Announcements Announcements

Welcome to our site.

logoPlease note that this site is best viewed through the following or later versions of Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.0, Safari 1.0, Google Chrome, Opera 6.0 or Netscape 6.0. Please send any comments via our Contact form.

Broadcast-Quality MP3

Please select the "Current Broadcast MP3" item under the "For Stations" button in the Navigation Bar.


SPECIAL AUDIO RECORDING:
Bill McKibben, environmental activist and founder of 350.org talks about the next steps in the climate change campaign


An address by Bill McKibben, founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, upon receiving the annual Gandhi Peace Award from the New Haven-based group Promoting Enduring Peace on April 18 in Hamden, CT

Bill McKibben, Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with "The End of Nature" in 1989, which is regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. The group he founded, 350.org, has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. The Boston Globe said in 2010 that he was "probably the country’s most important environmentalist."


SPECIAL AUDIO RECORDING:
Alexis Tsipras, leader of Greece's Left Party Coalition, on "Anti-Austerity Politics in Greece, Europe and Beyond"


A talk recorded on Jan. 25, 2013 at The City University of New York, in a program sponsored by CUNY's Center for the Study of Culture, Technology, and Work.

Alexis Tsipras, a member of the Hellenic parliament, president of the Synaspismos political party since 2008, head of the SYRIZA parliamentary group since 2009, and leader of the Opposition since June 2012. SYRIZA currently leads in Greek opinion polls. Listen to the audio here.


Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.

You can also listen to full unedited interview segments from Counterpoint, which are generally available some time the day following broadcast.

Subscribe to Counterpoint bulletins via our subscriptions page.

Between The Lines Blog  BTL Blog

"Rand Paul: Making a Point," by Reginald Johnson, March 8, 2013

"The Bipartisan Gift: Budget Cuts," by Reginald Johnson, March 2, 2013

"Fighting for Gun Control," by Reginald Johnson, Feb. 18, 2013

"Tyranny of the Minority," by Reginald Johnson, Jan. 28, 2013

"Is President Obama About to Betray Those Who Re-elected Him Less than 2 Months Ago?" by Scott Harris, Dec. 21, 2012

"Will the Slaughter of the Innocents in Newtown Lead to Gun Law Reform in U.S.?" by Scott Harris and Anna Manzo, Dec. 16, 2012

"My Friend in Sandy Hook," by Doug Moss, posted by Scott Harris, Dec. 16, 2012

Special Programming Special Programming


MP3: Glenn Greenwald delivers a keynote address at "A Conference in Defense of Civil Liberties and to End Indefinite Detention" at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain on Dec. 8, 2012.

Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for the Guardian newspaper. He's a former constitutional lawyer, and until 2012 was a contributing writer at Salon.com. Greenwald is the author of "With Liberty and Justice For Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful."

Read his column at The Guardian (UK)
Between The Lines' executive producer Scott Harris conducted an interview with Glenn Greenwald at the conference, which will be featured in a BTL program to be released Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012.

Noam Chomsky is linguistics and philosophy professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Author of nearly 100 books, Chomsky is one of the world's most widely read progressive dissident intellectuals. He talks about his new book, "Occupy," about the Occupy Wall Street movement and the wider issues of class warfare in the America today.
Listen to this interview (June 6, 2011)
MP3: Nathan Schneider (www.wagingnonviolence.org) has been reporting on the OWS movement from its first days in August, 2011. In this April 3, 2012 interview, Richard Hill asks him to assess the on-going debate in the movement between those espousing a strict adherence to non-violence principles and practices and those advocating a 'diversity of tactics', Interview conducted by Richard Hill, WPKN

Recent BTL Interview Topics

Economy War health care

Environment  Human/Civil Rights U S Politics International Politics

Progressive Resources

A compilation of activist and news sites with a progressive point of view

Share this content:

|

Podcasts Subscribe to BTL

Podcasts:  direct  or  via iTunes

Subscribe to Program Summaries, Interview Transcripts or Counterpoint via email or RSS feed

If you have other questions regarding subscriptions, feeds or podcasts/mp3s go to our Audio Help page.

Between The Lines Blog

Stay connected to BTL

RSS feed  twitter  facebook

donate  Learn how to support our efforts!

shop  Online Store

newswire Newswire

U.S. Politics

Economy

Bush Accountability

International Affairs

"Postwar" Occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan

Civil Liberties/ Human Rights

Environment and Sustainability

Media Issues

Activism

Fossil Fuel's Damaging Effects on Human Health, Reason Enough to Demand Renewable Energy Future

Real Audio  RealAudio MP3  MP3

Posted Oct. 26, 2011

Interview with Riki Ott, marine toxicologist, activist, author and former commercial fisher, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

fossilfuel

In the never-ending quest for harder-to-access fossil fuels, oil spills, gas explosions and pipeline leaks are everyday occurrences. The impacts of the quest for oil on ecosystems – while not always fully understood – are easy to see. But the effect on human health is often harder to determine and serious problems are often misdiagnosed or just dismissed out of hand.

