The December 2019 episode of Nature Bats Last featuring Mimi German is embedded here;
Mimi is a houseless advocate focused primarily on houseless neighbors in St. Johns, Oregon. She is known for her anarchistic shutdowns of the Portland City Council for 6 consecutive months over issues concerning houseless people in Portland. She is also the co-founder of Jason Barns Landing, a non-transitional houseless village situated on land JBL took over and occupied from Metro in Portland. Jason Barns Landing is named after a houseless friend who died on the streets of St. Johns while canning for his survival. Click on the embedded link directly above to take you to the Jason Barns Facebook page.
Mimi is also a poet, using her words as witness and as observer for a beauty unseen by most and to allow the darkness of this time to be witnessed in writing to the page. Finally, Mimi is currently helping care for her mother, who is contemplating hospice on the East Coast.
“Studies of Chernobyl and Fukushima also reveal crippling psychological fear of invisible contamination. This fear consumed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and people in Fukushima painfully associated their own experiences with those of people in the atomic-bombed cities. The situation in Fukushima is still far from physically or psychologically stable. This fear also plagues Chernobyl, where there have been large forced movements of populations, and where whole areas poisoned by radiation remain uninhabitable.”
The False promise of Nuclear Energy in a time of climate change;
“A huge cluster of jellyfish forced the Oskarshamn plant, the site of one of the world’s largest nuclear reactors, to shut down by clogging the pipes conducting cool water to the turbines.” Jellyfish clog pipes of Swedish nuclear reactor forcing plant shutdown.
“The revelations come on the heels of a report last week from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the aftermath of the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan. The report details how a spent fuel fire at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant that was crippled by the twin disasters could have released far more radioactivity into the environment.”
The January episode of Nature Bats Last will feature another interview with Stephen Jenkinson author of many books including the best seller “Die Wise”. Stephen’s website is Orphan Wisdom;
Feel free to leave your comments below and to subscribe to the blog as we chronicle the great unraveling.
I'm an anti-imperialist, environmental activist and blue ocean sailor, who is passionate about the earth and all it's inhabitants without favour. Brace for imminent impact as we bare witness to the non-linear unraveling of the biosphere and habitability disappearing for most if not all complex life on the only habitable planet we know of. To quote President Niinistö in North Russia: ‘If We Lose the Arctic, We Lose the World’. Folks we have lost the Arctic.
Kevin Hester 
Hi Kevin. Just discovered how to contact you, so here is my contact with Guy.
Hi Dr. McPherson. I had planned to offer my suggestion to you directly but after enjoying the above comments, my request will maybe add another theme. My request is simple. To date Peter Miller has been able to make, for himself, space in his inquiring mind for near-term extinction and has stuck with you for the continuing paradigm shifts occupying 11 sessions! That alone has my great respect for both of you. Attached to his growth with your assistance, last September he interviewed Phillese Todd with her PhD in quantum mechanics/engineering, and the opportunity seemed much favorable for both. It was, for me, a long-wished-for balance from another academic insight that added so well to your conservation biology. That interview was nearly 3 months ago when Phillise was contending with her own academic research into climate change and its impact in her life, on the life of her two children, and of the instructional content of her classes, plus her reticence to share with colleagues. So important was that interview to my knowledge-base, addressing abrupt climate change from two scholarly disciplines, that I ask if an update of her personal growth as she has faced that reality might make a highly enlightened 3-way discourse with you, Peter Miller, and Kevin Hester and others? It might also motivate her to bring her own data to a current status as could be added to Paul Beckwith who will shortly return from COP25. How could I be of assistance? David H.
And here is his reply with which I agree:
David H. Bailey, that’s a great idea. I would appreciate and welcome any effort at collaboration with Phillese Todd, Kevin Hester, and Peter Miller. Other scientists would be welcome by me (and please note I do not include Paul Beckwith as a scientist, for a variety of reasons).
Kevin, is there a way I could help even with my limited internet skills?
I have enjoyed all your articles.
David H Salt Lake City, Utah
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Hi David, that’s an inspired suggestion. I’ll take it up with Peter and Guy. Many thanks
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I was in Thailand when the Fukushima Tsunami and nuclear incident occurred. HKLN live covered the unravelling news with English subtitles. Cameras had picked up the rising cloud of a suspected explosion at the Daiichi power plant and started media speculated that there had been an explosion. It took at least 3 days before the Japanese authorities even released information and said that that there had been an incident, but it was under control. All of the Daiichi, Tepco workers who were sent in to deal with the aftermath, have subsequently died (as you would imagine). Their protective suits did not protect them.
