Beyond Nuclear International
Anche l’Africa brucia
Cambiamenti climatici, questioni economiche, povertà e sopravvivenza sono le concause delle migliaia di incendi che stanno soffocando l’Africa centrale
Di Angelo Ferrari
La foresta pluviale del continente nero è il secondo polmone verde del pianeta ed è altrettanto a rischio. Il cambiamento climatico è solo parte del problema. Senza una modernizzazione dell’agricoltura la pratica del “taglia e brucia” non potrà essere fermata.
Cambiamenti climatici, questioni economiche, povertà e sopravvivenza sono le concause delle migliaia di incendi che stanno soffocando l’Africa centrale. Forse più numerosi di quelli che stanno mettendo a rischio l’Amazzonia. Qui, in Congo e Angola, stando andando a fuoco le savane, ma anche parte della foresta pluviale, il secondo polmone verde del pianeta.
La pratica dell’incendio delle savane, detta “taglia e brucia”, non è nuova per il continente africano. È diffusa nella maggior parte degli stati africani, in particolare in quelli meno sviluppati. Per contadini e pastori è un mezzo pratico, diffuso e che ha radici lontane. Per così dire, un sistema ancestrale di gestione della terra. La Costa d’Avorio ne è un esempio. Tutta la parte centrale, boschiva, è stata distrutta proprio da questa pratica per avere terre coltivabili.
Il satellite NPP Suomi della NASA ha rilevato migliaia di incendi nell’Africa centrale l’11 luglio 2016. Gli incendi sono rappresentati da una moltitudine di punti rossi.
I cambiamenti climatici, tuttavia, hanno reso questa pratica ancora più diffusa, proprio per il venir meno delle terre coltivabili e fertili, o utilizzabili per i pascoli. Fattore, questo, che nel Sahel ha scatenato e scatena conflitti per lo sfruttamento della poca terra che rimane.
Standing up and fighting back
Reflections on the September 20 climate strike in Washington, DC
By Linda Pentz Gunter
In 1968, German students were on the march. The 68ers protest movement was in the streets, outraged largely at government authoritarianism, as well as their own economic struggles. What they also spawned was a culture of mistrust in the government, and a willingness to mobilize in huge numbers.
Arguably, it was the 68ers whose actions spawned the German climate movement, one which incorporated the many strands that are siloed elsewhere — pro-renewable energy, anti-war, anti-nuclear power and anti-nuclear weapons.
Student protest in West Berlin, Germany, 1968. (Photo: Stiftung Haus der Geschichte, Wikimedia Commons.)
What the 68ers were also rebelling against, of course, was the complicity of their parents in Nazism. Their protests were fueled by the anger and betrayal they felt. They had inherited a country that was forever stained by the grossest acts of barbarity imaginable. Why hadn’t their parents stopped it? They knew. They must have known. Why didn’t they act?
Some Germans did act of course. But not enough.
Now, some of us are the generation that those culpable German parents were then. And we are being asked the same question, this time about the climate crisis. Surely we knew? The evidence was always there. Why didn’t we act?
Some of us did, of course. But not enough.
Murky politics pollute the Pacific
Radioactive water at Fukushima should be stored not dumped
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Last week, Japan’s then environment minister, Yoshiaki Harada, made news with a pronouncement that wasn’t news. The storage tanks at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear site, filled with radioactive water, were reaching capacity. By 2022 there would be no room for more tanks on the present site. Japan would then have to dump the radioactive water stored in the tanks into the Pacific Ocean, he said.
Although likely unrelated to those remarks, a day later, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dispatched 19 of his cabinet ministers, including Harada. Harada was replaced as environment minister by rising star, Shinjiro Koizumi, the son of former primer minister, Junichiro Koizumi. Both father and son are opposed to nuclear energy, and on his first day in office, the younger Koizumi told reporters that he believed Japan should end its use of nuclear energy and close its nuclear power plants.
Shinjiro Koizumi, Japan’s new environment minister, says Japan should cease using nuclear power. (Photo: R2d2ki for Wikimedia Commons)
“I would like to study how we scrap them, not how to retain them,” Reuters reported him saying. This is a surprising position from someone inside the fervently pro-nuclear Abe government and it remains to be seen whether he will be allowed to translate his position into policy.
Hanford’s Dirty Secret
And it’s not 56 million gallons of nuclear waste
Reported by ICAN
Building nuclear weapons requires materials and labor, not just from scientists, but also from the men and women living in communities nearby. After the Cold War, many of the United States’ most crucial nuclear weapons production sites ‘closed’ and were forgotten, but not by workers and local communities, who were left to deal with the devastating, toxic legacy of these sites.
This is obvious at Hanford Waste Management Site, Washington. It is sometimes referred to as “the most toxic place in America,” yet most people will never have heard of it. While the workers and activists of Hanford speak out, their stories are dismissed because they demonstrate the real cost of nuclear weapons.
What happened at the Hanford site?
Hanford site was one piece of the Manhattan Project puzzle. It developed plutonium for the Trinity Test, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and Cold War weapons. By 1965, there were nine weapons reactors, five reprocessing plants, hundreds of support and research buildings, and 177 underground waste tanks. Ultimately, Hanford produced 74 tons of plutonium, roughly two-thirds of the US’s stockpile. The production facilities were phased out as the Cold War ended and the Dept. of Energy delegated cleanup to various private companies.
The decline and fall of nuclear power
“Nuclear energy has never been a clean economical energy source and will not be in the future”
By Linda Pentz Gunter
On August 25, 2019, the Washington Post published an editorial condemning Independent Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, also a Democratic presidential candidate, for, among other things, excluding nuclear power from his version of the Green New Deal. The Post declared that:
“Mr. Sanders also promises to make his plan unnecessarily expensive by ruling out a long-established source of carbon-free electricity: nuclear power. Not only would he halt the building of new plants, but he also would deny re-licensing to the existing ones that now provide about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity.”
The Washington Post condemned Bernie Sanders’s anti-nuclear Green New Deal. We disagreed. (Photo: Michelle Prevost through photogism, licensed under CC BY 2.0)
As one anti-nuclear colleague said on reading that: “he gets my vote right there!”
Specifically, Sanders’s $16.3 trillion climate plan included this:
“Phase out the use of non-sustainable sources. This plan will stop the building of new nuclear power plants and find a real solution to our existing nuclear waste problem. It will also enact a moratorium on nuclear power plant license renewals in the United States to protect surrounding communities. We know that the toxic waste byproducts of nuclear plants are not worth the risks of the technology’s benefit, especially in light of lessons learned from the Fukushima meltdown and the Chernobyl disaster. To get to our goal of 100 percent sustainable energy, we will not rely on any false solutions like nuclear, geoengineering, carbon capture and sequestration, or trash incinerators.”
How much is a trillion dollars?
And why the world shouldn’t spend it on nuclear weapons
By Linda Pentz Gunter
How much is a trillion dollars? An unimaginable amount? Uncountable?
Not the latter. That’s exactly how much money will be counted out, in front of the United Nations in October. It will take seven days and seven nights to count it all. (And you can help count it).
Why one trillion? That is the staggering amount of money that the world’s nuclear armed countries plan to spend on the nuclear arms race over the next ten years. The action is an offshoot of the campaign — Move the nuclear weapons money — and is designed to let the world know just how obscene a number that is. And all the far better things that money could be spent on.
A version of the bank notes to be counted envisions better use of one trillion dollars. (Image courtesy of Counting the Nuclear Weapons Money)
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