevitably suffer.
As if all this weren’t scary enough, “there is no adequate global governance at the scale of the threats posed by negative tipping points,” the report’s authors warn. Manjana Milkoreit is one of them. Milkoreit is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, and lead author of a chapter of the report about tipping point governance.
The GPM reached Manjana Milkoreit in Oslo. Listen our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Cootes Paradise (David Kattenburg)
Intact, natural ecosystems are home to a wide range of plants and animals. Cities are ecosystems too. The healthiest ones coexist with nature.
On the edge of one of Canada’s largest cities, the benefits provided by natural ecosystems, and the importance of protecting them, are on display. Here’s a story from Hamilton, Ontario – a place called Cootes Paradise. Click on the play button above, or go here.
GPM # 64What makes music sound funky? What makes it sound thrilling, sad, offbeat or downright strange? What makes you hum along, before you even know what notes come next?
Music is hardwired in your brain. I spoke about all this with Roger Dumas. Dumas is a neuromusicologist and brain-audio innovator, with a long, and interesting career. Having introduced Janet Jackson, Prince and other hip artists to the Moog synthesizer, Roger took up research work at the University of Minnesota’s Brain Sciences Center. These days, Dumas is working on behavioral and neuroimaging, and the validation of a musical chill-identifying algorithm.
Listen to our conversation with Roger Dumas. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Roger Dumas and his Moog synthesizers (David Kattenburg)
Then, there’s the sounds of silence — formerly sound-rich ecosystems, bursting with bird songs and insect buzz, that don’t resonate like they used to.
Earth’s oceans, filled with sound wave artists of all sizes, have fallen silent too.
Or, maybe it’s human noise that’s drowning out the sounds of nature, along with all the chatter and noise in our head.
People need to quiet down, focus and listen harder. They need to come to their auditory senses. Bernie Krause and Hildegard Westerkamp think so. Bernie Krause is a soundscape ecologist based in northern California. Armed with various recording devices, Krause — the originator of the acoustic niche and biophony concepts — has captured the sounds and songs of creatures large and small, above and below ground, and inside trees.
Hildegard Westerkamp is a Vancouver-based composer, radio artist and sound ecologist, and an alumnus of something called the World Soundscape Project. Westerkamp’s soundscape installations and small group soundwalks, down Vancouver streets, are renowned.
Listen to our conversation with Hildegard Westerkamp and Bernie Krause in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
GPM # 63Wanna destroy a people in whole or in part? In other words, commit genocide – as genocide is defined under international law?
You don’t need gas chambers or firing squads and deep ditches. Just destroy their schools and universities.
Bomb their libraries, archives and cultural institutions; seize their historical records. Make it as hard as possible for their kids to go to school.
“With more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed,” a group of UN experts declared in an April 18 statement, “it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’.”
The GPM spoke with the statement’s lead author.
First, listen to this: two attorneys for the government of South Africa, this past January, arguing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, in The Hague.
Tembeka Ngcukaitobi is a South African lawyer and legal scholar, and a member of South Africa’s Judicial Services Commission. Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh is an Irish human rights and international law expert at Matrix Chambers, in London.
Listen to Ngcukaitobi and Ní Ghrálaigh in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Little kids go to school in Hebron, occupied Palestine (David Kattenburg)
Numbers speak louder than words.
Since Israel’s assault on Gaza began, back on October 7, at least 60 percent of the besieged enclave’s educational facilities have been damaged or destroyed.
Israa University, the last remaining higher educational institution in Gaza, was demolished on January 17.
Today, over 600 thousand Gazan students have no access to education.
Or books. Thirteen Gaza public libraries are now in ruins.
Some 200 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed. Among these, Gaza 7th century Omari Mosque, a center of Islamic faith and learning, demolished in an Israeli airstrike back in December.
A Hamas stronghold, the Israeli military said.
Gaza’s Central Archives, repository of 150 years of Palestinian history, is reportedly in ruins.
In the course of all this physical annihilation, Israeli military forces have killed at least 5500 students, 260 teachers and 95 university professors.
These figures were contained in an April 18 statement by two dozen UN Special Rapporteurs and subject experts. The GPM reached out to the statement’s lead author, Farida Shaheed. Shaheed is the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Yousef Najajreh in his lab, Al-Quds University (David Kattenburg)
Getting an elementary, secondary or university education in Palestine these days is one thing. Doing top-drawer scientific research is another.
That’s what Yousef Najajreh has been doing for quite a number of years, under Israel military occupation and apartheid. Najajreh is a molecular pharmacologist in the faculties of Bethlehem and Al-Quds Universities, in occupied Palestine.
The GPM has spoken and hung out with Yousef on a host of occasions, most recently this past May. Here’s a conversation of ours from back in 2022 – in the midst of Covid – and in the wake of Israeli government legislation clamping down on visits by foreign academics to Palestinian campuses.
From Yousef, we’ll segue to Palestine’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, speaking to the International Court of Justice back in February, on the opening day of hearings on the legal consequences of Israel’s ‘prolonged’ occupation of Palestine.
Listen to these voices in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Al-Quds University Students (David Kattenburg)
GPM # 62The wheels of justice turn slowly, nowhere more slowly than at the world’s top international courts, where lawless powerful states and their allies enjoy impunity — perhaps.
No state commits crimes with more assured impunity than the State of Israel. Its unique dispensation may be crumbling.
Last week in The Hague, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, British barrister Karim Khan, announced that he’ll be seeking arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, for a host of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza – among these, starvation as a weapon of war, willful killing and murder, extermination and persecution.
“Reasonable grounds” also exist for charging Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader inside Gaza, the Commander-in-Chief of Hamas’ military wing, and Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’ political bureau, for a host of crimes committed since “at least” October 7, Khan also announced.
Four days later, across town from the ICC, the international community’s top judicial body, the International Court of Justice, ordered Israel to suspend its military operations in the southern Gazan city, Rafah, to open the Rafah crossing to humanitarian aid, and to let international observers in to ensure that evidence of genocide is not destroyed.
The ICJ ruling was issued in response to an ongoing case initiated by South Africa against Israel, in January, under the 1994 Genocide Convention. This was the fourth time South Africa asked the Court to order Israel to halt its assault on Gaza.
For Israel, last week’s ICJ ruling was the latest twist in a slow-motion legal train wreck. Long accustomed to doing what it wants – with impunity — Israeli leaders are now doubling down on their lawless acts, both in Gaza and the West Bank.
To learn more about last week’s landmark rulings at the ICC and ICJ, the GPM reached out to three legal and human rights scholars. In today’s podcast, you’ll hear Toby Cadman first. Cadman is a British barrister specializing in international criminal, human rights and humanitarian law. He’s the co-founder of The Guernica Group and Joint Head of Chambers at Guernica 37 International Justice Chambers in London.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Watch our conversation here:
To learn more about Karim Khan’s applications for arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders at the ICC – what they say and what they don’t – the GPM reached out to Canadian legal scholar William Schabas. Schabas is Professor Emeritus of International Criminal Law and Human Rights at Leiden University, and professor of international law at Middlesex University in the UK. Among the twenty books he’s authored — The International Criminal Court: A Commentary on the Rome Statute, and Genocide in International Law. Schabas was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2006.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Watch our conversation here:
No one has followed the international legal dimensions of Israel’s prolonged, effectively permanent occupation of Palestine more than Michael Lynk. Lynk is a retired professor of law at Western University, in Ontario. Between 2016 and 2022, Lynk served as the seventh UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian Territories.
The GPM reached out to Michael Lynk for his thoughts on arrest warrants soon to be issued against top Israeli and Hamas leaders at the International Criminal Court, and about this past Friday’s ruling by the International Court of Justice, ordering Israel to halt its military assault on the southern Gaza city, Rafah.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Watch our conversation here:
GPM # 61Israel’s assault on Gaza is now into its eighth month. As Israel wages war on Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied, effectively annexed West Bank, Western governments wage war on their own citizens who condemn Israeli crimes – on students, faculty and off-campus antiwar protestors, many of them Jewish.
McCarthyism is abroad, once more — communications surveilled; gatherings banned; reputations smeared; careers ruined; artists blackballed; academics dragged before angry legislatures.
Scoundrel time revisited. Back then it was communism. Today’s it’s Palestine.
Social media bursts with images of pro-Gaza, anti-genocide protestors young and old, on the ground, beaten, tasered, handcuffed and dragged away.
