Environmental concerns

. Ex-president Bill Clinton has long worn a hearing aid because in his youth he enjoyed loud music. Noise can make us ill – not just hearing loss (as I have from starting a dance club for Caribbean youth in an abandoned factory in London), but also high blood pressure, disturbed sleep and even heart disease. An article in a German trade union newspaper claimed that “noise sickness” tops the industrial ailment list. Noise is a pollutant. It produces a large amount of stress and strain for bodies and minds already taxed by a high-pressured economic system. Noise is the silent political issue that grates on many people’s nerves. In a poll 45% of the German population said they believe that protection against noise is more important than building new roads. Tens of thousands of people who live near London’s Heathrow airport have for years managed to stymie successive government...

By Richard Falk* and David Krieger** TFF PressInfo # 420 Prefatory NoteThis jointly authored essay was initially published in The Hill on May 30, 2017 under the title, “Averting the Ticking Time Bomb of Nukes in North Korea.” We did not choose such a title that is doubly misleading: our contention is not that North Korea is the core of the problem, but rather the retention of nuclear weapons by all of the states pose both crises in the context of counter-proliferation geopolitics and with respect to the possession, deployment, and development of the weaponry itself; a second objection is with the title given the piece by editors at The Hill. While acknowledging the practice of media outlets to decide on titles without seeking prior approval from authors, this title is particularly objectionable. The term ‘nukes’ gives an almost friendly shorthand to these most horrific of weapons, and strikes a...

Once again the media is presenting us with the images of the mother of all famines – stretching from the Yemen to Somalia, to Sudan and South Sudan, to the Central African Republic, to northern Nigeria. It’s a bad famine but there have been bad famines in the not so distant past – the great Ethiopian one in 1985 which triggered the rock star, Bob Geldorf, to organise a massive world-wide popular response. (I remember running with tens of thousands of other campaigners in London’s Hyde Park.) Before that, in 1974 at the World Food Conference, there was a real feeling that the world was running out of food and dramatic new policies must be put in place by the richer countries. They were and much progress was made. Between 1990 and 2015 the proportion of children under five who were malnourished fell from 25% to 14% of the world’s...

This New Year announces itself with bangs all over, not whimpers. Pope Francis made a tour d’horizon on all continents, strongly denouncing the violence in favor of his alternative: negotiation. Much violence is copycat or copyrat; violence being a la mode. Copying–aka learning–is not wrong. But it depends on what is copied. Here my 10-11 wishes: Wish no. 1: copying peace rather than violence, for instance from ASEAN and the Nordic Community, making peace self-reinforcing. Wish no. 2: reporting violence less prominently, more toward the end of newspapers-TV-radio news, and reporting peace upfront. Wish no. 3: understanding war better, not only how many killed but how many bereaved; understanding peace better as model for others. Wish no. 4: introducing Yin/Yang in Western thought: no totally good or bad humans or states around; they are all improvable mixtures. Wish no. 5: linking the good in ourselves to the good in others...

By Gunnar Westberg Very pleasant meeting. We all agreed on everything. We follow you, Big Brother, in all your ventures, we are so happy you like us. Reports and family pictures have appeared in media from a dinner with 350 guests. Nice laudatory speeches, not a disturbing critical word. There is a final document on everything that was agreed, already beforehand. I recommend no one to read the paper, you can’t, it is such a soporific (= tending to induce drowsiness or sleep). No journalist has so far given an overview, they fell asleep too, I guess. The section on Environment and on Energy seems good, but nothing new. The failure of the USA in energy conservation is not allowed to disturb in this Feel good report. The section on Defence and Security is, however, very depressing.

Marinaleda, Spain On a periphery road 108 Km east of Sevilla: one white Andalucian village after the other, traditional, poor; and suddenly this super-modern concrete reality, a utopia in many people’s minds! The basic concept is well known: authorities expropriated land lying fallow in the midst of unemployed starving land labor, and it was transformed into a communal cooperative with very inexpensive housing, kindergarten, schools, clinics. Behind that was the vision, knowledge, skill, will of the mayor for over 30 years, Juan Grillo. With the mind, a reality, and the will to transform that reality. We are dealing with more than economy and have to look beyond economics to capture what went and goes on. The old distinctions between public and private, and between owning and using, certainly enter. With comments, such as these. Generally public vs private is seen in terms of state vs capital, the state using plan...

when it all began, an educated conflict analyst or otherwise conflict competent person would have said about the conflict in Syria that it was a very complex thing, caused by history, environment, traumas, external factors, the economic situation, etc. And that al-Assad and his government was certainly an important reason but far from the only one. The conflict expert would have warned against at last four ways of thinking: a) any interpretation that put all the good people on one side and all the bad people on the other – because there are no conflicts in the world with only two such parties; b) any idea that the conflict could be solved by siding with the presumed good ones and going against the bad one(s); c) every attempt to ‘weaponise’ the conflict and increase the level of violence, the duration of the conflict and the human suffering; d) any and...

