Editor’s Note: With the inevitability of peak oil, many have welcomed nuclear as an alternate source of energy. Countless “accidents” over the past few decades (Chernobyl and Fukushima being the most prominent) have warned us of the risks associated with nuclear. Not only that, business as usual (without “accidents”) for nuclear does not bode well for public health either. The following is a press release by Radiation and Public Health Project. It highlights the key points of recent health research near NFS nuclear plant in Unicoi County, Tennessee. The press release is followed by a Deep Green Book Club discussion on a film about nuclear waste.
Contact Person
Joseph J. Mangano, MPH, MBA, Executive Director
716 Simpson Avenue, Ocean City NJ 08226 odiejoe@aol.com www.radiation.org
484-948-7965
FIRST IN-DEPTH HEALTH REPORT NEAR NFS NUCLEAR PLANT FINDS DRAMATIC RISES IN UNICOI COUNTY TN DEATH RATES
Since the 1990s, Unicoi County death rates for cancers and other causes increased dramatically, according to a new report released today.
Prior to the late 1990s, Unicoi County death rates were about equal to the U.S. But by the most recent period available (2019-2020), the county rate exceeded the national rate by the largest proportion in the past half-century, specifically:
44% higher for all-cause mortality
61% higher for premature mortality (age 0-74)
39% higher for all-cancer mortality
The report states that the release of radioactive chemicals into the environment by the Nuclear Fuel Services (NFS) plant may play a large role in the local health decline. “No other risk factor, such as access to health care, personal health practices, or poverty appears to have changed much,” says report author Joseph Mangano of the Radiation and Public Health Project.
“As an Erwin native, I am happy to join with Trudy Wallack and Linda Modica as a contributor to important information regarding the health of the people in my hometown and the surrounding areas” says Barbara O’Neal, co-founder of Erwin Citizens Awareness Network (ECAN), which commissioned the study.
The NFS plant is situated in Erwin, in Unicoi County. Since its 1959 startup, the plant has generated enriched uranium fuels for naval reactors and nuclear power plants. NFS releases a portion of this uranium and other radioactive elements into local air and water.
Prior to this report, no in-depth attempt has been made to analyze health status near NFS. The only national study of cancer near U.S. nuclear plants was conducted by the National Cancer Institute in 1990; that study did not include NFS.
The report also identified a growing county-national gap in death rates for infants and children. In the most recent period analyzed, the death rate for Unicoi County children exceeded the national rate by nearly 40%.
ECAN co-founder Trudy Wallack, believes that “as a resident of Greeneville, the protection and safety of the Nolichucky River stands paramount to my community & others. This river serves as the key source for our drinking water as well as family recreation and water sports. It is my hope that my contribution to this study will provide critical information regarding health…to all those who care and are asking questions.”
Editor’s Note: A week after the killing of a land-defender, the Governer of Georgia has signed an executive order to prepare national guards for protests against police brutality. Georgia has one of the highest incarceration rates in US. The protestors were defending a forest that was ordered to be cut down to build a “Cop City.” The protestors had set up camps and treehouses, which were being demolished by the cops before Tortuguita, the land-defender was shot. While the police claim that the victim had first attacked the police, it remains disputed by other demonstrators.
As a resistance gets more effective, the powerful use all means necessary to crush the resistance. Police crackdown is one of those tactics. Some activists, regardless of their dedication, may not be in a position to bear it for one reason or another. There will be others who are prepared to be on the frontline. Good organizing includes preparing the frontliners for any anticipated events.
While the move comes after law enforcement in Georgia killed a “Cop City” protester, one official said it is a “purely precautionary” measure before the anticipated release of video footage from an arrest in Tennessee.
Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday signed an executive order declaring a state of emergency through at least February 9 that will enable him to deploy up to 1,000 National Guard troops “as necessary.”
The order follows protests in Atlanta after 26-year-old forest defender Manuel “Tortuguita” Teran was shot dead last week during a multi-agency raid on an encampment to oppose construction of Cop City, a nearby law enforcement training center. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), which is investigating the case, has said Teran was killed after he shot and wounded a state trooper.
While the order begins by stating that “protests turned violent in downtown Atlanta” last Saturday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Kemp’s aides signaled that the move was not about the Cop City demonstrations but rather in anticipation of any potential response to video footage from Memphis, Tennessee showing the arrest of Black motorist Tyre Nichols.
As Common Dreams reported earlier Thursday, five fired Memphis cops were charged with second-degree murder and other crimes related to Nichols’ death. Footage of the 29-year-old’s arrest is expected to be released sometime after 6:00 pm local time on Friday.
“We understand the executive order is purely precautionary based on possible unrest following the release of the videos from Memphis,” an official in Georgia with direct knowledge of the situation told the AJC. “There are no immediate intentions to deploy the guard.”