Much more tranquilly, on May 13, prominent Jewish-Israeli historian Ilan Pappé was interrogated for over two hours by FBI agents at Detroit Metro Airport. Pappé is a history professor at the University of Exeter, in the UK, and the author of the groundbreaking 2006 work, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
Did he support Hamas, FBI agents asked Pappé in that little room on the edge of Motown? Was Israel’s war on Gaza genocidal? Did Pappé have Arab and Muslim friends in the Detroit area? What is the solution to the ‘conflict’?
After a lengthy exchange with someone on the phone (Pappé thinks they were Israeli), airport coppers returned his phone and waived him on.
British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah didn’t fare so well.
Last April 12, at Berlin airport, heading to a big Palestine conference, Abu-Sittah was detained, questioned for hours, then put back on a plane to London.
Abu-Sittah is the Rector of the University of Glasgow, and an expert in plastic and reconstructive surgery. Know one knows more about the bloody carnage Israel’s war has inflicted, especially on little kids, than Ghassan Abu-Sittah.
Not something German authorities wanted him to talk about. Hours later, dozens of German police broke up the conference he was going to attend. The Palestine Congress had barely convened. Heavily armed German cops cut off power and a live feed, and emptied out the crowded hall. One of the organizers, a Jewish activist, was reportedly arrested.
This story grows. Three weeks later, on May 4, Abu-Sittah was halted in his tracks at a Paris airport. Scheduled to address a symposium at the French Senate, French authorities told him to go away. Why? A Schengen ban had been placed on him.
Originally designed to stop football hooligans from traveling match to match within Europe’s border-free Schengen zone, a Schengen fatwa had just been slapped on the Israel critic — by Germany!
Schengen bans being what they are, the Dutch followed suit, blocking Abu-Sittah from attending a May 17 session of the Netherlands’ Rights Forum, in Amsterdam. Abu-Sittah had also planned to meet two Dutch MPs, and present details about Israel’s use of white phosphorus to a chemical weapons monitoring organization.
Thanks to the efforts of the European Legal Support Center, Germany’s fatwa against the eminent surgeon has just been lifted, though not in time to attend the Rights Forum gathering. Instead, Abu-Sittah beamed in, on Zoom.
Listen to Ghassan Abu-Sittah in this edition of the GPM. Click on the play button above or go here. You’ll also hear Dutch anesthesiologist Sara Galli, with Artsen Voor Gaza (Doctors For Gaza). Berber van der Woude, a political scientist, moderates the session.
Flag Woman in Rotterdam, October 2023 (David Kattenburg)
Germany’s Schengen fatwa on Ghassan Abu-Sittah has recently been lifted, thanks to the efforts of the European Legal Support Centre. The ELSC supports and defends advocates for Palestinian rights across mainland Europe and the UK. Tobias den Haan is a legal researcher with the center. Listen to den Haan in this edition of the GPM, speaking at last Friday’s Rights Forum gathering, in Amsterdam, in conversation with moderator Berber van der Woude. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Palestine solidarity activists have been doxed, smeared, fired and arrested for years, increasingly so with the widespread adoption of the pro-Israel IHRA — the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism.
October 7 moved the repression up a notch. Over the past month, almost 3000 students have been arrested on US campuses, in the course of peaceful protests against what the International Court of Justice considers plausible Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Here in Europe, no country is more hostile to free speech about the nature of the Israeli state and its core ideology, Zionism, and about the fate of the perpetually subjugated Palestinian people, than Germany.
Listen to British-German activist Wieland Hoband speak about this at that Rights Forum gathering this past Friday, in the wake of the busting up of that Palestine Congress in Berlin, and about the deep roots of Germany’s undying commitment to the ‘Jewish State’ (you may be surprised).
Hoband is a British-German composer and translator, and co-founder of the German group Jüdische Stimme – Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East.
GPM # 60Palestine solidarity protests have been taking place around the world, no more dramatically – and in the face of brutal police violence – than on university campuses.
In the Netherlands, students and faculty can expect to be dealt with in two very different ways.
At the end of March, at the most august proceedings of the University of Utrecht’s 388th birthday gathering, in a magnificent old church — Dies Natalis — a handful of students and faculty stood up and spoke out against genocide in Gaza.
True to the event’s theme — democracy and free speech – they got three and a half minutes to state their case during the opening comments of the university’s Rector Magnificus, and another ninety seconds in the middle of the keynote address by a professor of public management to hold up an anti-genocide banner in front of the podium.
Oppose unfolding Israeli genocide in Gaza, student and faculty protesters insisted. Disclose ties with Israeli universities and companies, and commit to an academic boycott.
The gowned rectors listened – with deaf ears, protesters told the GPM.
Standing close by with a microphone, Utrecht U. president Anton Pijpers did his best to hasten the termination of their interventions.
Watch this video of Utrecht U.’s Dies Natalis proceedings. Student and staff interventions at 8:29 and 24:24. Also check out the featured video interview with a pro-Palestine faculty member, draped in a keffiyeh. (pretty sporting of Utrecht U. to make all this available!)
Feeling ignored following months of letter-writing and their Die Natalis disruption, on May 7, students and faculty set up a protest encampment in a university courtyard. Riot police evicted them, violently, reportedly on the request of president Pijpers. Protesters were driven by bus to a remote location and dumped – a process reportedly referred to as “administrative displacement.”
The next day, students and faculty struck again, occupying a campus building. Once again, violence was meted out, this time involving the ‘Romeos’ – a notorious Dutch police unit consisting of masked cops disguised as protesters.
Infuriated, this past Monday, May 13, Dutch university faculty and students staged walkouts – in Amsterdam and Utrecht. The GPM attended the Utrecht protests. Listen to to today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
The GPM also rendezvoused with two of the students who participated in the March 27 Dies Natalis disruption, at a large pro-Gaza march in Amsterdam. Raha and Jeran are Masters students at Utrecht U. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
‘Palestine shall be free’ in Arabic (David Kattenburg)
In response to the violent police assault on Utrecht University staff and students on May 7 and 8, called in by university and city officials, on May 13, Utrecht students and staff staged a walkout.
A loud gathering and die-in unfolded in front of the university’s administration building. Come on out and speak to us, instructors asked university officials. They wanted to speak with Anton Pijpers. Pijpers declined. Vice Rector of Administration, Margot van der Starre, came out instead — acquitting herself with considerable grace.
A very well trained crowd of students repeated van der Starre’s words in smartly phrased chorus. Listen to all this in this GPM podcast edition. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Utrecht U. vice-rector Margot van der Starre speaks to student and faculty protesters (David Kattenburg)
After their noisy encounter with vice rector van der Starre, a handful of protesting instructors stepped into Utrecht U.’s administration building for quieter consultation. Forty-five minutes later, they stepped out and debriefed protesters.
The university had agreed to take a closer look at ties with Israeli universities, the instructors told cheering students, and will disclose its findings later this week.
Student protesters at Utrecht U. (David Kattenburg)
University officials will also consider attending a talk by Canadian academic Maya Wind, author of a new book entitled Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. That talk takes place this afternoon, May 14, in Utrecht. Stay tuned for an update on all this.
Utrecht U. faculty member Katherine van den Boger hands vice rector van der Starre a copy of Maya Wind’s book (David Kattenburg)
GPM # 59It’s a vast, living web beneath our feet – a tangled underground network of microscopic tubes weaving through the soil, pulsating with nutrients, tying the roots of trees and other plants into networks that extend over square kilometers.
Mycorrhizal fungi they’re called. Most plants rely on them entirely. In exchange for plant sugars, mycorrhizal fungi provide phosphorus and nitrogen.
But, mycorrhizal networks do more than just feed plants. They cycle carbon from atmosphere to soil, regulating Earth’s climate.
Underground fungi face a host of threats from above. Soil scientists have come together to protect fungal networks, and are calling on citizens to do the same. Toby Kiers is a professor in the Faculty of Science, Ecology & Evolution at the Free University of Amsterdam. She’s also the founder of a group called SPUN – the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks.
Toby Kiers (Credit: David Meulenbeld)
The cedar is Lebanon’s national symbol. It’s on its flag, its banknotes, a source of identity and pride.
But Lebanon’s renowned cedar forests are not what they used to be. Once a continuous carpet running up and down Lebanon’s mountainous spine, these splendid forests of cedar, pine and spruce have been exploited since the days of the ancient Phoenicians, who built ships out of them. The Egyptians used cedar in their mummies. The Ottomans, British and French took their turn, exploiting Lebanon’s forest wealth.
Today, all that remains of Lebanon’s cedar forests are a dozen fragmented islands, threatened by livestock grazing and climate change. The key to restoring them is their genetic diversity.
