TUC Radio

Blasted into bedrock of the island of Olkiluoto in Finland on the shores of the Baltic Sea, Onkalo has to remain secure for 100,000 years.

Danish filmmaker Michael Madsens documentary of the building in progress of Onkalo is a meditation on eternity, insanity and the impossibility of projecting anything 100,000 years into the future.

The film also proves eloquently and with expert statements the terrible danger that arises from so-called spent nuclear fuel from power plants and makes us see Fukushima with very different eyes.

This radio program presents excerpts from the film and its amazing sound design.

DATE: film released in 2010

Honoring Utah Phillips " From the archives of TUC Radio " this is a celebration of his life and an account, in his own words, of how he became an activist.

In this Part TWO Utah talked about founding the Poor Peoples Party, working with the Mormon Church, the Black Panthers and Judi Bari, and how he became involved with the Singer Songwriters movement. He closed with moving, enduring advice on how to work and organize together.

In the early-1960s, Phillips was involved with Fair Play for Cuba and the struggle for open housing laws in Utah. In 1968, he was nominated and campaigned for the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom ticket. The experience led to Phillips being dismissed from his job with the Utah State Archives.

Following the election, Phillips remained in Utah for a year, working for the Migrant Council and living on a cot in the back of a big warehouse called The Cosmic Airplane. Encouraged by friends, including folk singer Rosalie Sorrels, to try his hand at performing, Phillips moved to the East Coast in 1969. He settled, for several years, in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he became a regular performer at Cafe Lena.

Phillips was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies). His view of unions and politics were shaped by his parents, especially his Mom who was a labor organizer for the CIO. But Phillips was more of a Christian Anarchist and a pacifist, so found the modern-day Wobblies to be the perfect fit for him, an iconoclast and artist.

At the end of his life Phillips lived in Nevada City, California where he hosted a weekly, one-hour, radio show, Loafers Glory: The Hobo Jungle of the Mind. The Hospitality House that he co-founded still shelters the Homeless.

The folk singer, labor organizer, storyteller, activist and poet Utah Phillips was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 15, 1935, he died in Nevada City, CA, on May 23, 2008. He came to the Unitarian Fellowship Hall in Berkeley on May 18, 2004, to talk about his life. Recorded by Maria Gilardin.

Honoring Utah Phillips, the folk singer, labor organizer, storyteller, activist and poet. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 15, 1935, he died in Nevada City, CA, on May 23, 2008.

From the archives of TUC Radio " this is a celebration of his life and an account, in his own words, of how he became an activist. The golden voice of the great American Southwest, Bruce U. Utah Phillips came to the Unitarian Fellowship Hall in Berkeley on May 18, 2004, to talk about his life.

Phillips parents were union organizers in the 1930s. When he left home to join a road crew in Yellowstone Park the older workers, who played guitars, taught Phillips how to turn his ukulele chords into guitar chords.

As a soldier during the war on Korea, Phillips continued to find refuge in music and helped to form a band. After he returned to the United States he befriended Ammon Hennessey at the Joe Hill House for Transients and Migrants. Hennessey convinced him to become a pacifist and to use music as a political weapon.

Come back for the second part of this one hour talk when Utah Phillips remembered the founding of the Poor Peoples Party for children, working with the Mormon Church, the Black Panthers and Judi Bari, and how he became involved with the Folk Singers movement.

The Bandolero was seized by the Iceland Coast Guard on August 1, 2026. Reported by the AP.

("https://apnews.com/article/iceland-whaling-paul-watson-bandero-ship-seized-80064e2df900ed79f916608bd3780002")

When Captain Paul Watson " co-founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society returned from exile in France, TUC radio broadcast an interview with him that surpassed in downloads all programs of 2016 except for one. So here is an update on occasion of the beginning of the Japanese whale hunt in the Southern Ocean.

Sea Shepherd is an international non-profit, marine wildlife conservation organization. Their 1977 founding mission is to end the destruction of habitat and the slaughter of wildlife in the worlds oceans. Their decades long practice of aggressive non-violence has led to charges of piracy. However Sea Shepherds legal team defends the organizations right to enforce international conservation laws in neutral waters.