The Atlanta Police Department also mentioned the Memphis case in a statement Thursday:
We are closely monitoring the events in Memphis and are prepared to support peaceful protests in our city. We understand and share in the outrage surrounding the death of Tyre Nichols. Police officers are expected to conduct themselves in a compassionate, competent, and constitutional manner and these officers failed Tyre, their communities, and their profession. We ask that demonstrations be safe and peaceful.
In a series of tweets Thursday, the Atlanta Community Press Collective named several people killed by law enforcement in recent years and suggested that Kemp’s order is about “trying to instill fear in anyone who stands up against police brutality.”
Meanwhile, national groups and progressive lawmakers have echoed local demands for an independent probe in Teran’s case.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has highlighted that it is separate from the Georgia State Patrol and said that GBI “is conducting an independent investigation,” after which it will “turn the investigative file over to the prosecutor.” The agency noted Wednesday that DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston has recused herself from the case so a special prosecutor will be assigned.
Some have pushed back against the “police narrative” that the “corporate media has ran away with” for Teran’s case, as forest defender Kamau Franklin told Democracy Now! last week, adding that “we find it less than likely that the police version of events is what really happened.”
“And that’s why we’re calling for an independent investigation, not one that’s done by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, not one that’s done by any federal authority, but a complete independent investigation,” Franklin said, “because that’s the only way we’re going to know what really happened.”
“The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind,” Rachel Carson wrote.“That, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done.”
Silent Spring, which inspired the modern environmental movement, was more than a critique of pesticides, it was a cri de couer against industrialized society’s destruction of the natural world.
Yet five decades of environmental activism haven’t stopped the destruction, or even slowed it. In those same decades, global animal populations have dropped by 70 percent. Right now, we are losing about one football field of forest every single second. Looking forward provides no solace: the oceans are projected to be empty of fish by 2048.
A salient reason for this failure is that so much environmentalism no longer focuses on saving wild beings and wild places, but instead on how to power their destruction. The beings and biomes who were once our concern have disappeared from the conversation. In their place we are now told to advocate for projects like the Green New Deal. While endangered ecosystems get a mention, the heart of the plan is “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” in the service of industrial manufacturing.
This new movement is called bright green environmentalism.
Its advocates believe technology and design can render industrial civilization sustainable, and that “green technologies” are good for the planet. Some bright greens are well-known and beloved figures like Al Gore, Naomi Klein, and Bill McKibben as well as organizations like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and Audubon. These committed activists have brought the emergency of climate change into consciousness, a huge win as glaciers melt and tundra burns. But bright greens are solving for the wrong variable. Their solutions to global warming take our way of life as a given, and the planet’s health as the dependent variable. That’s backwards: the planet’s health must be more important than our way of life because without a healthy planet you don’t have any way of life whatsoever.
The bright green narrative has to ignore the creatures and communities being consumed. Take the Scottish wildcat, numbering a grim 35, all at risk from a proposed wind installation. Or the birds dying by the thousands at solar facilities in California, where concentrated sunlight melts every creature flying over.
Or the entire biome of the southern wetland forest, being logged four times faster than South American rainforests. Dozens of huge pulp mills export 100 percent of this “biomass” to Europe to feed the demand for biofuels, which bright greens promote as sustainable and carbon-neutral. The forest has a biological diversity unmatched in North America, lush with life existing nowhere else and barely hanging on. This includes the Southeastern American Kestrel. They need longleaf pine savannahs, and longleaf pine have been reduced to 3% of their range. The kestrels depend for their homes on red-cockaded woodpeckers, who exist as a whisper at 1% of historic numbers. Last in this elegiac sample is the gopher tortoise. Four hundred mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects cannot survive without the protective cover of the burrows dug by tortoises, tortoises now critically endangered. All these creatures are our kin: our fragile, wondrous, desperate kin, and environmentalists would have them reduced to pellets, shipped to Europe, and burned, while calling their slaughter “green.”
Facts about renewable energy are worse than inconvenient.
First, industrial civilization requires industrial levels of energy. Second is that fossil fuel — especially oil — is functionally irreplaceable. Scaling renewable energy technologies like solar, wind, hydro, and biomass, would constitute ecocide. Twelve percent of the continental United States would have to be covered in windfarms to meet electricity demand alone. To provide for the U.S.A.’s total energy consumption, fully 72% of the continent would have to be devoted to wind farms. Meanwhile, solar and wind development threaten to destroy as much land as projected urban sprawl, oil and gas, coal, and mining combined by 2050.
Finally, solar, wind, and battery technologies are, in their own right, assaults against the living world. From beginning to end, they require industrial-scale devastation: open-pit mining, deforestation, soil toxification that’s permanent on a geologic timescale, extirpation of vulnerable species, and use of fossil fuels. In reality, “green” technologies are some of the most destructive industrial processes ever invented. They won’t save the earth. They’ll only hasten its demise.