That’s precisely what a Lebanese NGO called Jouzour Loubnan – ‘Lebanon Roots’ — has in mind. Here’s a story about that.
Jouzour Loubnan’s seed bank (David Kattenburg)
Back in 2017, astronomers feasted their eyes and focused their instruments on something Albert Einstein predicted, but no one had every actually observed. A hundred and thirty million light years away, a pair of super dense neutron stars had collided with each other (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth), sending out pulses of electromagnetic signals and gravitational waves, rippling the fabric of space-time.
The GPM spoke with Samar Safi-Harb about the event, named after the date it was observed — GW170817. Safi-Harb is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and a Canada Research Chair on Extreme Astrophysics at the University of Manitoba.
GPM # 58Lots of reports in the news these days about Israeli military assaults on Palestinian refugee camps.
In little Gaza – Israel reduces refugee camps to rubble with 2000-lb American bombs, or plows them into the mud with armoured Caterpillar D9 bulldozers.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Palestinian refugee camps are routinely assaulted by heavily armed soldiers or police in search of “terrorists” to arrest or — more likely — gun down, no questions asked.
Teargas and sound bombs fill the air, fired by roof-mounted guns, drones or remotely operated sentry sites.
Apartheid wall and watchtower watch over Bethlehem and Aida (David Kattenburg)
For those who’ve never visited a Palestinian refugee camp, these are not dense tent or tin shacks encampments. They’re more like barrios; densely packed, tightly knit, fully functioning communities. On a very recent trip, I visited one of Palestine’s largest refugee camps – Aida – in the southern West Bank town of Bethlehem.
Founded in 1950 to house 1200 victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing, Aida is now home to about 6000. It’s a safe, welcoming place to walk, talk and film, a vibrant community packed with art and political graffiti.
But violent assault is always imminent, especially at night.
Heavily armed Israeli Border Police enter in armoured vehicles, through sliding steel doors along Israel’s apartheid wall, snaking along Aida’s northern edge.
The GPM spoke about all this with Rohini Haar, one of the authors of a report entitled No Safe Space: Health Consequences of Tear Gas Exposure Among Palestine Refugees, published in January 2018 by the Human Rights Center of the School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley.
Wall art, Aida, Bethlehem (David Kattenburg)
Aida Refugee Camp is a bustling and vibrant community. It’s also something of an outdoor art gallery. Resistance artwork, portraits of iconic poets and fighters, and political graffiti adorn its walls and facades.
Leila Khaled on Aida wall (David Kattenburg)
One of Aida’s best known hubs for resistance art and culture — the Alrowwad Culture & Arts Society and Vocational Training Center. Abdelfattah Abusrour is the Center’s founder and director.
Abdelfattah Abusrour (David Kattenburg)
GPM # 57Jeff Halper was a Child of the Sixties.
The 78-year old American-Israeli activist ticks off all the boxes. Born in Hibbing, Minnesota in 1946, his older brother was a classmate of Robert Zimmerman, soon to be known as Bob Dylan. Bob and younger Jeff hung out in the basement of Bob’s home. Bob attended Jeff’s Bar Mitzvah.
In the early Sixties, Halper traveled to Mississippi in support of the civil rights movement. He resisted the draft. Following high school graduation in the summer of ’68 (Dylan attended his grad party), he loitered on the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, doing his best to avoid the clubs of Mayor Daley’s thugs.
In the summer of’69, 23-year-old Jeff tromped through mud at Max Yasgur’s farm, in Woodstock, along with a half million other young music lovers.
But America bored him. In 1973, armed with an anthropology degree and disillusioned with American politics — with ‘The Movement’, widely seen as motionless and likely dead under Richard Nixon’s regime — Jeff Halper packed his bags and moved to Israel.
Six years into its belligerent occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, the self-declared ‘Jewish State’ struck the young Minnesota activist as “another front in the revolution.”
Halper was aware of the plight Palestinians faced, but Jewish ‘nationalism’ also piqued his interest. The occupation wouldn’t last long, he and other young Jewish activists figured. Israel’s settlement enterprise was still a blip. The oppression of Palestinians could be reined in through conscientious struggle.
“My idea was to, on the one hand, reconnect with a place that’s meaningful for Jews, with a Jewish population, but on the other hand work very much for an end to … I mean, we didn’t use those terms in those days; the ‘colonial thing’ … but an end to the occupation; to a just peace with the Palestinians; living together,” Halper told the GPM in a wide-ranging conversation at his West Jerusalem dining room table.
Before too long, Halper and others clued in to Israel’s modus operandis — the ruthless, systematic demolition of Palestinian homes.
In 1997, Halper and other peace activists formed ICAHD — The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. With financial support from the EU, UN and various church groups, staff were hired and an office rented. They began meeting Palestinians, something the Israeli peace movement wasn’t accustomed to doing, but clearly had to happen.
The learning curve was steep. Halper and his comrades knew nothing about the situation Palestinians faced at the hands of the administrative entity charged with their deepening subjugation and oppression — the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) — and trust needed to be built.
Palestinian home demolition had been the driving wheel of Israel’s settler-colonial project from the get-go.
Between the UN resolution partitioning Palestine in November 1947 and Israel’s May 1948 declaration of statehood, 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly driven from their homes. The destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages and urban areas, and the demolition of over 50,000 homes, would follow.
Israel’s aim was clear: preventing Palestinians from returning.
Between Israel’s 1967 conquest of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza and today, another 60,000 Palestinian homes and building structures would be demolished. The homes of Palestinian-Israelis — Israeli citizens — weren’t spared. Now and then, demolition of their homes exceeded that of Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Demolished Palestinian home in Al-Walaja, south of Jerusalem (David Kattenburg)
And Israeli domesticide doesn’t cease. Indeed, it accelerates.
In the seven months since Hamas’ daring incursion into southern Israel, the Israeli military has demolished over 300,000 Gazan homes — almost three-quarters of Gaza’s housing stock — killing an estimated 35,000, most of them women and children. Countless thousands of Gazans remain buried under the rubble of their humble homes.
Armed with US bombs and missiles, Israel demolishes Palestinian homes in an instant. Palestinian suffering and trauma will endure for generations. What’s its aim? Ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the consolidation of the settler-colonial regime it established in 1948, says Jeff Halper.
“You can’t do that without house demolitions,” Halper told the GPM in a wide-ranging conversation at his West Jerusalem kitchen table.
Jeff Halper is a founding member of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and of the more recent One Democratic State Campaign. He’s also the author of a host of books, including An Israeli in Palestine (2010), War Against the People (2015), and Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism and the Case for One Democratic State (2021).
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Jeff Halper (David Kattenburg)
GPM # 56Earth would do perfectly fine without people. Human beings are much less indifferent. Denied earth’s bounty, they’d be be nowhere. Nothing.
The bonding relationship begins with soil. From this most precious of substrates, food grows. And water springs, the sina qua non of life.
Equally precious are gifts that can’t be counted, measured or monetized: rootedness, memory, narrative, identity, belonging, heritage, tradition, continuity.
In the hands of those who covet land, Earth’s resources become weapons — vital resources to be denied, their indigenous stewards dispossessed, forcibly transferred, cleansed.
And replaced. Colonizers re-brand themselves as the land’s true, authentic and promised people.
This is the story of Palestine, its native inhabitants, and the colonizers who came from far away, claiming these lands as their own, a mere hundred years.
But, like Palestine’s gnarled olive trees — burned, chopped down and poisoned by the colonists and their military in the hundreds of thousands — Palestine’s native people are steadfast, and the final chapters of their struggle have yet to be written.
On a tiny patch of earth just south of Jerusalem, a pile of pages are being laid down and seeds sown by a Palestinian-American scholar/gardener/activist named Mazin Qumsiyeh and his green-thumbed, organizationally talented partner Jessie.
The Palestine Institute for Biodiversity & Sustainability, and Palestine Museum of Natural History, Mazin and Jessie call their enterprise.
Mazin and Jessie Qumsiyeh (David Kattenburg)
Clinging to the walls of a fertile valley beneath the city of Bethlehem, a half dozen kilometers south of Jerusalem, alienated from the holiest of Palestinian towns by walls, barbed wire and a string of mega-colonial settlements, boxed in by settler-only roads and militarized checkpoints, Jessie, Mazin and their friends are planting their native seeds, growing fruits and vegetables, raising chickens and rabbits and fish, offering up habitat for birds, insects and other wildlife. Rescuing their beloved landscape cruelly scarred by land thieves without true roots.