Within the global eco-system humanity has – since industrialization – upset balances and now suffers the consequences, trying to tackle them. COP21, the UN 195 States conference in Paris, reached the unanimous agreement demanded of them after two weeks of hard work. However, as the U.S. points out, an agreement is not a treaty with legally binding targets. Droughts-storms-floods and surface warming: land-oceans-glaciers. As glaciers melt oceans and rivers will over-flood major settled land. With the current 1 degree C warming bad and 2 degrees intolerable, they settled for the 1.5C goal “if possible”; a compromise. Better .5 only. The dominant theory sees greenhouse gases CO2-CH4 from using fossil fuels for energy, trapping heat in the atmosphere as the cause. Removing this cause, a sluggish process, calls for alternative energy sources, like wind and solar (the author got solar panels in 1975). Human settlements and forests darkening the planet, attracting...

Here, this Blog, I am calling upon families, educators and community leaders worldwide to become as children and rediscover the benefits of paying attention to nature, and to take action to strengthen children’s connections to nature. As adults, we should be opening the doors and providing the children and the youth opportunities that fully connect them to the natural environment so they can gain an understanding of the natural world in as many educational and recreational settings as possible. We cannot start too soon! Today’s children and families often have limited opportunities to connect with the natural environment. Richard Louv called this phenomenon, ‘nature-deficit disorder’ in his influential book, The Last Child in the Woods, and opened our eyes to the developmental effects that nature has on our children. Continue reading on Mofid’s blog – Globalisation For The Common Good Initiative.

By Jonathan Power On Saturday President Barack Obama was at the commemoration ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the Selma March led by Martin Luther King which gave the push for legislation that ensured black people the right to vote. Obama’s speech was breathtaking oratory – surely one of the top three speeches in the American history of the last 150 years. The fifteen minute speech was delivered without script or teleprompter. It ranged from history to philosophy, from politics to poetry. Every sentence was perfectly structured. The arguments were sharp and delivered with awesome authority and soaring elegance. Obama is the poet of prose. For those who say the only significant thing about Obama’s presidency is that he is the first black to hold the post I tell them to watch this on YouTube. Obama’s speech should be remembered in 150 years time as much as is Lincoln’s...

President Richard von Weizsäcker passed away 31 January and was very much celebrated in Germany for his brilliant presidency to normalize a Germany with a troubled past, even divided on top of that. But, by and large leaving out his global perspectives mentioned below. His brother Car Friedrich was a nuclear physicist turned peace activist with a wonderful peace program, in one word: Weltinnenpolitik, world domestic policy (well, it depends on the country, some domestic policies are better than others; I would go for a Swiss coalition governance, federalism, direct democracy). The president’s nephew Ernst Ulrich is an energy-environment leader, in Germany and through the UN in the world. I have/had the privilege of knowing them all, and my tribute to Carl Friedrich when he passed away is an editorial dated 2 July 2012. Richard kindly sent greetings to the symposium on “Peace Studies and World Domestic Policy” on the...

By Gunnar Westberg A memory: Russia as a candidate for NATO membership Members of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, IPPNW, have for many years regularly visited the NATO Headquarters in Brussels. We also had good contacts with Russian military officers and Foreign Office politicians. In the middle of the nineties members of NATO’s commission on Nuclear Weapons asked if we could arrange a meeting in Moscow, “because we meet the Russians only under very formal circumstances”. Some open discussions over the vodka were hoped for. We arranged the meeting and got a group of leading Russian military brass and politicians on the participant list. But NATO hesitated. We were told they could not afford the trip… Finally only one officer, a Canadian, came from Brussels. So there we were with a group of disappointed Russian officers. The NATO representative in Moscow showed up for a couple of...