Dr. Helen Caldicott -- "If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Save the Earth"
DATE: 21 March 2011
PRESENTER: Dr. Helen Caldicott
TOPIC: "If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Save the Earth"
Dr. Helen Caldicott spoke at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 107 W.
Barcelona Road, Santa Fe, NM on Monday, 21 March 2011, 6:30-8:30PM.
Community Peace Radio attended this powerful lecture by Dr. Caldicott, and we were accorded the privilege of recording it. It is posted here with permission from Dr. Caldicott and the Los Alamos Study Group.
See the press release below for more details.
March 15, 2011 press advisory
Dr. Helen Caldicott – physician, author, lecturer, founder of prominent environmental, peace, and women’s organizations – to speak in Albuquerque and Santa Fe
Albuquerque – The Los Alamos Study Group is pleased to host two public talks by Dr. Helen Caldicott, in Albuquerque (March 20) and Santa Fe (March 21). Times and locations are below.
For the last four decades Dr. Caldicott has played a uniquely important role in the politics of nuclear weapons and nuclear power worldwide. Her seven books, thousands of public talks, and countless interviews have been hugely influential in the global movement for nuclear disarmament. In the 1980s the movement she helped inspire was a significant international force, specifically affecting the nuclear policies of Mikhail Gorbachev. That movement, and Dr. Caldicott, helped lead the way to the nuclear rapprochement that marked the end of the Cold War.
Born in Melbourne, Australia in 1938, Dr. Caldicott received her medical degree from the University of Adelaide Medical School in 1961. She founded the Cystic Fibrosis Clinic at the Adelaide Children's Hospital in 1975 and subsequently was an instructor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and on the staff of the Children's Hospital Medical Center, Boston, Mass., until 1980 when she resigned to work full time on the prevention of nuclear war.
Dr. Caldicott has received many prizes and awards for her work, including the Lannan Foundation 2003 Cultural Freedom Prize and 21 honorary doctorates. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Linus Pauling. In April of this year she will receive the Nuclear Free Future Award for Lifetime Achievement, in Berlin.
Dr. Caldicott is a co-founder of the Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and the umbrella group International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), composed of PSR and similar organizations in other countries. She founded the U.S.-based Nuclear Policy Research Institute (NPRI), which evolved into Beyond Nuclear. She also founded Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament (WAND), now Women’s Action for New Directions.
The Smithsonian Institute named Dr. Caldicott one of the most influential women of the 20th Century. Further background on Dr. Caldicott can be found at http://www.helencaldicott.com/about.htm
Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at the door. Attendance is limited to the first 150 persons (Albuquerque) and 180 persons (Santa Fe). Helen's books will be on sale before and after both events.
▪ Sunday, March 20th, 6-8 pm: "If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Save the Earth," presentation at The Outpost Performance Space, 210 Yale SE, Albuquerque, 2 blocks south of Central Avenue.
▪ Monday, March 21st, 6:30-8:30 pm: "If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Save the Earth," presentation at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Santa Fe, 107 W. Barcelona Road, Santa Fe, one block north of Cordova Rd. on Galisteo Street.
“Helen’s message and personal example of hope, warning, and compassionate engagement is especially important and inspiring as we face the converging crises before us. We are very pleased to have her here,” said Los Alamos Study Group Director Greg Mello. “Helen has a unique ability to help people get beyond barriers to personal engagement and the fulfillment that can come from it.
“The nuclear weapons establishment believes it owns New Mexico. Its leaders, many of whom I know, hope our complaisant population and weak institutions will make it easy to build new factories and churn out a new generation of nuclear warheads with which to threaten the planet.
“A $7 billion plutonium complex to design and build nuclear components for those warheads is now planned for Los Alamos National Laboratory. If built, it would be by far the most expensive infrastructure project ever conceived in New Mexico, except our two interstate highways. It would turn Los Alamos into a full-scale plutonium maquiladora and put a dangerous and growing nuclear borderland in the State's very heart. In constant dollars, this project greatly exceeds the original Manhattan Project in New Mexico in cost. Once begun, you can kiss the promise of significant "green jobs" goodbye.
“This proposed giant complex is a “small” but pivotal part of a $200 to $300 billion policy developed by President Obama to completely renew and expand the U.S. nuclear warhead production complex and its laboratories and build a new generation of bombers, submarines, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and advanced reentry vehicles.
“Our deepening economic decline will prevent the completion of most of this, but this misguided and pathological effort will in the meantime be a potent means for taking tax dollars from human and environmental needs and putting it into the pockets of a relatively few people. It is also a highly-potent means for concentrating political power in a few specialized corporations and their bought-and-paid-for political representatives.
“These nuclear policies comprise an in-your-face class issue; they have severe direct and indirect environmental impacts; they involve fraud, deception of Congress, and other corruption; and they involve the attempted re-colonization of an entire state – ours, where almost half of all warhead spending occurs. The Obama nuclear renaissance would be an essentially permanent dark age for New Mexico. We can’t let that happen.”
Los Alamos Study Group http://www.lasg.org 2901 Summit Place NE Albuquerque, NM 87106 (505) 265-1200/office (505) 577-8563/mobile
