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The Green Planet Monitor

The Green Planet Monitor

By: David Kattenburg
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 Listen, Read, Watch2017-23 Earth Chronicle Productions Biological Sciences Politics & Government Science Social Sciences
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  • Green Planet Monitor Podcast

    Green Planet Monitor Podcast
    Jul 30 2023
    GPM # 21 You are what you eat, so they say. As it happens, the trillions of bacteria inhabiting your intestinal tract eat what you eat, turning meals into molecules that affect your gut, immune system and mind. The brain and nervous system, in turn, seem to be able to scan and modulate your gut microbiome. Premek Bercik and his colleagues untangle the mysteries of this bi-directional relationship. Bercik — a Professor in the Division of Gastroenterology and member of the Farncombe Family Digestive Health Research Institute at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario — studies gut disorders such as Celiac disease and Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), and the links between gut bacteria, bowel inflammation and affective disorders such as depression and anxiety. Listen to the GPM‘s conversation with Premek in today’s podcast. Click on the button above or go here. Gut bacteria have numerous tricks up their sleeves. Virtuosic metabolisers of the meat, carbs, fiber and fats we feed them, those bacteria generate molecules that modulate our immune system, stimulate neurons in the walls of our intestinal tract or travel straight to mood centres in our brain. Among these, neurotransmitters such as serotonin and histamine. Bacteria also stimulate the vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the body, connecting the brain stem and the walls of the gut. The beneficial effects of bacterial supplements (probiotics) may be mediated by the vagus. In return, the vagus seems to affect gut microbes, scanning those bugs and modifying the composition of bacterial populations. Not surprisingly, the gut microbiome is affected by emotional stress. Much of what we know about the gut-brain axis has been established in experiments on germ-free mice. Inoculated with stool samples from people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), germ-free mice exhibit negative shifts in their own bowel behaviour. Inoculated with gut samples from people with mood disorders, germ-free mice exhibit their own behavioural shifts. Drilling down into the mysteries of human gut physiology, Premek Bercik and his team have studied specific strains of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bacteria. In the former category, Bifidobacterium longum is a well known probiotic. B. longum NCC3001 reduces patient depression scores and improves gut symptoms, Bercik and his colleagues have found. It also shifts neural activity in brain regions known to be targeted by antidepressants, such as the hippocampus and amygdala. And, B. longum raises levels of a molecule called brain-derived neurotrophic factor in the hippocampus of mice. Then there’s a known intestinal ‘bad guy’, Klebsiella aerogenes. Certain strains possess an enzyme that converts the amino acid histidine — found in dietary protein — into the inflammatory and pain mediator, histamine. That histamine crosses the intestinal barrier, where it stimulates mast cells, a type of white blood cell. They, in turn, secrete even more histamine. Consistent with this scenario, people with IBS tend to secrete elevated levels of histamine in their urine. And, decreased consumption of certain types of fermentable fiber (which, when digested by bacteria, create optimal metabolic conditions for bacterial histamine production) leads to lower urinary histamine and pain relief. Listen to our conversation with Premek in today’s podcast. Click on the button above or go here. Land of a Thousand Hills (David Kattenburg) The 29th anniversary of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide has just come to a close. Over the course of those awful hundred days, between April 7 and July 15, 1994, an estimated eight hundred thousand ethnic Tutsis and a lesser number of their Hutu neighbors were brutally killed by Hutu extremists armed with knives, hoes and machetes. Over the airwaves, venom flowed. Announcers at Radio-Télévision Mille Collines (from Rwanda’s popular nickname, the ‘Land of a Thousand Hills’), urged listeners to “kill the cockroaches.” RTLM chiefs distributed cheap pocket radios to stoke the furnace of ethnic hatred. Established in July 1993 by Hutu extremists “to create harmonious development in Rwandan society,” it became the genocide’s key driving force, mobilizing grassroots members of the notorious Interahamwe militia. This documentary was produced in 2009. All the people you hear have moved on. ‘Gacaca’ courts ended in 2012. Radio Izuba continues to broadcast in Kibungo, eastern Rwanda. Listen to the story in today’s podcast. Click on the button above or go here. They’re all the rage. Drones. Every country wants them, packed with sensors, cameras and missiles. Small ones that loiter, drop tear gas or bombs, or crash with a big bang, in kamikaze fashion; big ones that fire missiles, blowing up cars, buildings and people to bits. All on command from control rooms hundreds, if not thousands of kilometers away. Now, Canada is in the market for a fleet of its own. Hellfire missiles and laser guided bombs may be on its ...
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    59 mins
  • Little Boy and Fat Man