School kids and grown ups from up and down Palestine come to visit. So do international visitors and volunteers from far-off places. GPM correspondent David Kattenburg is one of them.
Listen to this report. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Thanks to Paul Tekenbroek for video production.
GPM # 55Seven months into Israel’s assault on Gaza, starvation in the besieged enclave is widespread. In north Gaza, famine is “projected and imminent.”
These are the latest findings of a UN-affiliated group of food security experts, released on March 18.
The Famine Review Committee based itself on something called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC system. According to IPC metrics, famine has begun when at least 20% of households face an extreme lack of food, at least 30% of children suffer from acute malnutrition, and two out of 10,000 are dying each day from starvation, or the interaction of malnutrition and disease.
The “famine threshold for acute food insecurity has already been far exceeded” in Gaza, accompanied by a “major acceleration of death and malnutrition,” the Committee declared.
Fifty-five percent of North Gaza households are currently experiencing catastrophic food insecurity, it said, a figure projected to rise to 70% by mid-July.
According to Al-Jazeera, 27 Gazans have died of hunger since Israel’s assault began, 23 of them children.
On a related matter, this past week, the Irish government announced that it will be intervening in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, and that it will be calling on the UN’s top court to include forced starvation in its definition of genocide.
The GPM spoke about all this with Michael Fakhri, Special UN Rapporteur on the right to food. In a March 5 statement, Fakhri and five other UN experts declared that Israel has been “intentionally starving” Gaza.”
Michael Fakhri is a professor at the University of Oregon School of Law. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Unknown photographer. Please reveal yourself.
Speaking of genocide – the so-called crime of crimes; a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court – a group of Canadian lawyers and legal scholars have submitted a letter to the Canadian government, demanding that it “take all actions within its power to prevent the commission of genocide in Gaza” – something they say the Trudeau government is not doing.
Specifically, the group is calling on Ottawa to halt arms sales to Israel, and Canada’s importation of Israeli arms and weapon systems.
It also wants Ottawa to suspend military cooperation with Israel, to ban the importation of products produced in Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to impose sanctions on Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, his cabinet ministers and top military chiefs, to withdraw their ambassador, to prosecute individuals and groups recruiting Canadians to serve in the Israeli military, and to prohibit Canadian enlistment.
That’s just part of their list of demands, on behalf of three Palestinian-Canadians who’ve lost family members in Gaza. One of them has lost 74 members of his extended family in the course of Israel’s bombing campaign, soon to enter its seventh month.
The GPM spoke about the Demand for Action letter with two of its authors. Dimitri Lascaris is a private attorney, journalist and activist. Faisal Bhabha is an attorney with the Legal Centre for Palestine. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his outstanding guitar instrumentals.
GPM # 54An astonishing fact:
In the 248 years since the United States of America became an independent republic, the US has only been at peace for about eleven.
The United States of War, you could call it. David Vine does. Vine, a Professor of Anthropology at American University, in Washington D.C. has recently completed the third in a trilogy of books about Washington’s fondness for permanent war – and about the role military bases play in its warfighting pursuits – across North America, at first; then around the world.
The United States of War – a Global History of America’s endless conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State, was published in 2020 by University of California Press.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
And listen to the GPM‘s complete conversation with David Vine here:
Speaking about tiny islands coveted, invaded by and oppressed by Washington and its Western allies, consider little Haiti.
Columbus landed in Haiti (then Hispaniola) on his first voyage in 1492. Haiti became a Spanish colony.
In 1697, Spain ceded Haiti to the French, who turned it into a slave colony, reaping tons of sugarcane and massive wealth for the freedom-loving French. In 1791, former slave Toussaint Louverture launched a revolt. His successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines defeated Napoleon, declaring Haitian independence in 1804 – the second free republic in the Americas.
Clearly a threat to Haiti’s far larger and more powerful slave-based republic to the north. Throughout the 19th century, US gunboats invaded Haitian waters on numerous occasions, seeking access to Môle Saint-Nicholas, a protected harbor on Haiti’s northwest tip – the perfect place to establish a naval base and coaling station.
US troops occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, protecting US corporate interests. Powerful US, French and Canadian corporations would take their place, reaping profits from Haitian natural resources and cheap labour, in alliance with local ‘white’ elites, and the dictatorial dynasty of Francois Duvalier and his son.
Baby Doc was deposed in 1986. Elected but compliant regimes followed, punctuated by popular governments that inevitably displeased France, the US – of course – and Canada.
Haiti’s current turmoil began in July 2021, following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Moise’s successor, Ariel Henri, has now been booted out, in violent street campaigns led by heavily armed street gangs. Anti-imperialist, the most powerful Haitian gangster calls himself.
To learn more about all this, the GPM spoke with Yves Engler. Engler is a Montreal-based writer and political commentator, and the author of thirteen books. His latest, Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy — co-written with Owen Schalk — documents Canada’s contribution to the ouster of over twenty elected governments around the world, including the popular Haitian government of Jean Bertrand Aristide.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.
GPM # 53Nothing like a huge bazaar. Who doesn’t love wandering through a crowded food market, or scouting out old vinyl or antiques in a packed convention hall, bursting with merchants and awesome deals.
How about an arms convention, merchants of death at every turn, hawking surface-to-air missiles, armored personnel carriers, speed boats bristling with guns, and killer drones of all sizes — for deadly prices?
That’s what the Doha International Maritime Defence Exhibition & Conference, or DIMDEX, offered up, earlier this month in the Qatari capital. DIMDEX describes itself as “a dynamic platform attended by key decision makers and industry leaders,” showcasing “state-of-the-art technologies and products,” “significant deals and partnerships.”
Merchants of death is what Dimitri Lascaris calls them. Lascaris – a Canadian lawyer, activist and journalist – is an intrepid follower of the arms industry. He attended DIMDEX, smart phone on a selfie-stick, videoing the scene, with colour commentary.
The GPM reached Dimitri somewhere in the Middle East. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
And go on Dimitri’s tour of the DIMDEX 24 here:
Imagine this scenario: A G20 summit is taking place near Quebec City. Protesters will be there. Among these, anti-capitalists vowing to disrupt the summit, exploiting the presence of international media to further their radical cause.
Wise to their aims, the Canadian Air Force launches an unmanned surveillance drone. Severe storms are on the horizon. The drone flies to the summit, through restricted airspace, under military and Air Traffic Control.
Loitering over the noisy protesters, the drone confirms there are no threats, but beams back lots of photos to National Defense controllers.
Here’s another scenario: The same drone takes off from a runway west of Kandahar, in Afghanistan. A High-Payoff Target has been spotted beside a road where an alliance convoy will soon be traveling, so the drone is armed with an AGM114 Hellfire Missile and a pair of 250-lb. GBU 48 laser-guided bombs.
Arriving at the scene, the drone spots three “fighting-aged males.” Zooming in, operators back in Canada spot disturbed earth nearby. Circling for a closer look, they spy a wire coming from a patch of disturbed earth, near the three, clearly suspicious suspects. One of them appears to be holding a radio or cell phone. Now it’s clear. He and is friends are clearly combatants, legal agencies and controllers conclude, authorizing the use of force and the immediate liquidation of the three men.
These two imaginary scenarios were contained in a Request for Proposals issued by the Canadian Department of National Defense back in 2016. Canada is in the market for a fleet of drones that can perform these tasks for real. Two weapons firms put in offers. Quebec-based L3-Harris produces Israeli-style Heron drones. The American one markets Predator 2.0. Since then, L3-Harris has reportedly pulled out of the competition.
The GPM spoke about Canada’s future drone fleet with Matt Korda. Korda is a Canadian researcher at the Federation of American Scientists, in Washington D.C. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.
GPM # 52Some time in the next six months, the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, will issue an advisory opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s 57-year occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
The UN top court will be responding to a request from the UN General Assembly, asking it to determine whether Israel’s occupation is legal, and if not, what Israel’s obligations are under international law, and what the obligations of third states are to set things right.
If the top UN court does deem Israel’s occupation – its settlement enterprise certainly is – all UN member states would be obliged not to acknowledge the legal validity of Israel’s prolonged occupation, nor render it aid and assistance.
Peace Palace, seat of the International Court of Justice, The Hague
Arguably, no country bears greater historical responsibility for all this mess then Britain.
Still, with supreme richness, in late February, British lawyers (in lockstep with their American colleagues) urged the ICJ not to render an Advisory Opinion on Israel’s ceaseless occupation of Palestine, or if it did, not to go into all the history.
The UK has reason to make such a request.
