Overmedicated nation: children in danger

E120, e145

Environmental Prize Winner Opposes Fracking

E120, e145, e130,

Mickey Mouse Monopoly: Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power

ChallengingMedia

Uploaded on Oct 4, 2006

http://www.mediaed.org

The Disney Company’s massive success in the 20th century is based on creating an image of innocence, magic and fun. Its animated films in particular are almost universally lauded as wholesome family entertainment, enjoying massive popularity among children and endorsement from parents and teachers.

Mickey Mouse Monopoly takes a close and critical look at the world these films create and the stories they tell about race, gender and class and reaches disturbing conclusions about the values propagated under the guise of innocence and fun. This daring new video insightfully analyzes Disney’s cultural pedagogy, examines its corporate power, and explores its vast influence on our global culture. Including interviews with cultural critics, media scholars, child psychologists, kindergarten teachers, multicultural educators, college students and children, Mickey Mouse Monopoly will provoke audiences to confront comfortable assumptions about an American institution that is virtually synonymous with childhood pleasure.

Interviewees include Henry Giroux, Diane Levin, Gail Dines, Elizabeth Hadley, Carolyn Newberger, Alvin Poussaint, and Justin Lewis.

Global Climate Change
Environmental Justice
Environment Ethics

Blood and Oil – A Declaration of Dependence

ChallengingMedia

Uploaded on Apr 22, 2008

http://www.bloodandoilmovie.com

Featuring the author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet; Blood and Oil; and Resource Wars.

“Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that.”
Fmr. CENTCOM Commander General John Abizaid

Synopsis:
The notion that oil motivates America’s military engagements in the Middle East is often disregarded as nonsense or mere conspiracy theory. Blood and Oil, a new documentary based on the critically-acclaimed work of Nation magazine defense correspondent Michael T. Klare, challenges this conventional wisdom to correct the historical record. The film unearths declassified documents and highlights forgotten passages in prominent presidential doctrines to show how concerns about oil have been at the core of American foreign policy for more than 60 years — rendering our contemporary energy and military policies virtually indistinguishable. In the end, Blood and Oil calls for a radical re-thinking of US energy policy, warning that unless we change direction, we stand to be drawn into one oil war after another as the global hunt for diminishing world petroleum supplies accelerates.

“A Declaration of Dependence” is the second section on the DVD, “Blood and Oil”.

Global Climate Change
Environmental Justice
Environment Ethics
Climate Film Festival
EJ Film Festival
EE Film Festival
Media

The Myth of the Liberal Media: The Propaganda Model of News

ChallengingMedia

Uploaded on Oct 4, 2006

http://www.mediaed.org

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky demolish one of the central tenets of our political culture, the idea of the “liberal media.” Instead, utilizing a systematic model based on massive empirical research, they reveal the manner in which the news media are so subordinated to corporate and conservative interests that their function can only be described as that of “elite propaganda.”

Global Climate Change
Environmental Justice
Environment Ethics
Media

Why Walmart Is a Threat to Organic Food

Walmart will turn organic food into another low-cost input that shortchanges consumers, workers and the environment for a fast buck.

Photo Credit: Stephen Orsillo/Shutterstock.com

May 1, 2014 |

Only after I decided to pursue freelance journalism fulltime, thereby joining the ranks of low-wage workers, did I enter a Walmart for the first time. It was in Southern California, in the spring of 2012, and I was trying to go easy on my wallet as I crammed my car with supplies before embarking on a cross-country reporting tour.

I reluctantly ventured inside a Walmart near San Diego, but I discovered immediately why its slogan, “Save Money, Live Better,” is a lifeline for the economically distressed. In the average superstore there’s a phenomenal 142,000 separate items at astonishingly low prices: button-down shirts for $10, a large bag of potato chips for a buck, a fat tube of toothpaste for two bucks, 25 cents for a metal fork, 10 oranges for a dollar. One former Walmart worker in California told me everyone he knew shopped there because, “Walmart is cheap as shit and it’s convenient.”

So when Walmart announced in April that it was invading organic turf by introducing the Wild Oats food line in 2,000 stores, some food-justice advocates were excited about the possibilities. They believe that Walmart’s buying power, which accounts for a 33 percent share of groceries sold nationwide, will enable it to offer lower prices for consumers, expand the market for organic farmers, and lessen the use of toxic pesticides and global-warming fertilizers. It’s a classic win-win, showing how the free market can solve problems it helped create.

…(read more).

Global Climate Change
Environmental Justice
Environment Ethics
Food-Matters

Urban Shield: Boston to Test Region’s First Responders

Members of the Public May See Public Safety Personnel Responding to Simulated Emergencies. Exercise Will Consist of Several Events Throughout City and Region. No Danger to the Public.