There are solutions, once we confront the actual problem.
Simply put, we have to stop destroying the planet and let the world come back. A recent study in Nature found we could cut the carbon added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution in half by reverting 30% of the world’s farmland to its natural state. This would also preserve 70% of endangered animals and plants. This is the lowest of low hanging fruit when it comes to combating climate change and healing our planet. Everywhere there are examples of how the wounded are healed, the missing appear, and the exiled return. Forests repair, grasses take root, and soil sequesters carbon. It’s not too late.
The green new deal has reforestation as one of its goals, but it’s not the main goal, as it should be. If environmentalism is going to help save the planet — and if it’s going to respond to global warming commensurate with the threat — it needs to return to its roots, and remember the love that founders like Rachel Carson had for the land. We need to pledge our loyalty to this planet, our only home.
There’s no time for despair.
Wildcats and kestrels need us now. We have to take back our movement and defend our beloved. How can we do less? And with all of life on our side, how can we lose?
Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert are the authors of the forthcoming book, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It. The book will be available March 16th, but you can pre-order to your local bookstore or library via IndieBound now.
By Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin / Memphis Black Autonomy Federation
To grasp what happened at the March 30, 2013 Klan demonstration, you need to understand what led up to everything. The Klan said it came to Memphis to protest the renaming of the racist Memphis Confederate Parks system. Of course, all police preparations and media reporting claimed that the cops “had” to create a downtown police security zone of 10-12 square blocks to “keep the peace”, and not repeat the so-called anti-Klan “riot” of 1998, which was blamed on protesters then, but actually was a police riot as a result of an order by then-Mayor Willie Herenton to gas and beat protesters because they were approaching the Klan through breaks in the police line.
So, using that mantra of “preventing a riot”, and also the media propaganda that this was a “new” Klan group, in response to critics who asked why the Klan was being allowed to protest at all, they put together a police army of 600 cops, 4 military armored cars with machine guns, a chain link fence to separate protesters from Klan, and confined the residents of Memphis behind a line of paramilitary riot police to “protect” the Klan from the people. Of course, the obvious reflection was that this happened over 15 years ago and that the anti-Klan protest movement was “new” as well, did not penetrate the prevailing myth circulated by the cops and the lapdog media.
Our movement, the Memphis Black Autonomy Federation, had created a broad-based group called the Ida B. Wells Coalition Against Racism and Police Brutality to bring out Memphis residents, but also anti-fascist activists from throughout the Southern and Midwestern regions. We tried at first to have a meeting at city hall, but this was refused by a groups of businessmen, then the city permit office refused a permit for the same area as the Klan, which was at the courthouse itself, just a few hours before. Then, the cops wanted to not allow any more than 100 people from the community come to the event, but we fought that, and they apparently allowed everyone to go in, including white supremacist supporters and anti-Klan activists. This latter decision was a recipe for disaster, we felt, and we did not initially feel that it would be safe to go inside. If someone got to fighting a Klan supporter, they could be shot and we all would have been in danger. We decided to press on anyway.
If we had not applied for the city parade permit, no one would have been allowed to protest at all, and we would not have even known of their security plans at all. Only because we kept prodding the city to back off on at least some of its security precautions, did they agree to allow the protest. They then issued the permit at the last minute, and the lapdog media dutifully reported it, including the city’s denial that it had ever denied our permits. This little media report would prove to be the undoing of the city’s plans for total denial of the event, and its plans of discouraging any protest through media saturation by the Mayor and government officials who time and again tried to frighten, scold, and intimidate people from coming down to an anti-Klan event. Just the fact that people knew that there was going to be a protest made them come down to the event, even if they were totally unfamiliar with our movement.
The day before the event we were concerned about being pushed into a “protest pit” as was done at many other events in other cities and was used to crush the anti-globalization movement, and because the original plan called for us all to be shoved into a small space on the side of the courthouse itself, we decided that it would be a threat to our security to go in that space, and we called for an activist General Assembly at a nearby park, which was outside the police protest zone, to discuss options. So about 150 of us met at Court Square park, and talked about going to the Forrest Park and attacking the statute itself, but then the cops came up and told us that we “had” to go to the “security zone”, and we feigned going there, but in fact we had prepared a number of signs saying “Cops Stifle Free Speech!” and about 150 of us marched down to police lines and protested the police state methods of controlling the protest.
