Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– Bill McKibben: Japan’s Horror Reveals How Thin is the Edge We Live On
– Nicholas Stern: Climate inaction risks a new world war
– Monbiot: We won’t trouble Saudi’s tyrants with calls to reform while we crave their oil
– Learning from Japan about Resilience
Food is at the core of so many of our global problems, including hunger, obesity, energy, climate change, economic disparity, and on and on. But it’s also something that unites us— everyone eats.
One of the things I’ve been arguing for years is that most people in the developed world, given a perceived lack of alternatives and no narrative to explain change and sacrifice, will do almost anything to keep their present way of life. I point out that if they become cold enough most people would shovel live baby harp seals into their furnace to keep warm, while carefully justifying why this is reasonable and necessary and probably convincing themselves that baby harp seals like to be burned alive.
Even now, 10 days after the crisis began, the situation at Fukushima is still not under control. The disaster is clearly worse than the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, yet not as grave as the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, which spread radioactive material over large portions of Europe. A chronology of how the Fukushima crisis has unfolded demonstrates that even a country as advanced as Japan — and as practiced in dealing with natural disasters — was unprepared for an earthquake of this magnitude, the largest in Japan in 1,200 years.
And finally, there is always the surprise of: Why now? Why did the crowd decide to storm the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and not any other day? The bread famine going on in France that year and the rising cost of food had something to do with it, as hunger and poverty does with many of the Middle Eastern uprisings today, but part of the explanation remains mysterious. Why this day and not a month earlier or a decade later? Or never instead of now?
The earthquake and subsequent tsunami disaster in Japan have prompted speculation about the world’s nuclear future, the pressures on oil, and issues around economic collapse. Here’s our round-up from some of the top thinkers in the peak oil movement.
– Radiation Spread Seen; Frantic Repairs Go On
– A Hunger for Information
– Plant’s Design, Safety Record Are Under Scrutiny
– Monbiot: Japan nuclear crisis should not carry weight in atomic energy debate
– Jonathan Schell: From Hiroshima to Fukushima
It’s not that you are discounting yourself – it’s that the personal you with all its small indulgences, its interiorities and subjective biographical events is turned inside out suddenly and asked to be someone else. Someone who acts within the bigger picture. Your own Spring uprising.
When we design machinery that is dangerous and prone to failure we try to reduce risks by tight regulations, specifics, and centralised control. Of course, these strategies are expensive and therefore are best implemented over large scales. So, we are raising the stakes by building bigger and more expensive systems in order to hedge the risk of failure. In the case of nuclear energy, the result is the concentration of power production in large plants. That strategy seems to work, within limits: on the average, the safety record of the nuclear industry is not bad. But when something goes wrong with a nuclear plant, it tends to go wrong in a big way, such as with Chernobyl and Fukushima.
We are all Japan. The earth’s axis shifted 6.5 inches and each day is now 1.8 microseconds shorter. On an energetic level — acknowledged only by the wisdom of “alternative” medicine — we all felt that. Our psyches know. It was a quake felt round the world, literally.
But I do think that the media portrayal of people responding by attempting to protect themselves denies the fact that most of us *know* we cannot always trust governments to act in our best interest or tell us the truth.
As nuclear Japan melts down, America has the same reactors, the same government policy of withholding vital information (“to prevent terrorism”) about nuclear risk. Radio Ecoshock finds the key audio clips from nuclear critics long banished to the media wilderness – plus interviews with Nicole Foss from “The Automatic Earth” (who is a trained and published nuclear expert!) and Shawn Patrick from Greenpeace. These are American reactors from GE, all promoted as “fail-safe” answers to future energy. Now we see (again) what happens when reactors go wrong. Will the Japanese people now demand renewables? Could this tragedy lead to a burst of clean energy innovation?