Nuclear accidents are always played down and most of the disaster is kept as much as possible from the general public. The radiation that poured into the sea from Daiichi, crossed the Pacific affecting the West Coast of North America… causing starfish to collapse into jellyfied corpses and many other species to wash up on beaches. With recent storms, some radioactive materials were again washed out to sea and it was no surprise for me to see massive die offs in waters around the coasts again (most noteably Alaska).
People think that because animals can be seen in dead zones around Cher noble and Fukushima, that the radiation problem is over exaggerated. But those animals have shorter life spans and reproduce quickly giving false impressions that all is well. Likewise, people claim that there are lots of radiation survivors… They should see what their cancer coping regimes are like, before making those assumptions.
Man’s arrogance is in our reluctance to see that our technologies are harmful to a living planet. They would work better on a dead one, but maybe that is not so far away. 😔
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And now TEPCO is testing the waters to see if they can get away with this. No doubt they will…
‘An Appalling Act of Industrial Vandalism’: Japanese Officials Do PR for Plan to Dump Fukushima Water Into Ocean
The Japanese government told embassy officials from nearly two dozen countries that releasing the water into the ocean was a “feasible” approach that could be done “with certainty.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/03/appalling-act-industrial-vandalism-japanese-officials-do-pr-plan-dump-fukushima
sealintheSelkirks
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This fits on this thread I think. Can’t paste a link, subscriber only, so hopefully this entire paste is worth the space, Kevin.
From CP+ 21Jan 2024 (counterpunch.org)
Los Alamos, Mon Amour: Gone with the Downwind
by Ed Rampell
A newspaper clipping glimpsed in a new documentary is headlined “New Mexico’s Infant Mortality Highest in U.S., Report Says.” Lois Lipman’s film explains why that rate is so high for babies, as well as for others, especially Indigenous and Hispanic inhabitants, in her gripping First We Bombed in New Mexico. Onscreen Tina Cordova, born and raised at Tularosa, only 30 miles from the Trinity Site, declares: “We are the first victims of the atomic bomb.” While the title of Lipman’s gripping 95-minute chronicle may be derived from Joseph Heller’s 1967 satirical antiwar play We Bombed in New Haven, this new production, which won jury and audience awards at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, is in the tradition of anti-nuclear bomb nonfiction classics such as 1982’s The Atomic Café, Judy Irving/Chris Beaver’s 1982 Dark Circle, Jim Heddle’s 1984 Strategic Trust: The Making of Nuclear Free Palau, Dennis O’Rourke’s 1986 Half Life, and Robert Stone’s 1988 Oscar-nominated Radio Bikini.
If those films emerged during the heightened Cold War tensions of the Reagan era, Lipman’s First We Bombed in New Mexico is part of the current crop of works reflecting today’s increased anxiety over nuclear weapons, as well as power, that includes: Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer; Irene Lusztig’s Richland; Steve James’ A Compassionate Spy; the anti-nuclear power SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome by Heddle, Mary Beth Brangan and Morgan Peterson and Oliver Stone’s pro-atomic energy Nuclear Now; plus Joshua Frank’s book Atomic Days, The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America.
Half Life and Radio Bikini focus on how nuclear bomb tests and radioactivity have affected the Natives of the Marshall Islands, where the U.S. detonated 67 atomic and hydrogen bombs from 1946 to 1958 when Washington-(mis)administered a United Nations Trust Territory. Like those Pacific Islanders, New Mexicans weren’t properly prepared for the nuclear explosions, in terms of education, evacuation and afterwards, medical care, when the Trinity test exploded the world’s first nuclear device on July 16, 1945 at the Alamogordo Bombing Range (AKA the Jornada del Muerto or “Journey to Death”). Similar to the Marshallese, residents of New Mexico, particularly youth, played with white particles that fell from the sky after Trinity’s plutonium implosion test because they looked like snow. Only they weren’t – as survivor Barbara Kent relates in First We Bombed in New Mexico, instead of being cold, these flakes felt warm, because it wasn’t “snow,” but rather nuclear fallout, which had deadly aftereffects for the unknowing youngsters.
As teaching unvarnished American history comes under attack, Lipman’s documentary uncovers the coverups, and is the flip side of 2023’s Oppenheimer, the big budget biopic about the nuclear physicist who spearheaded the top secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, which produced the nuclear devices detonated at the Trinity Site, then dropped the following month on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although he had three hours to tell his story, director/co-writer Christopher Nolan somehow never got around to actually showing the effects that “Oppie’s” A-bombs and radiation had on the Japanese, or on the New Mexico residents within range of the Trinity site. Nolan’s cowardly “oversight” might have been bad for box office, because confrontations with those historical facts might have made American ticket buyers feel “uncomfortable” for the mass murder their government engaged in, and thus Hollywood perpetuates and perpetrates covering-up the U.S.’s genocidal history.