The cops were perplexed, and a small number of them tried to chase us around or steer us into the barbed wire area, but we refused to go. It was a standoff, but they did not arrest anybody or beat us up. It was clear that they did not want to break their ranks to try to arrest all of us, so we took advantage of the moment and kept protesting. Then we moved towards the park, but there was a split between those who wanted to go inside the police lines, and those who did not. The group started splintering. After much soul searching, we decided we would go inside. So we headed for the entrance, and many followed us. The cops had everybody head through TSA style metal detectors, empty our pockets, and searched us. They seized all papers, pamphlets, protest signs, and denied you entry if you were wearing “radical” t-shirts of Che Guevara or Huey Newton, but also Jefferson Davis or N.B. Forrest attire. They seized our bullhorns, but returned one of them as we were entering the event.
When we got inside, everyone seemed subdued, and there was no chanting or screaming, everyone was just looking for signs of the Klan to show. The Klan was kept 2-3 football fields away from us, who were behind barbed wire. There was a long line of riot police inside arrayed as a gauntlet we had to pass, then there were police snipers on the roof, and a line of police standing across from us, about five deep and then others on horseback. They never moved for five hours, just stared ahead at us in military formation.
What made us feel good about going inside is that there was in fact a large number of people already inside waiting on us. They kept streaming in. These were not the usual white middle class activists or the old civil rights deadheads, these were working class Black people of every age. They were angry as hell because the Mayor had brought these “Ku Klux Kowards” to town, and had put us behind barbed wire and coddled the Klan. The Klan came on special city buses, only about 60 of them, which contained riot police and a special security wing of Memphis police and Shelby County Sheriffs.
On March 30th, sixty-five Ku Klux Klan members gathered at the steps of the Shelby County Court House and marched in response to the recent name changes of three previously confederate parks in Memphis. One of these parks, formerly known as Bedford Forest Park, was renamed Health and Science Park. Nathan Forest was the first grand wizard of the Klan and was responsible for massacring over three hundred black people during the Civil War.
Twelve hundred people turned out to the counter protest demonstration against the Klan despite the alternative event across town put on and promoted by Mayor A. C. Wharton Jr. and city officials with live music and Easter festivities in efforts to discourage people from going to the rally site. The majority of those in attendance were residents of Memphis, however many organizations came from outside of Memphis including Florida Anti-Fascists, KC IWW from St. Louis, IWW, Deep Green Resistance, Black Autonomy Federation from Memphis, Concerned Citizens for Justice Team from Chattanooga, TN., Chattanoogans Organized for Action, Black Bloc Chicago, Anti Racist Action, Memphis Black gang members rep, Let’s Organize the Hood, and Direct Action Memphis.
Many of those who gathered marched down the streets, but were latter funneled into “Free Speech” zones where they could not see or get near the Klan. Hundreds of police in militarized gear lined the streets of downtown Memphis and lined the fences of the gated designated protest area. Lorenzo Ervin, a founding member of the Black Autonomy Federation and a main organizer of the counter protest wrote in a note entitled “Memphis Anti-Klan Demonstration: Protesting in a Police State“: “…in response to critics who asked why the Klan was being allowed to protest at all, they put together a police army of 600 cops, 4 military armored cars with machine guns, a chain link fence to separate protesters from Klan, and confine the residents of Memphis behind a line of paramilitary riot police was used to “protect” the Klan from the people.”
Thirty one year old Cedric Moore of Tipton County (twenty miles from Memphis) stated that “if the KKK had a real point to prove they wouldn’t need these police”. His sister, thirty-five year old Porteia More who is also a resident of Tipton County expressed her reasoning for coming out to the counter demonstration: “They came here years ago and I wasn’t able to come… I made it a point to be here on today but I did not know we would not have a chance to see them. I wanted to understand why they were here and marching… I understand they don’t want the symbol to be changed but it’s time for everyone just to get along.”
When asked what her opinion was of the police response to protestors she responded: “I think it’s just too much going on. We see many police out in uniform versus the KKK… I think it’s too much.” Twenty-year-old Lando from Horn Lake, Mississippi echoed similar sentiments: “It looks they are treating us like the enemy… They have police from all counties out here. All this money invested in some KKK.”
JoNina Ervin, standing chair of the Black Autonomy Federation and organizer of the counter protest, took issue with the permit process and what she views as an overall violation of people’s right to free speech. The Black Autonomy Federation had to apply three times to hold their protest and were finally approved only two days before the march. In the past, authority to approve permits lay in the hands of the city council, but it was changed to the police director the 19th of March two days before they applied for their first permit. “We thought the procedures to get the permit were unconstitutional,” stated JoNina.
“Once we find an attorney we want to go to court to challenge the city ordinance. We were told we could not bring any leaflets, flyers or posters into the protest area… I noticed at the Klan rally through videos they had posters. Our free speech has been restrained. How can you voice your first amendment rights when you’re being intimidated? Pretty soon we won’t have any free speech rights unless we challenge these policies.”
No one was hurt that day, and only one arrest was made.
If you would like to get in contact with the Black Autonomy Federation or offer support, please contact them at Organize.the.hood@gmail.com.
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