    Little Boy and Fat Man
    Aug 4 2023
    GPM # 22 Seventy-eight 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: almost all were 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 would supposedly have resulted from putting boots on Japanese soil. Other, more cynical reasons would emerge in time. Here’s a story about America’s development of Little Boy and Fat Man, 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, 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 (Canada was indeed involved. Listen to Hans Bethe). And Rosalie Bertell, late anti-nuclear campaigner and authority on the health 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 this story in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Bikini Island, the atoll’s largest island, at sunset (David Kattenburg) 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 – 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. Read this recent piece by Glenn Alcalay. And listen to our complete conversation 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 consolidated its status as 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 atomic and thermonuclear tests 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, under the aegis of the US Department of Energy. Health impact claims adjudicated and awarded by the now defunct Nuclear Claims ...
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    Less than 1 minute
  • No Immediate Danger

    No Immediate Danger
    Aug 13 2023
    GPM # 23 Seventy-eight years ago, on August 6, 1945, the US dropped a uranium-enriched fission bomb – ‘Little Boy’ – on the Japanese port city, Hiroshima. Three days later, anxious to test their second innovative device before the war ended, they detonated a second bomb — a plutonium-triggered implosion device called Fat Man — over Nagasaki. Why Nagasaki? Because Nagasaki lay in a bowl, surrounded by hills nuclear scientists figured would reflect neutrons. They wanted to check that out (listen to Glenn Alcalay here). When the dust settled, a couple hundred thousand lay dead or dying. Most were civilians. Thousands more would sicken and die in the years to come. America’s official rationale for dropping bombs on Japan: avoiding huge casualties a ground invasion of Japan would supposedly have incurred. Harry Truman’s non-mea culpa was immediately accepted by the American media and public. The real reason would emerge in time: one-upping the Soviets, setting the stage for global supremacy, with the bomb as gold standard. Gar Alperovitz has written a pair of books about the nuclear bombing of Japan. Alperovitz is a historian, political economist, activist and writer, and the author of two books about the nuclear bombing of Japan. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam was published in 1965. His 1995 work, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, updated the story. Alperovitz is also the co-founder of something called the Democracy Collaborative, a research centre on ecologically sustainable, community-based economics, and the Next System Project. Listen to my conversation with Gar Alperovitz. Click on the play button on top, or go here. ‘Bravo Shot’ over Bikini atoll, the Marshall Islands, March 1, 1954 Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just the start. Building bombs would become a booming business for America and the other four ‘Permanent Members’ of the United Nations (the ones franchised to possess nuclear weapons and to threaten their use), Russia, China, the UK and France. Nuclearism was a bonanza for the ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ of course, and for the Pentagon too. Each military service hustled for its own nukes. The Air Force had dropped their first two on Japan. Soon, the army had a growing arsenal of its own, mounted on missiles. So did the navy, to detonate at or below the surface of bodies of water. Hungry for their slices of protection, prestige and power, a half dozen other countries developed smaller but equally deadly arsenals. Here’s a great song about that. In the fields of the bomb, there was no shortage of profits to go around — digging up uranium in desolate, underdeveloped areas of the world inhabited by disenfranchised indigenous people; enriching it; selling it; designing warheads of the latest sort; testing nukes in the atmosphere or just below ground, spreading radionuclides all around the planet. Power plants put the peaceful atom to work. Their radioactive wastes got dumped in the seas, buried or processed into fertilizer to be spread on farm fields. Plutonium from spent fuel rods would be enriched and packed into warheads. Untold numbers of nuclear workers and innocent bystanders would die in the course of all this atomic industriousness, especially islanders and other First Nations people. Tens of millions more would perish (and continue to do so) in wars fought or engineered by the possessors of the ultimate weapon — the weapon that determines who wields bona fide power and who doesn’t. This is something I produced back in 1986. In order of appearance: Rosalie Bertell was a Canadian-American anti-nuclear activist and authority on the health effects of ionizing radiation. Bertell, a sister of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart, founded the International Institute of Concern for Public Health, in Toronto. Her book — No Immediate Danger – Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth — was published in 1985. In 1986, Bertell received the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Prize. Rosalie Bertell passed away in 2012. You’ll also hear two voices recorded at the ‘Crimes of the Official Terror Network Tribunal’, a four-day popular summit organized by the Alliance for Non-Violent Action, in Toronto, in June 1988: Al Draper, a Royal Canadian Air Force serviceman, was one of many US and Canadian servicemen recruited to observe US nuclear bomb tests in the Nevada desert, to see how it affected them. Ward Churchill was a professor at the University of Colorado at the time of this recording, and an activist with the American Indian Movement (AIM). Donna Smyth was an English professor at Acadia University, in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and an anti-uranium mining activist. Smyth’s 1986 work, Subversive Elements — drawing on her experience opposing uranium mining in Nova Scotia in the early 1980s — was described at the time as “a multi-generic, postmodern, ecofeminist, Maritime novel.” Thanks to ...
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    59 mins
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