As Mandatory Power in former Ottoman Palestine, under the League of Nations Covenant and Mandate system, following World War I, Britain was obliged to prepare Palestine’s people for independence. In a census carried out at the start of its Mandate, it determined that seventy-eight percent of Palestine’s people were Muslims, ten percent were Christian, and eleven percent were Jewish.
Rather than building independence for Palestine’s people, Britain proceeded to hand it over to European Jewish colonists. The rest is history.
The GPM spoke about all this, and the ICJ Advisory Opinion hearings, with Victor Kattan, Professor in Public International Law at the University of Nottingham School of Law, and author of the 2009 work From Coexistence to Conquest – International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891-1949.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Israel’s assault on Gaza is now into Day 156.
Ostensibly aimed at wiping out Hamas, Israeli leaders openly admitted from the start that they’re aim was to wipe out Gaza; slim its population down by 90 percent or so; driving Gazans into Egypt, or wherever. The sea, if need be.
Five and a half months in, Gazans are starving and sick.
All according to plan. Israeli war minister Yoav Gallant announced, at the get-go, that all food, water, electricity and medicine would be cut off from the ‘Jewish’ state’s sliver of a ghetto, already under comprehensive siege since 2007.
As Israel turns the screws on Gaza, it takes aim at an even older enemy – the single most important organization, on the ground in Gaza, providing Gazans what Israel doesn’t want them to have: food, schooling, and other social supports: the UN Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA.
At the end of January, Israel alleged, with a big splash, that twelve out UNRWA’s 13,000-strong staff in Gaza had joined Hamas in its October 7 assault. A hoary Israeli tactic that invariably works, for a while. Predictably, Western powers quickly suspended aid to the Gazan people’s only secure lifeline.
Since then, various media outlets and governments have concluded that Israel’s accusations are thin gruel. Essentially, baseless. Sweden and Canada have renewed funding to UNRWA — a decision Canadian ‘human rights’ organization and “staunch” Apartheid Israel “defender” B’Nai Brith Canada is now howling about..
Truth be told, Israel’s hate-on for UNRWA predates the emergence of Hamas by decades — back to UNRWA’s founding, in 1949, brainchild of Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte.
Count Folke Bernadotte
Bernadotte was the UN’s first mediator in Palestine, appointed days after Israel’s founding, on May 20, 1948.
On September 16, 1948, Bernadotte submitted his first plan.
Central to the Swedish diplomat’s vision – the Palestinian people’s inalienable right of return to lands they’d been brutally expelled from by Zionist militias, inside Israel.
And, in the interim, creating an agency to help Palestinian refugees out.
That organization would emerge as UNRWA.
Bernadotte didn’t live to see UNRWA’s foundation, in December 1949. One day after submitting his peace plan, on September 17, 1948, Count Folke Bernadotte was brutally assassinated by Zionist militias, led by future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
The GPM spoke about Count Folke Bernadotte, and UNRWA, with former UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness, who has written about Bernadotte.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.
GPM # 51This past Friday, March 1, marked the 70th anniversary of the Bravo Shot, the first in a series of high-yield US thermonuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, just north of the equator, in the central Pacific.
The Pentagon carried out 67 nuclear tests in the Marshalls between 1946 and 1958 — 44 at Eniwetok Atoll, in the northern end of the chain, and 23 at Bikini Atoll.
Castle Bravo was the biggest, and a big experiment: a fission-fusion device fueled by lithium-deuteride, designed by the Hungarian and Polish nuclear physicists Edward Teller and Stanisław Ulam.
Bravo exceeded expectations. Rated at 6 megatons, it yielded fifteen. Thrilling news for nuclear scientists and the American military.
Bad news for the Marshallese people. Just north of Bikini, fallout rained down on the people of Rongelap and Utirik Atolls. Finer particulate fallout drifted up and down the Marshalls, and, through Earth’s stratosphere, all around the planet.
I visited the Marshalls on the fiftieth anniversary of Bravo, back in 2004; then again in 2007. Here are some voices from those trips. In order of appearance: American anthropologist and nuclear researcher Holly Barker (reached in the US); Rongelap residents (on the Day of Two Suns) Elio Boaz (living in Salt Lake City at the time of this conversation), and Lamayo Abon; Canadian nuclear health activist Rosalie Bertell (now passed away); the former chair of the Nuclear Claims Tribunal (set up to adjudicate nuclear claims), Jim Plasman; the Tribunal’s Public Defender Bill Graham (now passed away), and Rongelap Senator Abacca Anjain-Maddison.
Listen to these folks in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Old observation tower pad on Bikini Island (David Kattenburg)
The history of US nuclear weapons testing in the Marshalls Islands, its health, social and cultural impacts, and the drawn-out effort to get the US to pay full compensation to the Marshallese are complicated.
Having secured the Marshalls as a UN ‘Trust Territory’, between 1946 and 1958, the US achieved nuclear superpower status for itself by testing 67 fission and fusion devices there — above, at the surface and within the waters of Bikini and Eniwetok Atolls (talk about trust and good faith).
Although US government and other independent studies had/have shown that all of the Marshalls were exposed to radioactive fallout in the course of its testing program, US government compensation has always been limited to the residents of just four atolls, Rongelap and Utirik among them.
Under the terms of the first ‘Compact of Free Association’ agreement between the US and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), in 1983, the US provided $150 million to the RMI, in “full and final” compensation for damages done.
The RMI is one of three Pacific island states that have signed Compacts of Free Association with the US (the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau are the other two).
In return for exclusive access to its territorial waters, and the right to use Kwajalein Atoll as a bullseye for ICBMs fired from California and Alaska, Washington provides the RMI with defense and economic assistance — and ample supplies of canned, boxed and other ultra-processed foods.
Diabetes and heart disease kill far more Marshallese than lingering radioisotopes.
Under Section 177 of the US-RMI Compact, in 1988, a Nuclear Claims Tribunal (NCT) was established. Its mission: to render “final determination [of] all claims past, present and future, of the Government, citizens and nationals of the Marshall Islands which are based on, arise out of, or are in any way related to the [American] Nuclear Testing Program.”
Invested in secure instruments, the NCT’s 150 million allocation was supposed to generate interest. Instead, it suffered a crushing loss in the 1987-88 Black Monday stock market crash. By the time it ceased functioning in 2011, the NCT had adjudicated over $2 billion in personal injury, property loss, and class-action claims.
Shortly prior to the NCT’s folding, the RMI submitted a “Changed Circumstances” petition to the US Congress, asking for additional funding to pay out adjudicated claims. The petition was rejected.
Under the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (amended in 2023), US government funding is provided to ‘Downwinders’ — Americans who lived downwind from the Nevada Test Site (where numerous nuclear weapons were also tested in the atmosphere) — as well as to American uranium miners and nuclear installation employees, and to US service personnel recruited to observe atomic blasts (those still alive).
Not to the Marshalls.
In January 2023, a new US-RMI Compact of Free Association was signed, allocating $2.3 billion to the Marshalls over 20 years (Israel receives about $4 billion every year), and $700 million for an RMI trust fund, associated with the RMI’s ‘Four-Atoll Program’.
On the 70th anniversary of the March 1, 1954 Bravo Shot, the GPM spoke with Giff Johnson, long-time resident of the Marshalls, and the editor of the Marshall Islands Journal.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Sunset over Bikini Island (David Kattenburg)
I visited Bikini Island back in 2007, in the course of a round-the-world trip. A very isolated spot.
Bikini Island lies across Bikini Atoll from the spot where Bravo lit up the morning sky, seventy years ago, on that infamous Day of Two Suns, excavating a huge hole in the atoll’s coral.
Bikini’s leaders ran a dive operation at the time. For a certain sum of money, tech-divers from around the world got to explore various mangled destroyers and aircraft carriers. Among these, the USS Arkansas, the Saratoga (affectionately referred to as ‘Sara’), and the flagship of the Japanese navy, all sent to the bottom of the atoll — along with lots of other small vessels — by US nuclear bombs of all sorts
We ended up stranded on Bikini for a week. Bikini Atoll Divers has since shut down.
Here’s a story from back then. Listen to it in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.
GPM # 50Israel and its allies moved heaven and Earth to prevent it from happening. This past week in The Hague, it did.
On Monday, February 19, in response to a late December request from the UN General Assembly for its authoritative legal opinion — a request Israel, the US and fifteen other states voted against — the UN’s supreme judicial body, the International Court of Justice, convened oral hearings on the status of Israel’s 57-year belligerent occupation of the Palestinian territories, under international law, and on the legal ‘consequences’ arising from Israel’s extraordinarily well documented, though unadjudicated crimes.