But independent filmmaker Lois Lipman, an Emmy Award winner who made documentaries for 60 Minutes and the BBC, will have none of that in her searingly honest documentary, a sort of “people’s history” in the Howard Zinn tradition that exposes nuclear colonialism and environmental racism. First We Bombed in New Mexico, which has also won the Documentary Feature Jury Award at the 2023 Austin International Film Festival, shows the other side of Nolan’s story of scientific “glory”: Not of the Promethean Caucasian “genius” scientist (although there is color and black and white archival footage of J. Robert Oppenheimer interwoven throughout Lipman’s doc), but rather the sordid saga of how the Manhattan Project wreaked genetic mayhem on the local mostly brown people for generations, unleashing untold clusters of cancer. For good measure, Lipman’s low budge indie also briefly incorporates clips shot presumably in 1945 of the irradiated hibakusha, Japanese survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear blasts and radioactive fallout – something Nolan couldn’t bother including and/or dramatizing in his $100 million blockbuster (why risk that kind of investment with such an unpleasant plot point that could turn off multiplex audiences?).
(Onscreen a commentator also points out that while the U.S. conducted surveys of the nukes’ effects on the Japanese after occupying their islands, American citizens in New Mexico were largely ignored by the authorities. This U.S. government callousness and indifference towards peoples of Indigenous and Mexican heritage is arguably the legacy and “fallout” of white expansionist America’s wars of aggression against Natives and Mexico.)
But the people of the Land of (dis)Enchantment are no longer mere passive victims and Tina Cordova, a feisty, fearless activist, is the protagonist of First We Bombed in New Mexico. A survivor of thyroid cancer, Cordova is the co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which is spearheading a campaign to receive compensation for New Mexicans, then-living near the Trinity Site, as well as their then unborn children, who grew up to have radiation poisoning caused by Uncle Sam’s Trinity Bomb detonation. Cordova asserts: “Our government tested nuclear devices adjacent to where Americans live,” because just like what we now call “America” when Captain John Smith, the Pilgrims and other Europeans arrived here, New Mexico wasn’t empty, uninhabited, or a “Terra nullius” in 1945.
Like a New Mexico La Pasionaria, the impassioned Cordova relates a long list of relatives lost to the Big C, including: “My father developed oral cancer without any risk factors. He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t use chewing tobacco. Had no viruses. The doctor told us this just didn’t happen. But they also told us they see this a lot here.” After Cordova was stricken with cancer herself, she lost her job and life savings. But turning to activism, the Tularosa-born Cordova vows: “We’re not going to be martyrs. They count on us to be unsophisticated, uneducated.”
According to a press release for the film, “In her investigation, Tina Cordova learns that Manhattan Project physicians warned General Groves that Trinity’s fallout would be catastrophic and urged the evacuation of residents. There were even cattle cars secretly waiting outside Carrizozo to do this. Ultimately, the Military took care of itself and quickly left New Mexico following the blast but residents were never informed about any of this – or given medical help. Tina also discovers that baby deaths in New Mexico spiked after the explosion, ‘New Mexico babies were the first victims of Trinity.’ Their death statistics were covered up.”
In addition to educating “downwinders” and others about the hidden history of the atomic test and legacy of nuclearism and exposure to radiation, Cordova and allies seek a form of reparations from the federal government. “Downwind victims of later Nevada Cold War nuclear tests have been eligible for compensation since 1990 by RECA (Radiation Exposure Compensation Act) but RECA excludes New Mexicans, who are primarily people of color. This then becomes Tina’s goal – to have Congress extend RECA and give compensation and healthcare to communities that suffered cancers from nuclear testing but who continue to be ignored,” according to the film’s press release.
In 2018 Cordova and supporters fly from New Mexico to Washington, D.C., where Tina testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee. There is an urgency to Cordova’s testimony, which also presumably underlines the timeliness of releasing First We Bombed in New Mexico now. Cordova is seeking passage of Senate Bill 197, which amends RECA. According to the press release: “The clock is ticking, the Downwinders have until June 2024 to get Congress to vote to extend RECA. After that, RECA sunsets.”