BOSTON– On Saturday, May 3, the City of Boston’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) will host Urban Shield: Boston, a 24-hour regional training exercise that simulates large-scale public safety incidents in the Metro-Boston area. Urban Shield: Boston will begin at 8 a.m. Saturday and conclude at 8 a.m. Sunday.

The training will include approximately 2,000 personnel from: departments within the City of Boston (Boston Police, Boston Fire, EMS, OEM, and the Boston Public Health Commission); the Metro-Boston Homeland Security Region (MBHSR, which includes Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Quincy, Revere, Somerville, Brookline, and Winthrop); the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority; and the Conference of Boston Teaching Hospitals. The exercise will assess the ability of public safety personnel to successfully respond to, and manage, multiple public safety threats and emergencies occurring simultaneously throughout the metro-Boston area.

“As we saw last year during the Boston Marathon attacks, our first responders are well trained to handle any situation,” said Mayor Martin J. Walsh. “Urban Shield: Boston is a unique training exercise that enables our first responders to work collaboratively in a simulated environment so they can operate effectively in real-world scenarios.”

As first responder teams arrive from throughout Greater Boston, they will be assigned to deal with a series of 11 complex public safety scenarios based on past real-life events, including:

• an “active shooter” situation in Brookline;
• a “hostage” rescue of elected officials in Boston;
• an “explosive device” found in the transit system;
• an “injured officer” situation in Cambridge;
• a “parking lot collapse” in Boston; and
• a large-scale consolidated event at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

…(read more).

Shouldn’t Boston & Cambridge be considering the combined and very real threat of sea level rise (SLR) and a Category-3 hurricane?  

What scenarios are being tested for the municipal and regional response-preparedness for this probable event?

See: EV & N – 141 – CCTV | Climate Vulnerability and Preparedness: Planning for Resilience and Adaptation

Global Climate Change
Environmental Justice
Environment Ethics

Floating nuclear plants could withstand earthquakes and tsunamis

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Published on Apr 15, 2014

When an earthquake and tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant complex in 2011, neither the quake nor the inundation caused most of the damage and contamination. Rather, it was the aftereffects — specifically, the lack of cooling for the reactor cores and spent fuel, due to a shutdown of outside power — that caused most of the harm.

A new design for nuclear plants built on floating platforms, modeled after those used for offshore oil drilling, could help avoid such consequences in the future. Such floating plants would be designed to be automatically flooded by the surrounding seawater in a worst-case scenario, providing sufficient cooling to indefinitely prevent any melting of fuel rods, or escape of radioactive material.

The concept is being presented this week at the Small Modular Reactors Symposium, hosted by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, by MIT associate professor of nuclear science and engineering (NSE) Jacopo Buongiorno along with others from MIT, the University of Wisconsin, and Chicago Bridge and Iron, a major nuclear plant and offshore platform construction company.

Video filmed by Christopher Sherrill, courtesy of MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering.

Global Climate Change
Environmental Justice
Environment Ethics
Nucelar

MIT at Flood Level

gmoke

Published on May 2, 2014

On Friday, May 2, 2014 FossilFreeMIT declared a flood zone all around their campus at Hurricane Sandy strength plus projected 2050 sea level rise to publicize their divestment campaign. It was also a good advertisement for the same weekend’s annual Sustainability Conference focusing on resilience and coastal cities. Here’s how the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer looks under this climate change scenario.

Global Climate Change
Environmental Justice
Environment Ethics

Is the IPCC Government Approval Process Broken?

http://www.robertstavinsblog.org/2014/04/25/is-the-ipcc-government-approval-process-broken-2/

Posted on April 25, 2014 by Robert Stavins
Over the past 5 years, I have dedicated an immense amount of time and effort to serving as the Co-Coordinating Lead Author (CLA) of Chapter 13, “International Cooperation: Agreements and Instruments,” of Working Group III (Mitigation) of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has been an intense and exceptionally time-consuming process, which recently culminated in a grueling week spent in Berlin, Germany, April 5-13, 2014, at the government approval sessions, in which some 195 country delegations discussed, revised, and ultimately approved (line-by-line) the “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM), which condenses more than 2,000 pages of text from 15 chapters into an SPM document of 33 pages. Several of the CLAs present with me in Berlin commented that given the nature and outcome of the week, the resulting document should probably be called the Summary by Policymakers, rather than the Summary for Policymakers.

…(read more).

Global Climate Change
Environmental Justice
Environment Ethics