The Green Planet Monitor

GPM # 75 Humanity has never faced a more monumental challenge. After two centuries of burning fossil carbon, trashing the atmosphere, pushing Earth systems to the edge of collapse, industrial societies need to develop other sources of energy that are renewable and clean. The prospects are frightening, but climate angst has an antidote. Wind and solar, for sure. There’s another vast storehouse of e...

GPM # 74 Five weeks shy of the first anniversary of October 7, 2023 and the launch of Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza, the GPM sat down with one of the conflict’s most astute observers, Mouin Rabbani. Rabbani shared his thoughts about Israel’s genocidal war, the Palestinian people’s depleted, divided and leaderless ‘national liberation movement’ (a state of affairs muc...

GPM # 73 “It’s the economy, stupid.” In search of US presidential campaign slogans summing up what concerned voters, this was the catchiest Bill Clinton strategist Jim Carville came up with, back in 1992. “Change vs. more of the same” and “Don’t forget health care” were much less memorable. Thirty-two years and eight presidential campaigns later, ano...

GPM # 72 Seventy-nine years ago, on August 6, 1945, the US dropped a uranium-enriched fission bomb, code named ‘Little Boy’, on the Japanese port city, Hiroshima. Three days later, they dropped a second bomb, a plutonium-implosion device — Fat Man — on Nagasaki. When the dust settled, between 130 and 225,000 people were dead or dying. To this day, casualty numbers vary wide...

GPM # 71 On July 19, the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, issued a historic ruling. In an 83-page Advisory Opinion , addressed to the UN General Assembly, the UN’s top court declared that Israel’s 56-year belligerent occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza is unlawful, and that Israel must terminate it in short order. The self-declared ‘Jewish State’ must also s...

GPM # 70 Guess what? Mobile phones are covered in germs. Duhh … You talk into them. You spit on them. You touch them with hands you just sneezed or coughed into! You take them into the toilet! The GPM spoke about the dark, dirty side of smart phones with Lotti Tajouri , Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics at Bond University, in Robina, Australia. Listen to our conversation in today’s p...

GPM # 69 Wheat: genus Triticum . It’s a grass, a cereal, cultivated around the world for its grain, across vast swaths of land. Alongside maize and rice, wheat is the food staple for human beings here on Planet Earth. Wheat has come a long way since humans began cultivating it, 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent. Of the dozens of species, Triticum aestivum is the most commonly grown th...

GPM # 68 The pollution of Earth’s atmosphere by fossil fuel burning is just one of the insults the planet faces in this human-engineered age of ours – the Anthropocene. In their relentless hunger for food, fiber and fuel, humans have transformed an estimated three quarters of Earth’s vegetated land surface, and appropriated a quarter of its natural productivity. Human Appropriation of Net Pr...

GPM # 67 Israel’s assault on Gaza – plausibly genocidal, according to the International Court of Justice – is now into its tenth month. Almost 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by American bombs and missiles, half of them women and children. Unknown numbers lie dead and rotting beneath the rubble. Ninety thousand have been injured. Apartment blocks, schools, universities, hospitals, places of w...

GPM # 66 Back in late May, Spain, Ireland and Norway declared their formal recognition of Palestinian statehood . One hundred-forty five out 193 UN member states now do so. In situations like this, Israel doesn’t just fulminate. It doubles down on its illegal activities — activities it knows it can carry out with impunity — all the while turning the screws on Palestinians in both Gaza...

GPM # 65 It’s a living web beneath our feet – a tangled network of microscopic tubes weaving through the soil, pulsating with nutrients, tying the roots of trees and other plants into vast networks. Mycorrhizal fungi they’re called. Most plants rely on them entirely. But, mycorrhizal fungi do more than just feed plants. They cycle carbon from atmosphere to soil and back again, regulating Earth’s c...

GPM # 64 What makes music sound funky? What makes it sound thrilling, sad, offbeat or downright strange? What makes you hum along, before you even know what notes come next? The ability to ‘understand’ and interpret music is hardwired in your brain. I spoke about this with Roger Dumas . Dumas is a neuromusicologist and brain-audio innovator, with a long, storied career. Having introduc...

GPM # 63 Wanna destroy a people in whole or in part? In other words, commit genocide – as genocide is defined under international law? You don’t need gas chambers or firing squads and deep ditches. Just destroy their schools and universities. Bomb their libraries, archives and cultural institutions; seize their historical records. Make it as hard as possible for their kids to go to school. “With m...

GPM # 62 The wheels of justice turn slowly, nowhere more slowly than at the world’s top international courts, where lawless powerful states and their allies enjoy impunity — perhaps. No state commits crimes with more assured impunity than the State of Israel. Its unique dispensation may be crumbling. Last week in The Hague, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, British ba...

GPM # 61 Israel’s assault on Gaza is now into its eighth month. As Israel wages war on Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied, effectively annexed West Bank, Western governments wage war on their own citizens who condemn Israeli crimes – on students, faculty and off-campus antiwar protestors, many of them Jewish. McCarthyism is abroad, once more — communications surveilled; gatherings banned;...

GPM # 60 Palestine solidarity protests have been taking place around the world, no more dramatically – and in the face of brutal police violence – than on university campuses. In the Netherlands, students and faculty can expect to be dealt with in two very different ways. At the end of March, at the most august proceedings of the University of Utrecht’s 388th birthday gathering, in a magnificent o...

GPM # 59 It’s a vast, living web beneath our feet – a tangled underground network of microscopic tubes weaving through the soil, pulsating with nutrients, tying the roots of trees and other plants into networks that extend over square kilometers. Mycorrhizal fungi they’re called. Most plants rely on them entirely. In exchange for plant sugars, mycorrhizal fungi provide phosphorus and nitrogen. But...

GPM # 58 Lots of reports in the news these days about Israeli military assaults on Palestinian refugee camps. In little Gaza – Israel reduces refugee camps to rubble with 2000-lb American bombs, or plows them into the mud with armoured Caterpillar D9 bulldozers. In the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Palestinian refugee camps are routinely assaulted by heavily armed soldiers or poli...

GPM # 57 Jeff Halper was a Child of the Sixties. The 78-year old American-Israeli activist ticks off all the boxes. Born in Hibbing, Minnesota in 1946, his older brother was a classmate of Robert Zimmerman, soon to be known as Bob Dylan. Bob and younger Jeff hung out in the basement of Bob’s home. Bob attended Jeff’s Bar Mitzvah. In the early Sixties, Halper traveled to Mississippi in...

GPM # 56 Earth would do perfectly fine without people. Human beings are much less indifferent. Denied earth’s bounty, they’d be be nowhere. Nothing. The bonding relationship begins with soil. From this most precious of substrates, food grows. And water springs, the sina qua non of life. Equally precious are gifts that can’t be counted, measured or monetized: rootedness, memory, n...

GPM # 55 Seven months into Israel’s assault on Gaza, starvation in the besieged enclave is widespread. In north Gaza, famine is “projected and imminent.” These are the latest findings of a UN-affiliated group of food security experts, released on March 18. The Famine Review Committee based itself on something called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC system...

GPM # 54 An astonishing fact: In the 248 years since the United States of America became an independent republic, the US has only been at peace for about eleven. The United States of War, you could call it. David Vine does. Vine, a Professor of Anthropology at American University, in Washington D.C. has recently completed the third in a trilogy of books about Washington’s fondness for permanent wa...

GPM # 53 Nothing like a huge bazaar. Who doesn’t love wandering through a crowded food market, or scouting out old vinyl or antiques in a packed convention hall, bursting with merchants and awesome deals. How about an arms convention, merchants of death at every turn, hawking surface-to-air missiles, armored personnel carriers, speed boats bristling with guns, and killer drones of all sizes &#8212...

GPM # 52 Some time in the next six months, the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, will issue an advisory opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s 57-year occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. The UN top court will be responding to a request from the UN General Assembly, asking it to determine whether Israel’s occupation is legal, and if not, what Israel’s obligation...

GPM # 51 This past Friday, March 1, marked the 70th anniversary of the Bravo Shot , the first in a series of high-yield US thermonuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, just north of the equator, in the central Pacific. The Pentagon carried out 67 nuclear tests in the Marshalls between 1946 and 1958 — 44 at Eniwetok Atoll, in the northern end of the chain, and 23 at Bikini Atoll. Castle Bravo...