Courts in many jurisdictions have sided with Sea Shepherd " with the notable exception of the US 9th District Court. The US court sided in 2012 with Japanese Whalers and ordered Watson to stay away from the whaling fleet. Even though in March 2014 the International Court of Justice ruled that the Japanese whaling program was not, as claimed, for scientific purposes, and ordered Japan to cease operations, the US District Court is standing by its ruling. On August 23, 2016, a preliminary injunction, which prevents Sea Shepherds US branch from disrupting Japanese whaling operations in the Southern Ocean, became permanent.

However Sea Shepherd is an international organization and the Australian branch is not bound by the US 9th District Court ruling. Australia in fact has declared Japans hunt in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary to be illegal.

As this program goes out in late November 2016 Sea Shepherd Australia is outfitting their most recently added vessel, the Ocean Warrior, to confront Japanese whalers who already left Japan on November 18, 2016.

While still in exile in Paris in January of 2016 Paul Watson was interviewed by Aurlie Aim who is part of the Chou Brave TV collective. They touched on remembrance, vision, ideas, climate change, children, ecology, diversity and interdependence and even food and above all why exactly we humans will die when the oceans die.

They spoke in a coffee house with some music in the background.

The investigative journalist and acclaimed author, specializing in weapons and war, Annie Jacobsen, has come closer than other investigators to the razor edge of secrecy that surrounds the current nuclear war machine. Her book, Nuclear War, is based on hundreds of interviews with war planners and engineers - plus recently declassified documents.

Annie Jacobsen, reminds us that a Doomsday killing machine has been designed, capable of destroying not just two cities but life on this planet - first with fire and heat and then seven to ten years of darkness and ice sheets from nuclear winter.

Annie Jacobsens book, Nuclear War, A Scenario, has 373 pages of interviews and sources, but it covers only 72 minutes of real time. Beginning at zero hour with the launch of one rogue nuclear missile - in Jacobsens scenario from North Korea - that will hit the Pentagon only 38 minutes later and destroy all of Washington DC.

Here is the question and answer section of an interview by tech writer Quentin Hardy for the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Watch the full one hour video of this conversation on the YouTube channel of the Commonwealth Club. The title is Annie Jacobsen | Nuclear War

This is an updated archival program in memory of Cecile Pineda

Cecile Pineda had come to the Unitarian Universalists Fellowship Hall in Berkeley on Hiroshima Day 2014 to support Harvey Wasserman. He campaigns to prevent the opening of nuclear power plants - to limit their operation - or to close them down.

Cecile Pineda had just finished her novel: Devils Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step, that the Nations John Nichols called: An astonishing anatomy of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster..."

Cecile Pineda died at home on August 11, 2022. Her friends and students miss her voice, her humor, her deep scientific knowledge and her rebellion - all inside her art of writing.

This replay of her appearance, along with Harvey Wasserman, has an eerily contemporary cast.

In April of 2026, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced final approval of Diablo Canyon Power Plants operating license renewals, completing the federal licensing process that California initiated in 2022 under Senate Bill 846 to keep the plant online through 2030.

Harvey Wasserman, still active today, continues his campaigns opposing nuclear solution to expanding power needs.

DATE: I recorded this event on August 6, 2014.

Prof. Moomaw wrote in 2021: Humanity puts out 11 billion tons of carbon

each year " amazingly less than half ends up in the atmosphere. NASA

satellite data and research show that a bit more than half of the

remaining 6 billion tons of carbon are going into forests, plants,

wetlands and soils. The other 40 " 45% is being absorbed by the oceans.

However the extraordinary capacity of forests to absorb carbon is being

undermined by world-wide logging and clear-cutting " which ironically

turns forests, that could be our best protection from climate disaster "

into yet another powerful source of greenhouse gases.

William Moomaw is Professor Emeritus of International Environmental

Policy at Tufts University. Stuart Scott was founder/executive producer

of Facing Future TV.