Riki Ott is a marine toxicologist, activist, author and former commercial fisher who experienced the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska first hand. She spent years examining the continuing threats to sea life – and humans – from that 1989 disaster. After British Petroleum’s massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010, she spent months helping local residents identify health consequences and demand help in getting medical treatment. Ott also spent time in Battle Creek, Mich., after a tar sands pipeline ruptured in July 2010 and spilled 1 million gallons of tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River watershed.

Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Ott during the Connecting for Change conference, an East Coast Bioneers gathering held in New Bedford, Mass., Oct. 21-23, where she was a keynote speaker. Here, Ott discusses the human impacts of fossil fuel use and outlines her hope for a fossil fuel-free future.

RIKI OTT: I think the best argument for stopping all of our fossil fuel use is the human health impacts. This has been consistently covered up every time there's a spill or a disaster, like in the Gulf. "Oh, people have heat stroke; people are seasick; people have food poisoning."

I've been down there again recently, just in October, and people still have the same symptoms they had a year and a half ago. I'm sorry, but you don't get seasickness for a year and a half; or heat stroke for a year and a half. People have been on multiple rounds of antibiotics – or have been – with absolutely no change in their symptoms. This is because it's not a biological causation; it's chemical causation. And what I've been seeing is the petrochemical industry – and, unfortunately, the insurance company, which is influenced heavily by these big corporations – they don't want to acknowledge that oil makes people sick – very, very sick. And so they've covered it up. Medical doctors in the Gulf are intentionally – or very misinformedly, let me put it that way – diagnosing people with heat stroke and what-not because they know that if they put chemical illness, they will not get paid; the insurance company will not pay them.

There's all kinds of levels of this going on. We see this with the tar sands. I was shocked when I went to Battle Creek, Mich., in August, so it was about a year after the Enbridge pipeline spill. I was shocked that people were exactly as sick as they were in the Gulf, with all the same symptoms, and I realized that I'd hardly heard anything about this in the news. And then I realized, Oh, it's because it's a political game. Our nation at the highest level has no exit strategy off of oil, or fossil fuels. Forget natural gas as a bridge. Fracking is killing people. It's poisoning water – irreversibly damaging precious water to the point where it will be toxic for generations. We cannot afford these environmental costs; we cannot afford the human health costs of pursuing this addiction to fossil fuels until the last drop is gone. We have to get off of it. And what that's going to take, since our federal government has no imagination space to do this, and they've completely been high-jacked by the corporations, is it's going to take the people doing exactly what they're doing now – rising up and saying "Enough!" And becoming aware of the huge costs to human health and the environment and saying, "No! No bridge with natural gas; no such thing as clean coal; nuclear is a disaster waiting to happen." We need to seriously invest in clean, green, safe energies. I don't even call them alternatives. I call them energy options. This is all doable; we can do it now, and we need to do it.

BETWEEN THE LINES: If we did it now – they say we can do it, we just lack the political will – but it would also mean, I think, people would have to use less energy, which wouldn't necessarily be a terrible burden, based on how much we use now. But don't you think that's true?

RIKI OTT: I think part of the equation is we've been wasting an incredible amount of energy, and I don't think people are even aware of how much energy we're wasting. So there's a combination of we're using more than we need right now, and then there is the real fact that we as Americans have been living kind of high on the hog. And it's gonna take restructuring our lifestyles. I think that can be done in a way that actually makes our living better, where we'll have more free time, more quality time with our families. So, that's sort of the Bioneers dream, but I'm seeing this dream in Transition Towns, and other communities across the U.S. – Sustainable Seattle, Dreaming New Mexico. There are states and communities working toward this end of how could we be happier with less stuff. And it's real. The communities that are trying this are finding it's much more satisfying than the way we live now. So I'm actually looking at being really excited about what's around the corner, in terms of realizing our full potential as human beings, using less energy.

BETWEEN THE LINES: And just the last thing. You said in your talk that 95 to 100 percent of the hundreds of people from the Gulf whose blood was tested had traces of oil in their system and also evidence of the dispersants. That's shocking.

RIKI OTT: Okay, what happened when I was in the Gulf, literally by late June, July of 2010, people started asking me as I went back and forth across the Gulf. Is there any way that I can prove I'm feeling this way because of what happened in the Gulf, because of the BP disaster? And I said, Yes, we need to take volatile organic solvent blood profiles. And people did that. They did it across the Gulf, from Florida to Louisiana. And what was consistently found, whether they are 2-year-olds or 80-year-olds, whether they are just a visitor down to the Gulf or whether they have a beach home in the Gulf, that the level of oil that is showing up in people's blood is in the upper 95th to 100th percentile of people nationwide. In other words, they have more oil in their blood than 95 to 100 percent of the rest of us in the nation. This is toxic. It's an emergency situation. It is totally freaking people out down there. People are dying; people know people are dying, and people are struggling to get immediate triage for something the federal government and most of the medical doctors in the Gulf and BP are completely still denying at this point. It's an incredible situation – people are not backing down, though.

: Riki Ott's latest book on oil spill impacts is titled, "Not One Drop.” Find more information on the campaign for a fossil fuel-free future at www.rikiott.com.

Related Links: