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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Nukes and Lovolution |
Current rating: 0 |
by Doctress Neutopia
Email: neutopia (nospam) lovolution.net (unverified!)
Phone: 520 541 1398
Address: 134 S. Rush Street #1 Prescott, AZ 86303 |
26 Aug 2001
Modified: 21 May 2002 |
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Essay about the 2001 Great Lakes Action Camp and Conference. The theme was against nuclear power and for renewable energy programs. |
Brief Notes on the Great Lakes Anti- Nuclear Action Camp 2001
by Doctress Neutopia
Glossary
Lovolution: A non-violent worldwide spiritual, political, social and economic revolution; the evolution of revolution; enactment of conscious evolution; ending the war between the sexes
Gaia religion: the holistic realization that we are all one, share the same biosphere and must learn to live in harmony with all living things.
Soulization: The next phase of human evolution we will connect on a soul-to-soul level of awareness in which a person’s character determines values within the society. A soulization creates a different form of city design and economic structure that creates balance between personal and collective space.
Arcology: ecological architecture that combines live and work space, rural and urban space to create a more balanced architectural structure.
I have returned from the 2001 Great Lakes Action Camp as a more enlightened human being. Understanding the nefarious activities of the nuclear industry allows one to better understand the nature of the struggle we face to save the biosphere for plant and animal life. After listening to expert speakers on their specialized part of the nuclear story, I came to see exactly what the first 50 years of the nuclear age means, an age that will be with us for millions of years. For example, in irradiated fuel, Plutonium-239 will be \"dangerous for a quarter million years, or 12,000 human generations.\" Understanding that nuclear waste will be with us for ages to come makes one realize that when the atomic age began with the making and testing of the first atomic weapons, we have not found the wisdom to handle the consequences of the pollution that has resulted from the splitting of the atom. Unless we discover this wisdom very quickly, it is quite clear to me that we are doomed. The only way to conquer this poisonous lifestyle is by educating people about what the nuclear industry is doing with the nuclear waste, part of a huge conspiracy against humans living in peace within the biosphere.
After hearing such illumining speakers such as journalist Carl Grossman on the US military’s plan for Outer Space based weapons, professor Gordon Edwards on nuclear physics and proliferation, citizen activist Deb Kat’s on shutdown campaigns, Wenonah Hauter on food irradiation, Ann Harris on whistleblowers, Harvey Wasserman on the history of nuclear power, as well as other very powerful speakers on the issue, I realized that what the nuclear age has created is a nuclear lifestyle which is effecting us in every aspect of life from before birth in our DNA until death and beyond for generations to come.
The nuclear lifestyle is one that is addicted to the nuclear jobs created by a plutonium economy. When a couple buys into the nuclear powered dream house, they take out bank loans to become an \"Atom’s Family.\" Since partners are enslaved to the dollar in order to pay the mortgage, there is little time for gardening and whole foods cooking. They are forced to raise their kids on processed fast foods that have been zapped by food irradiation plants that further destroy the nutritional value of the foods that have already been poisoned by pesticides.
To protect the nuclear family house, the family pays federal taxes to which the majority of the money goes into building a new generation of nuclear weapons and laser beam weapons to be deployed into Outer Space. The idea of national defense is part of the myth behind protecting \"our national interests\" since really the people behind the nuclear power complex are transnational corporations who are working for totalitarian rule of the world. The myth of the unlimited use of nuclear power also leads to urban sprawl and the need to build more nuclear power plants even though the nuclear industry has not solved the problem with the wastes except by using it to irradiate our foods and to \"recycle radioactive materials\" in the commercial sector. The military has also found ways to recycle depleted uranium using conventional weapons that they experimented with in the Gulf War resulting in terrible birth defects and illnesses on both sides of the conflict.
Not only is the \"atoms family\" a sexist model, but racist in that the places where the nuclear industry wants to dump the waste is on Native America land such as Skull Valley on the Goshute Reservation in Utah and at Yucca Mountain in Nevada which is one the Western Shoshone homelands. The irony is that US military planners are planning on having the nuclear waste facility run by solar power! Also being dumped on is the African America rural poor population at Barnwell, South Carolina. Not to mention the sub-critical nuclear testing that is going on at the Nevada Test Site where the military is working on creating \"mini nukes.\"
At the end of the educational week of the camp, after the puppets, other props and banners were made for the parade; we were informed that a civil disobedience action would take place outside the Exelon headquarters.
Exelon was formed during a merger of PECO Energy and Commonwealth Edison. It is the largest nuclear reactor operator in the USA, owning 20% of the nuclear power plants. They run one in New Jersey, five in Pennsylvania and 11 in Illinois. They also own plants in Canada and Europe and are planning on building one in South Africa. They are planning to build a new \"Pebble Bed\" reactor plant north of Chicago. Pebble beds are designed without safety systems or evacuation plants.
Exelon reactors pollute local communities. They have dumped over \"5 million curies of radioactive pollutants into the air and waters of Illinois and over 3 million curies in New Jersey\". To understand how much pollution this is, a \"typical hospital has about 305 curies of radioactive material on hand for an entire year of medical treatments.\" Is it any wonder why the nuclear lifestyle has resulted in helping to create epidemics of cancer? And does anyone really believe that nuclear medicine is going to cure the problem?
Harvey Wasserman pointed out, there are two basic lies of the nuclear industry: that nuclear power is two cheap to meter and that no one was killed in the Three Mile Island accident. Let me add a third lie that there are atoms for peace! The nuclear power industry and the nuclear weapons industry are in business together. The US has become a rogue nation in that it refuses of follow the rules of non-proliferating treaties. Harvey stated, \"Nuclear power was a tumorous outgrow of the military.\" At Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the total amount of radioactivity released were at least 200 times the amount released by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Speaker after speaker at the Action Camp pointed out that nuclear power is not financially stable, nor it is not the answer to solving global warming. The nuclear industry’s argument for nuclear power being the way to lower global warming, they compare the greenhouse emissions to highly polluting coal-fired electricity plants rather than comparing it to alternative energy such as wind power. Also their figures don’t take into consideration secondary emissions from \"mining and enrichment of uranium, construction of power plants, and reprocessing.\" Nor does it look at the emissions caused from the transporting of radioactive wastes to the proposed federal waste dump at Yucca Mountain. The NRC is not looking out for our public safety since their salaries are paid by the nuclear industry. As Wasserman said, we need to do our own health studies. We need our own Geiger counter readings. The industry was born from an act of destruction and it has been lying about its existence ever since.
The nuclear lifestyle can be summed up in four words: death, denial, burial and finally species extinction.
During the third day of the Action Camp, to help move us beyond the nuclear civilization into a solar soulization, I was able to give a workshop on Lovolution and Nukes: How to Build Sustainable Communities of Love. The struggle we face is to build a Gaian world view that is based on soft power that is sustainable, to not only convert our present cities into ecocites, but to build new pedestrian cities that are designed for sustainability and communal living. Green technology is here ready to be a transformation tool using of wind, solar, hydrogen and fuel cells. But Green technology is not enough to save us. It is not enough because our core problems deal with power relationships between the sexes, creating a world without poverty where everyone has equal opportunities at self-actualization and finding a form of \"spiritual democracy\" that creates a new social fiction. We are looking for the liberated spirit that can not only stop the Nuclear Age from destroying us, but one that has the creative drive to build something entirely new; networks of arcologies (ecological architecture) where everyone has a dignified role in the global culture founded on human rights. In order for the anti-nuclear movement to grow, then we have to build alliances among people who are working in the direction of creating a radical alternative to the nuclear lifestyle. We need to include everyone who has something to offer in the Great Work of building an ecocity from songwriters to construction workers, to architects and solar engineers to kitchen workers and childcare teachers.
After the workshop was over, I invited people to join me at the tee-pee by the river to enact a water ritual as a symbolic action to initiate the Lovolution. So after lunch around 15 people did a silence walking meditation to the Tee-pee. We were instructed to pick up three leaves on the walk to be used in the ritual. One leaf would be released to flow down current of the river to let go of our collective addictions such as nuclear power, the burning of fossil fuels, urban sprawl, the private automobile that is bringing down the quality of life for everyone. The next leaf would be to symbolize a personal addiction that is keeping us from connecting with our authentic self so that we can be more affective anti-nuclear activists. Finally the third leaf was for the creative edge that we needed to explore personally for the collective good.
When we arrived to the Tee-Pee some of us expressed our thoughts during the meditation and told us about the objects they had collected on the way. Rita had some wonderful things to say about what she had found. One was a branch of leaves. She said that they represented our connection to each other, each a part of the stem, but with our individual parts within the tree of life. She showed us another leaf that had been starting to change colors with the coming of Fall. The orange, red, yellow and green colors represented the differences races on Earth she said, but each being a part of the whole.
Kathy got us to laid down on the grass and put our faces in the dirt. While on the Earth we felt the global nature of ourselves and the problems of nuclear pollution around the globe. Brandon read a poem about the lack of real love in his life, pleading with the Cosmic to allow him to discover his authentic self in a world so fragmented. He left the poem in the Tee Pee. Terra confessed to us that she was addicted to constantly being in a hurry, never taking the time to get to know her self. Her wish was that she find the time to listen to the voice within that she had almost lost.
It was time for us to go to the water. Watching out for the poison ivy, we made our way to the riverbanks realizing that the Fox River must at some point flow into the Great Lake that we were only thirty miles away from. Being that the Great Lakes is the largest body of fresh water in the world and supplied the North American continent with the sacred element, we realized that our ritual to heal the water and for the bringing in a Solar Age was a mighty task to perform, especially when one realizes that the nuclear industry has dumped millions of radioactive waste into places like the Mississippi River. We waded out into the river over the stones in our bare feet and then one by one let go of your leaves letting the world hear our realizations about the self and what our poetic mission was in order to clean up of the waters of the world. Our time in the water became more and more mythic as the folks on shore drew down even more magick to the event chanting, \"Bring the fairies back! Bring the fairies back!\" Asking for the waters to carry our message across the seas, we asked that the message of the anti-nuclear movement to flow over the airwaves so that the message of the union between anti-nuclear politics and the spirit of the water within us could flow together.
John Shumaker (the poet who gave me the courage to go ahead with the ritual) and I felt it was a triumph that we were able to conduct such a ritual to Gaia at the Action Camp. It acknowledged that what was needed was not only the political and technological dialogue about the nuclear industry, but also about our inner need to be able to create a solar mythos around the image of true love and poetry which is at the core of our movement to save the garden of love on Earth. Dealing with a deadly pollutant that is invisible, we are required to look at the invisible forces between people. It was our conviction to the love’s power radiating from us that would give us this wisdom on how to build the communities that will save us from the Nuclear Tyranny.
For more photos from the conference, follow this link and go to the end of the original article:
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=60515&group=webcast |
See also:
http://www.lovolution.net
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Nuke article |
by Trish
carlie3034 (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
21 May 2002
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I'm disapointed I don't have enough time to finish reading this today, but will book mark it for later reading. I must say, it's been a long time since I've seen such use of so little fact and so much fiction!
I admire the commitment you make though, to at least getting out there and making an attempt at learning and reporting on your ideas/ideals. Perhaps when you're done with all the Sternglassesqe type stuff, you'll try reading some very direct and science based information.
Thanks! |