A report on the underground networks in the forest

Suzanne Simard is Professor of Forest Ecology in the University of British Columbias Faculty of Forestry. In spite of her status in academia, rigorous research and love and respect from her students it took over 30 years for her ideas to break through.

Ferris Jabr writes in the New York Times Magazine: By analyzing the DNA in root tips and tracing the movement of molecules through underground conduits, Simard has discovered that fungal threads link nearly every tree in a forest " even trees of different species. Carbon, water, nutrients, alarm signals and hormones can pass from tree to tree through these subterranean circuits

Resources tend to flow from the oldest and biggest trees to the youngest and smallest. Chemical alarm signals generated by one tree prepare nearby trees for danger. Seedlings severed from the forests underground lifelines are much more likely to die than their networked counterparts. Crucially, a majority of the carbon sequestered in forests resides in the soils, anchored by networks of symbiotic roots, fungi and microbes.

Each year, the worlds forests capture more than 24 percent of global carbon emissions. When a mature forest is burned or clear-cut, the planet loses an invaluable ecosystem and one of its most effective systems of climate regulation. The razing of an old-growth forest is not just the destruction of magnificent individual trees " its the collapse of an ancient republic whose interspecies covenant of reciprocation and compromise is essential for the survival of Earth as weve known it.

On May 4, 2021 Suzanne Simards book, Finding the Mother Tree came out.

In a rare Ted talk in June 2016 Simard laid out what she discovered. This radio program also includes excerpts from her Zoom seminar at UBC: Dispatches from The Mother Tree Project, on Oct 22, 2020.

And in late 2020 the acclaimed environmental writer Ferris Jabr accompanied Suzanne Simard for several days of field research in rough terrain for what became a cover story in The New York Times Magazine. This program ends with quotes from his extraordinary science based article.

Ferris Jabr has also written for the Scientific American, The Atlantic, Harpers, and The New Yorker.

By now Suzanne Simards insights are beginning to influence the thoughts about climate change, carbon sequestration and harvesting techniques in departments of forestry throughout Canada and the US.

A quick note: Im stopping to do radio programs in August 2025. Just had my 79 birthday and have been producing radio for almost 50 years " beginning at KPFA in Berkeley. Most recently my home is an oak and madr0ne forest in Northern California. Thanks to Otis Maclay from Audioport who has placed re-runs for over a year now. He told me that more than 120 stations are taking TUC Radio every Tuesday. Good Bye to you all!!

A small bookstore in Point Reyes Station, a coastal town in West Marin, California, was the first to invite Suzanne Simard for a conversation. Three days earlier, on May 4, her book had been published. Finding the Mother Tree, Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, has already become a best-seller.

Suzanne Simard was born in the Monashee Mountains of British Columbia and grew up in an old growth forest. She was educated at the University of British Columbia and Oregon State University; and is now Professor of Forest Ecology in the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Forestry.

Over 1,000 people participated on the Zoom book release hosted by David Haskell. He is professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of the South and author of The Forest Unseen and essays, op-eds, and poetry.

Point Reyes Books called Suzanne Simard a pioneer of plant communication and intelligence; much like Rachel Carson. Simard, they say, writes in inspiring, and accessible ways, how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved; how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, cooperate and compete with one another with sophistication. All characteristics ascribed only to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies. And at the center of it all stand the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.

The one hour film of the conversation is posted on Youtube The link can be found on the website of Point Reyes Books. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yRiN876lZw

DATE: 2021/05/07

On August 28, 2008 analysis of the media was Michael Parenti's most up-to-date contribution. He gave the keynote speech for the Modern Media Censorship lectures by Project Censored. Each year Project Censored gives awards for the most censored news stories of the year. Parenti lists important criteria by which to judge media bias, ranging from ownership to labeling, false objectivity and sensationalism, omission, outright lies and the denial of causality with the famous theory of "stuff happens".

Michael Parenti (1935-2026) wrote and lectured on the mainstream media for decades. His key book on this topic is "Inventing Reality - The politics of the News Media." With roots in a working class Italian district of New York and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale Michael Parenti became an internationally known writer and lecturer. He was the author of twenty books.