As Cordova stresses before the Committee: “We experience a cycle of poverty associated with the cost of taking care of our health when we get sick from the radiation overexposure. Living in rural New Mexico, we can never get treatment at home because there are no medical facilities in the small towns and villages where we live. It places us in a position of undue stress both emotionally and financially. People tell me stories of how they hold bake sales to buy pain medications or how they have to sell cattle to pay for their chemotherapy… The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act recognizes the responsibility of the Federal Government to apologize and provide monetary compensation to individuals who contracted certain cancers and other serious diseases following their exposure to radiation during atmospheric nuclear weapons test. Other downwinders in the United States have received more than $2.25 billion in claims, and while that would be incredibly significant for us, what we covet most is the health care card they receive that entitles them to the best health care available anywhere with no co-payments, no deductibles, and no limits. Again, we are simply asking to be treated the same as other downwinders who have been overexposed by radiation due to nuclear testing.”
In her heartbreaking Senate testimony, the well-spoken Cordova added: “We know from the census data that there were thousands of people living in a 50-mile radius of the test site. We’ve identified ranching families that lived as close as 12 miles to the test site… because the scientists working on the project had to make certain the test was a success, the bomb was packed with 13 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium. Only three pounds of the 13 pounds of plutonium fissioned. The remaining ten pounds of unfissioned plutonium was joined with the soil, the sand, the animal and plant life in the area and incinerated and traveled over seven miles past the atmosphere, penetrating the stratosphere. The plutonium utilized has a half-life of 24,000 years…
“It was also the only bomb ever detonated on a platform 100 feet off the ground. In comparison, the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were detonated at a height of 1,600 to 1,800 feet. The blast literally had nowhere to go once it impacted the earth and is the reason radioactive material was dispersed widely across the Tularosa Basin. This radioactive fallout settled on everything. On the soil, in the water, in the air, on the plants, and on the skin of every living thing, both human and animal. It was an environmental disaster of grand proportions and the total destruction of a way of life for everyone who lived in New Mexico at the time…
“New Mexicans were the first people in the world to be exposed to radiation as a result of a nuclear test. The New Mexico Downwinders are the collateral damage that resulted from the development and testing of the first atomic bomb.” (See here.) As Paul Pino, a former school principal and musician, also notes in the film, his “mother and brother [who died from cancer] can’t be brought back to life, but [financial compensation] can help pay medical bills” for the living.
Senators from liberal Democrat Cory Booker, the Judiciary Committee’s ranking member, to reactionary Republican Josh Hawley express sympathy for the downwinders, who have believed that if they could just present and plead their case and the injustice of their cause before the Senate, they’d sway the federal government to provide compensation to the irradiated New Mexicans, who have joined forces with uranium miners. But their faith has been misplaced; unlike the Americanos, they did not “remember the Alamo.” The Hispanics and Pueblo Native Americans have forgotten that it was this same U.S. government that seized up to half of Mexico’s land during 1848’s Mexican-American War and committed genocide against the continent’s Indigenous peoples during endless “Indian wars,” as well as instituted nuclear colonialism in New Mexico a century after the Mexican-American War. As one of the doc’s commentators pithily observes, seeking redress from the feds is like the foxes guarding the henhouse. Of course, the documentary notes that up to its release, Uncle Sam has failed to extend any form of reparations to New Mexicans, as time runs out on RECA and genetic genocide continues to wreak cancerous havoc in the 47th state admitted to the Union.
The tenacious Tina is not the film’s only interview subject. In addition to others suffering from radiation and anti-nuke activists, a number of insightful academics, journalists, politicians and authors appear on camera, including University of New Mexico assistant professor Myrriah Gómez from the Pojoaque Valley and author of Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos. Gómez blasts what she calls “the nuclear industrial complex” and contends that land including, from the Pajarito Plateau, where Los Alamos is located, were seized through eminent domain and the inhabitants were never adequately compensated, if at all for their forcible removal from their ancestral territory.
To explain the “why” for Project Y – the code name for the Los Alamos lab – which was designated as the site where the top secret Manhattan Project would develop an atomic weapon in 1942, it’s important to remember that the U.S. was fighting WWII at the time and embroiled in a nuclear arms race with the Germans as to who would invent A-bomb first. Oppenheimer was a left-leaning Jew who despised fascism, hence the imperative to create nukes before the Nazis did. But in May 1945 the Red Army entered Berlin and VE-Day was declared May 8, 1945, ending the war in Europe, with WWII continuing in the Pacific Theater. So, after the defeat of Hitler, the target for the bomb was moved from Germany to Japan, and there is a fierce debate on whether or not Washington really needed to drop A-bombs there to supposedly save the lives of thousands of U.S. servicemen who, it’s believed, would have died in a possible invasion of Japan. Especially given that the Soviets entered the war against Japan by August 7, just as Stalin promised FDR and Churchill at 1943’s Tehran Conference the Soviets would after Germany was beaten.