In other words, what Israel must do to set things right, and what the international community must do to ensure it does. ICJ hearings wrap up on the afternoon of Monday, February 26.
Here are a few voices from the proceedings:
Riyad Mansour is Palestine’s Ambassador to the United Nations. An emotional pleading to the court.
Some of the tiniest state delivered the most powerful presentations at the ICJ this past week. Little Belize topped the list. Assad Shoman, is special envoy of the Belizean Prime Minister, on sovereignty issues.
Philippa Webb is another member of Belize’s delegation. She’s a professor of international public law at King’s College London, and member of the bars of Belize, New York State, England and Wales.
And, one of the session’s most cogent presentations, from Ireland. Rossa Fanning is Ireland’s Attorney General.
Listen to these voices in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Qalandia checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem.
GPM # 49Some like it hot – or get used to it. In Iceland, where volcanoes belch hot gases and volcanic cracks burst open, spewing thousand-degree magma across the landscape, volcanism is a way of life.
This past November, the town of Grindavík, population 3400, on Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula, was evacuated as red hot magma — 1200-degree hot; that’s 2200 Fahrenheit — started pouring out of a nearby crack.
Iceland owes its very existence to this thick, super-heated fluid. The world’s 18th largest island is formed from magma, oozing out of a huge fissure on the bottom of the north Atlantic, where two of Earth’s largest tectonic plates originate, spreading apart from each other.
As they spread, magma rises, solidifying into basaltic rock and forming a ridge. Iceland, about the size of southern Britain, is perched on top that mid-Atlantic ridge. Sometimes it’s quiet – relatively speaking. Every few thousand years, things heat up. That’s what’s happening now.
To learn more about Iceland and its geology, I reached out to Freysteinn Sigmundsson, a geophysicist at the Nordic Volcanological Center, at the University of Iceland’s Institute of Earth Sciences, in Reykjavik.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Shawn O’Halloran at 2015 CD release party (Clive Baugh)
Shawn O’Halloran was a Canadian musician based in Hamilton, Ontario. Shawn passed away, in most untimely fashion, back in 2019. Among the dozen songs he wrote and performed for Earth Chronicle Productions, back in 1993, accompanied by percussionist Paul Panchezak — Tectonics. Thankfully, Paul Panchezak is still drumming away with Hamilton-based group Trickbag.
Listen to Shawn’s song about Earth tectonics in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Volcanic eruptions, ground fissuring and red hot magma creeping towards town can be a big nuisance, not to mention a deadly hazard. On the other hand, volcanism provides heat and electricity to Iceland’s 373,000 people, and also a Blue Lagoon to bathe in.
Near surface geology also provides an opportunity to store atmospheric carbon – permanently. There’s been lots of talk over the years about carbon storage and capture as a way to fight Earth warming: pumping CO2 into the ground; into porous rock or gas deposits. Climate activists see it as a scam. How long will that CO2 stay in subsurface deposits, before it seeps right back into the atmosphere again?
In Iceland, and other places where granitic rocks forms from magma, not far beneath Earth’s surface, scientists have been combining CO2 with water – carbonating it – then pumping that water deep down. Slowly, that CO2 becomes incorporated into carbonate rock.
I spoke about this, a few years ago, with Peter Kelemen, Arthur D. Storke Memorial Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, in NYC, and a member of Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth University.
Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.
Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.
We’ve all heard it before: Eat less meat. People lucky enough to eat, should eat less of everything. Microbe magic! Having fun with microbes. Growing them! And, Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Israel’s eternal, undivided capital. For Jewish Israelis, not for indigenous Palestinians.
The geology of cities -- built out of stuff mined from the ground. That’s where all cities will end up, broken down and fossilized. The GPM speaks with a geologist who gazes into the future. Some human-made molecules won't break down either. Forever chemicals, they’re called, and they’re everywhere. In non-stick cookware, cosmetics and clothing. They last forever, and they’re toxic. On a happier note -- the human microbiome. All those bacteria living on us and in us, delivering crucial services. Nothing more amazing than the bacteria in the gut of a pregnant woman, steering healthy fetal development.
A victory for South Africa and the Palestinian people at the International Court of Justice. State parties to the 1948 Genocide Convention will now have to act, starting with Israel’s friends. One of those friends is Canada, with famously double standards.
The United States of War: The United States of America has been waging wars for all but about a dozen years in its 250-year history, some of them genocidal. The GPM speaks with David Vine, author of a book called The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State. American military bases make its wars – and its nuclear weapons arsenal -- possible. The Marshall Islands, in the middle of the Pacific, were the scene of 67 US nuclear weapon tests between 1946 and 1958, and continue to act as a bullseye for US intercontinental ballistic missiles.
South Africa versus Israel at the International Court of Justice. Lawyers for South Africa depose. And, weaponizing genocide justice. Western powers accuse official enemies of committing it, while defending their dearest friend and ally. A conversation with Canadian genocide scholar William Schabas.
Genocide in Gaza -- Is Israel guilty of this crime of crimes? One thing is clear: genocidal incitement permeates Israeli society. The GPM speaks with Israeli human rights attorney Michael Sfard. How to stop Israel’s assault? Some call for international intervention. The GPM speaks with Canadian international law expert Ardi Imseis. And, the Anthropocene. A wake-up call from Canadian Earth scientist Martin Head.
Artificial Intelligence -- to translate voices or access your bank account; to select targets to bomb and a few people to kill, along with thousands of others you weren't targeting. The GPM speaks with the Realities of Algorithmic Warfare Project. Wherever you are in occupied Palestine, Israeli soldiers target everyone and everything, children’s theaters included. Last July, the GPM spoke with Mustafa Sheta, founding director and General Manager of the Jenin Freedom Theater. Today, he sits in an Israeli jail, one of 8000 Palestinian political prisoners.
Oceans of clean energy on humanity’s doorstep -- wave, tidal, surface heat and, wherever freshwater flows into the sea ... salt gradient energy. Tipping points in Earth systems. Unstable states world governments need to prepare for now. And, America’s Passionate Attachment to Israel. Loyalty is a must.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on its 75th anniversary. If Britain and France had had their way, it would not have been universal. The GPM speaks with Canadian social scientist and human rights scholar Rhoda Howard-Hassmann. Lots of countries deny basic human rights laid down in the Declaration. Israel, for instance, in the occupied Palestinian Territories. A conversation with the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.
Sleeping and dreaming -- essential and mysterious. An old Tanzanian friend speaks about torrential rains and village celebrations. And, in the Dutch city of Delft, a big university digs deep for the heat beneath: geothermal energy.
The Monroe Doctrine on its 200th birthday. Messy American politics in 1823, messy American politics in 2023. The GPM speaks with American historian Jay Sexton. And, Cambodia’s Great Lake, the Tonle Sap. It’s a story about fish.
Hamas didn't parachute into Gaza from another planet. The Islamic Resistance Movement, its leaders and militants are an organic part of a packed population of refugees, with no other place to fight. The GPM speaks about this with Israeli-British historian Ilan Pappe, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Israel’s response to Hamas’s October 7 attack? Collective punishment. The GPM speaks with international law expert Toby Cadman.
The Canadian military shops for surveillance drones that can kill. The GPM speaks with arms researcher Matt Korda. The Canadian government slaps sanctions on a Russian discussion group. Who’s disinforming whom, University of Manitoba political scientist Radhika Desai asks? And, Canadian activist Dimitri Lascaris calls on real leftists to challenge fake peaceniks on the right.
The dreadful events of October 7 didn’t happen in a vacuum. As Israel retaliates, reducing little Gaza to rubble, in the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers and settlers work hand in hand, driving Palestinians from their land. Gazing on Israeli super-violence, genocide comes to mind.
Tapping Earth’s largest source of clean energy -- its oceans. Ocean waves, tides and heat. A massive resource. Then, there’s salt gradient energy. Wherever fresh river water flows into salty seas, electricity can be generated, with zero carbon emissions.
Risky moves: A Canadian political scientist attends a sanctioned forum in Russia -- and asks Vladimir Putin a question. An Italian climate researcher refuses to return to work fast, from the other side of the planet. Slow travel releases less carbon, he tells his bosses. The GPM interviews Radhika Desai and Gianluca Grimalda.
Terrorist atrocities in Israel, Israeli atrocities in return. Seeds sown, reaped, then sown again. Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, the US vs. Russia and China … What sense to be made?