In First We Bombed in New Mexico, film clips are screened of Truman and Stalin at Potsdam, where the “Big Three” (with Britain’s prime minister) met in defeated Germany to discuss the postwar world’s contours starting on July 17, 1945 – the day after the Trinity Test. MIT professor Kate Brown, author of Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and The Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, points out in an interview that Truman wanted to have the trump card of exclusively possessing the world’s first and only nukes to lord over Stalin when they met. And this led to rushing the Trinity Test, despite rainfall, which spread radiation fallout, as the rationale for developing and deploying atomic bombs evolved into becoming mega-weapons of the brewing Cold War.
Another point that’s made in Lipman’s documentary and essential to add here is that while Indigenous and Hispanic New Mexicans were certainly disproportionately affected by America’s bomb tests, white U.S. citizens were not spared. According to the New York Times, the “radioactive fallout from the Trinity test reached 46 states, Canada and Mexico within 10 days of detonation.”
Trevor Douglas, a white American who dirt biked in Bingham, NM, near the Trinity Site, appears in the film before he dies of glioblastoma brain cancer. Even movie star John Wayne, and members of the cast and crew of 1954’s The Conqueror – shot in Utah on location downwind of where the Atomic Energy Commission detonated 100-plus nuclear bombs from 1951 to 1962 during the Cold War – contracted and died of cancer. A clip of the Duke’s epic, improbably starring Wayne as Genghis Khan, is shown. Not even an Academy Award-winning Cold Warrior was saved from the insidious effects of radiation sickness.
At the dawn of the Atomic Age, experiments overseen by the AEC were conducted on developmentally challenged children to find out what effects the new nuclear technology had on human beings. According to The Independent: “The tests included feeding cereal [Quaker Oats!] doused in radioactive iron and calcium to 19 mentally retarded boys in a state school in Massachusetts from 1946 to 195[3], to help understand nutrition and metabolism.” According to Andrew Goliszek’s 2003 In The Name of Science, malnourished babies were also injected with radioactive chemicals in another dubious study at the Walter E. Fernald State School.
Used as human lab rats, the mentally disabled, underaged and infant test subjects obviously did not give informed consent before being turned into nuclear guinea pigs. In one of the anti-nuke documentaries, researchers who carried out these cruel tests defended their practice by saying that early on in the nuclear era, radiation’s effects weren’t known. But that’s precisely the reason NOT to conduct such experiments on humans. Notice that the professors, scientists, etc., did not conduct the risky tests on themselves or their loved ones – but upon the least of these among us.
Similarly, environmental racism impacts members of our most disempowered communities in the societal totem pole. In Cordova’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, she stated: “The physician who served as the Manhattan Project Medical Director Dr. Louis Hempelmann, stated afterwards, and I quote, ‘A few people were probably overexposed, but they couldn’t prove it and we couldn’t prove it so we just assumed we got away with it.’” Although, as First We Bombed in New Mexico exposes, a new generation of sophisticated, educated Indigenous and Hispanic activists are no longer passively letting the nuclear powers-that-be “get away with it.” As Paul Pino opines: “It ain’t over until we win.”
As an older, irradiated Marshallese woman says with bitter irony at the end of Half Life about how the bomb and radiation irreversibly impacted her atolls, “What goes on in the minds of these people? They think they are smart… but really they are crazy. [Americans] are smart at doing stupid things.” Including, as Lipman compellingly shows, to other Americans…
The West Coast Premiere of First We Bombed in New Mexico is at the Palm Springs International Film Festival on January 8, 9 and 10. According to the film’s press release, “After the festival premiers, First We Bombed in New Mexico will be used in a powerful impact campaign to inform and excite public opinion to get RECA extended before it expires.” For more information see: https://www.firstwebombednewmexico.com/.
Ed Rampell was named after legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow because of his TV exposes of Senator Joe McCarthy. Rampell majored in Cinema at Manhattan’s Hunter College and is an L.A.-based film historian/critic who co-organized the 2017 70th anniversary Blacklist remembrance at the Writers Guild theater in Beverly Hills and was a moderator at 2019’s “Blacklist Exiles in Mexico” filmfest and conference at the San Francisco Art Institute. Rampell co-presented “The Hollywood Ten at 75” film series at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and is the author of Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States and co-author of The Hawaii Movie and Television Book.
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