A small Canadian lake records humanity’s impact on Planet Earth. On the floor of Canada’s House of Commons, an old Nazi veteran gets a standing ovation. And, when official enemies are to blame, Canada calls for justice. For a beloved ally, Canada calls for justice to be suspended.
One of medical science’s greatest paradoxes: The cancer cells that killed Henrietta Lacks revolutionized medicine -- medical care her own family couldn’t afford. Narrow profit margins for Canadian uranium companies operating in Niger. Big health risks for Nigerien miners.
Six out of nine planetary systems key to the survival of the human species are under threat. Is Earth still a safe operating space for human beings? And, a mega-engineering project to save an endangered African lake -- on the drawing board, and very worrisome.
Feed your head, Grace Slick cried in the song 'White Rabbit'. How about feeding the bacteria in your gut? Beer won’t make you smart, or healthy. How about wine, casked, matured and sold at your local hospital? And, recalling the Birmingham Campaign for civil rights, and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, sixty years ago.
A year after the US Supreme Court banished abortion rights, millions of American women and girls face dire health and emotional health threats. Twenty two years after the Twin Towers' destruction, we recall the first 9-11 -- back in 1973. And, Palestine Panopticon. Israel’s vast carceral system for subjugated Palestinians.
Kids aren’t the only ones rebelling against extinction. In Ottawa, a sixty-year-old gets arrested for sitting down on a highway. Forget politicians -- citizens’ assemblies are the way to go. And, channeling Johnny Cash for adoring fans in France and Germany.
In West Africa, French colonialism officially ended in the 1960s. Six decades later, neocolonialism lives on. These days, America is the world’s preeminent imperial power and NATO its most powerful tool. In Cambodia, French colonists are long gone. Military chiefs and their rich clients rule the roost, much to the detriment of biodiverse ecosystems.
Uranium mining in Niger: a filthy, toxic business. Fifty years after the end of America’s war on Vietnam, traces of US chemical weapons linger. And, the Anthropocene. A geologist talks about humanity's transformation of Planet Earth.
Long debunked: the mythology of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Out of the mushroom clouds, nuclearism's dark expanding circle. And, the world’s latest new weapon: killer robots. No immediate danger.
Commemorating the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: a nuclear scientist remembers. A historian paints a different picture. And, the Pacific Island nation that paid the other ultimate price, turning America into a nuclear-armed superpower.
Bacteria in your gut tweak your brain. Sometimes friendly, sometimes not. The hundred-day genocide in Rwanda -- recalling the mayhem on its 29th anniversary. And, armed drones. Canada wants to buy some.
Artificial Intelligence: existential threat to humanity, or just to basic civil rights? Personal DNA testing – you never know what you’ll find. And, Forever Chemicals in the blood of pregnant mums and their babies.
After years of study, a scientific panel proposes a formal definition of the Anthropocene, naming the spot where humanity’s fingerprints are best observed in the rock record. A Canadian geologist relishes the moment. And, a First Nations elder reflects on the lake of her dreams and memories.
Nothing woolly-headed or Utopian about it: A universal, guaranteed basic income. A hundred years later, memories of war that do not fade. And, one of humanity’s great revolutions – the 1950s Great Acceleration has transformed Earth’s surface completely, hurtling our planet into an uncertain future.
Humanity’s impact on Planet Earth has a name: the Anthropocene. The start of Earth’s human age can be pinpointed in ice and biological cores, and the bottom sediments of bays and lakes -- including a small lake in southern Ontario. But human beings have no control. And now we stand at catastrophe’s door.
Powerful new antibiotics discovered using artificial intelligence. Sitting in a restaurant, staring at a piece of fish -- Is it really that expensive kind? Pull out your DNA barcode reader, and find out! And, sex and the brain; women’s and men’s are wired differently; men’s brains are sexualized before they’re born.
A US Supreme Court ruling throws American wetlands under the bus. In the oven, wheat and corn flour turn into bread and tortillas; spread on farm fields, rock flour reacts with carbon dioxide, turning into carbonates that get stored – forever. And, sharp questions off his tongue and a smartphone in hand, a Canadian activist ambushes politicians.
Underground fungal networks, pulsating with nutrients; storing mountains of carbon. On Lebanese hilltops, ancient cedars grow, against all odds. And, looking back at a cosmic event of colossal proportions, that rippled space-time.
Long Covid -- a complex ailment driving lots of people down. Moms, babies and bacteria; the relationship starts before you’re born, then you’re colonized. And, Canadian forests – net CO2 source, not sink.
“War is not healthy for children and other living things.” It isn’t healthy for Planet Earth’s climate system either. The cradle of crop diversity here on Planet Earth – Ethiopia. And, Israel-Palestine – a discreet toponym, six syllables tripping off the tongue.
The roots of the US anti-abortion movement -- misogyny, racism and hatred of immigrants. On the edge of a big Canadian city, an oasis of calm where wildlife thrives. And, the latest report from the World Meteorological Organization; its lead author is scared.
Turning tall cane stalks into small, supple reeds for woodwind instruments. Decarbonizing construction; tons of carbon are embodied in buildings; there’s plenty of ways to decarbonize them. And, the Palestinian village of Jubbet al-Dibh. Last week, the Israeli military bulldozed its elementary school!.
We’ve heard it before: Eat less meat. People lucky enough to eat, should eat less of everything. Microbe magic! Having fun with microbes. Growing them! And, Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Israel’s eternal, undivided capital. For Jewish Israelis, not for indigenous Palestinians.
The Earth Chronicles -- Trees & Earth. Something I produced back in 1993. Still makes sense.
Extinction Rebellion protests pack London streets; human beings have commandeered an astonishing quarter of Earth’s natural productivity, decimating biodiversity and polluting the planet; bacteria, on the other hand, are the foundation of life on Earth. Most are harmless, and even helpful.
A Palestinian village called Battir -- food culture under settler-colonial rule. What were humans like a hundred thousand years ago, and what have they done to the planet? And, the restorative powers of sleep. For both body and mind.
Fermented foods -- very nutritious, very magic. Taking stock of biological diversity, using DNA barcodes. And, a frightening vision of a warming planet – Hothouse Earth.
Ice sheets melting, oceans rising, currents shifting … Sex and the brain; women’s and men’s brains are different … and sonic violence in Lebanese airspace; Israeli fighter jets and drones invade Lebanese skies, every day, every night.
The geology of cities. Built out of stuff mined from the ground. That’s where all cities will end up -- broken down and fossilized. Forever chemicals, they’re called. In non-stick cookware, cosmetics, clothing. They last forever, and they’re toxic. And ... All those bacteria living on us and in us, delivering crucial services. Nothing more amazing than the bacteria in the gut of a pregnant woman, steering healthy fetal development.
Old songs linger in your head. Mobile phones are covered in germs. On the path to zero carbon emissions, hydrogen is a no-brainer.
Young Israelis who refuse to serve in the military. And, as climate catastrophe sweeps the planet, in the Swedish city, Goteborg, engineers and students are designing the sort of building where people can live – comfortably -- without squandering Earth’s limited resources, or polluting its atmosphere
Drug-resistant infections – the new pandemic? And, a tangled network of tiny tubes, pulsating beneath our feet. Fungal networks below ground sustain life above.
In today's edition of the Green Blues Show -- Iran: Is the Islamic Republic as evil and aggressive as its detractors say? And, via-a-vis the Land of Israel, uttering the A-word. Breaking the taboo.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition # 44 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Commemorating the life and work of Frank Plummer, a Canadian pioneer in HIV-AIDS research. And, Donald Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’ lands with a thump.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 43 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
In this edition of the Green Blues Show: conserving seeds, long-lost legumes and cultural memory. And in the fight against drug-resistant bacteria, a very popular herb has the right stuff – cannabis.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 42 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
As Earth’s atmosphere warms, so do its oceans – at an accelerating rate. Lebanon’s illustrious cedars have long been under threat. Now they’re being restored. And, alternative strategies for feeding ourselves, on a planet that has only so much to give.
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'Unwilling or Unable' – a radical new theory for justifying military interventions. As Earth warms, a billion people may soon be exposed to mosquito-borne viral diseases. And, trawling the oceans for plastic.
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Farmers, dyers and fabric producers from a single watershed, woven together into a fibreshed. Is ethnic cleansing a charitable enterprise? The Canada Revenue Agency will soon pronounce on this matter. And, on the 25th anniversary of little Rwanda’s hundred-day genocide, there are whispers in the hall.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 39 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Formerly abundant insects have vanished from a lush Puerto Rican rainforest. In tiny Gaza, under crushing Israeli military siege, antibiotic-resistant microbes infect high-velocity sniper wounds. And a big green dream: Endless clean energy from a tiny compound that soaks up solar rays.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 38 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
What’s going on in Venezuela? I speak to someone who’s just returned, with an alternative view on the turmoil. Carbon taxes versus regulation. What works best? Both, it turns out. And – as if over a decade of crushing Israeli military siege weren’t enough, now the people of Gaza face multi-drug-resistant microbes.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 37 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
A conversation with jailed Palestinian feminist and legislator Khalida Jarrar. And deep carbon – unimaginably huge numbers of microbes living deep beneath us.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 36 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
The flu virus. the human rights situation in occupied/colonized Palestine. And, attributing extreme weather to climate warming.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 35 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
In the wake of the worst wildfires in California history, thoughts from an expert in fire dynamics. And, forest and atmosphere. Two tightly coupled systems, both in high peril.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 34 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
In today's edition of the Green Blues Show: Latin American migrants: climate change refugees? And a safe ecological operating space for livestock production. Have we wandered out of bounds?
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 33 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Billions of viruses lurk in the animal wilderness, threatening to hop over to humans and trigger the next pandemic. Scientists are mapping them. And, an increasing number of observers have concluded that Israel is a settler-colonial apartheid state. One Palestinian voice calls for justice and the rule of law.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 32 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Scientists warn that Earth may soon slip into hothouse mode. An update on Palestine’s case against Israel at the International Criminal Court, and air pollution from Alberta’s tar sands threatens to acidify lakes across the region.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 31 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Who’s to blame for climate change – ‘Us’? The Royal ‘We’? Or global capital and neoliberalism? Automation and artificial intelligence in the workplace – a revolution against labour? And, one prominent Israeli is worried about where Israel is heading.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 30 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
The impact of oil spills on shipwreck microbiomes, Canadian peacekeepers head to Mali, and the nexus between the global arms trade and the global flood of refugees.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 29 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
In Tanzania, bloggers are now government-regulated. Unarmed Gazan protestors wounded by Israeli snipers are being tended to by a team of doctors from the ICRC. And -- forget about Donald Trump and his second Supreme Court nominee. Check out the radical conservative judges he’s been appointing to American court benches, coast to coast.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 28 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Good food makes good neighbors. Traditional agriculture is also a form of cultural and political resistance. And, digital carbon footprints – all that browsing and clicking generates Earth-warming CO2. Smart computing tips for a low carbon economy.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 27 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Earth’s cryosphere, all that ice and snow that reflect solar radiation, keeping Earth cool, is melting. Do Israeli soldiers aim to maim unarmed Palestinian protesters when they gun them down? And on a more mundane topic – carbon taxes!
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 26 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
The toxic legacy of American chemical warfare in Vietnam. A report card from Canadian Auditors General on Canada's climate change performance (disappointing). And, the information economy isn’t anywhere near as clean as you’d think. But, Web servers are reducing their carbon footprint.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 25 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
The social costs of burning carbon exceed the value of the Big Five Tar Sands producers, and the province of Alberta's entire GDP, by a country mile. Reflections on this rock humans live on, and what happens when it melts. And, the plight of children in war-ravaged Yemen.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 24 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
A landmark scientific report warns of degraded land and vanishing biodiversity; cars, everywhere to be seen; commemorating Rwanda’s hundred-day genocide; and mapping climate change: where it's at, where we’re heading, and what Canadians are doing about it.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 23 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Voices from the vault about energy and climate; an African friend talks about his new book; light rail transit in Hamilton, Ontario; sounds good – but for whom? And the voice of an unforgotten urban activist, urging urban dwellers to make a difference.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 22 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
An update on the detention of young Palestinian Ahed Tamimi; doing the math on Canadian climate action (It doesn’t add up). And, confronting oil pipelines as activists know how – through non-violent direction action.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 21 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
High African fashion goes fair trade in the Netherlands; investigating extraterrestrial prokaryotes here on Earth; Are we in the midst of another mass extinction? And, moving beyond the so-called ‘Two-State Solution’. The single state of Israel-Palestine is now on the drawing board.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 20 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
In this edition of the Green Blues Show: American intervention in other countries’ elections. It’s been going on for years. Worse still – toxins in your body. Lot’s of them. Saving Earth’s climate by building oil pipelines? And – sex on the mind and in the brain.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 19 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Online gaming solves big genome problems; an eminent South African jurist says Israel practices apartheid in the occupied Palestinian Territories; a young Afghan refugee shares his harrowing tale of flight to Canada; and old tunes that never fade may jog other memories that do.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 18 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Fishing for microbial resistance genes in community drinking water ... Climate Science 101 ... The story of your life, in board game or tablet format. And, seed saving in India, facing down corporate germplasm monopoly.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 17 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
The joys of microbial fermentation and edible alchemy. In the little east African nation of Rwanda, the ghosts of hate radio linger in the air. In a crowded Bethlehem neighborhood, there's no safe space from Israeli tear gas. And, a curious muscle disorder called dystonia.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 16 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
In today's edition of the Green Blues Show: A chat with Canada’s favourite climatologist; a look at the new geologic epoch humans have engineered; a First Nations community named Garden Hill that lives up to its name, and direct-to-consumer genome testing. It’s just a spit away.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 15 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
An alternative analysis of the North Korean nuclear crisis; the gut-brain axis: an axis of evil? And from our vaults, a debate that never grows old: the relative merits of US corporate health care, versus Canada’s public health care system.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 14 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
No Way to Treat a Child: holding Israel accountable for its abuse of Palestinian children. The second half of our last edition’s chat with ecological economist William Rees, and one of North America’s most energy efficient buildings, in the epicenter of North America, Winnipeg.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 13 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
A Palestinian village that resists military occupation, and its most renowned citizen; a conversation with one of Canada’s most distinguished ecologists, and an online game that lets you do more than just procrastinate.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 12 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Nothing is as constant as change. A historian speaks about how it happens. Ninety years after the execution of Italian-American anarchists Sacco & Vanzetti, one of America’s most notorious jury trials is commemorated. And neutron stars ... When these hardest of celestial objects collide, watch out!
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 11 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Carbon taxes, cap-and-trade emission reduction systems ... What are they all about? Democracy in chains: An American academic speaks about her Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. And, on the hundredth anniversary of the First World War, a Belgian town commemorates the days of its ravaging.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 10 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Two stories about land and people in Palestine: squeezing olive oil for markets around the world, and promoting cultural and biological diversity -- a future single state in mind. And on a completely different note, on the other side of the Mediterranean, some plants were born to play Jazz.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 9 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Canadian mining companies misbehave and get taken to court, a Canadian singer-songwriter pays homage to Johnny Cash, and humanity at the crossroads. One scientist calls for time out and careful thought.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 8 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
A food forest in Palestine. Down in the basement of a big French hospital – fabulous bottles of wine. And, what to do with Earth-warming CO2? Turn it into rock.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 7 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
As sea levels rise on a warming Earth, urban engineers defend coastlines in innovative ways. Another look at plastic pollution, and scary microbes on the loose. Are multi-drug resistant bacteria a greater threat to humanity than global terrorism?
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 6 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
In this edition of the The Green Blues Show: Microplastic fibers in our drinking water, in our food, falling from the air. Cause for concern? Good old-fashioned sleep, and how it makes our brain more plastic. And Israeli Apartheid. An eminent academic says it’s real.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 5 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
In an idyllic Pacific atoll vaporized by atomic bomb tests, seventy years ago, marine life returns. Genetically modified apples and potatoes raise eyebrows -- and a few concerns -- and barcoding the millions of creatures in the tree of life, for instant identification.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 4 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Precarious employment – the new normal; Venezuela struggles to chart its own path, the international community breathing down its neck; prairie heat – visions of a future where summers are very hot and health fails. And the ‘Forever Legacy’ of climate change. Forget about life in 2050. What will life on Earth be like in 500 years?
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 3 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Killer Robots. A chorus of voices from the AI and robotics community call for a ban. Computer-brain interfaces reveal music in the mind. Land Defenders in Muskrat Falls, Labrador, oppose hydro dams. And thoughts from Canada’s emeritus ecologist.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 2 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.
Welcome to The Green Blues Show. The latest news ... a bit of news. In our first edition: Fighting for the fifteen buck minimum wage, "gene drives" (the latest genetic engineering tool), and visions of life in South Asia, at the end of this century, where climbing wet bulb temperatures may make life outdoors too hot to handle.
The post The Green Blues Show – Edition 1 appeared first on Green Planet Monitor.