Caldicott's unflinching attitude

Helen Caldicott will be the keynote speaker in the “Power Play” program on May 22. See p. B4.

By Tom Politeo
CO-CHAIR HARBOR VISION TASK FORCE

Helen Caldicott does not mince words. She can be direct, downright blunt. According to a recent opinion poll taken in her native Australia, she points out that Australians now consider American foreign policy to be about as great a threat their security as Islamic fundamentalism.

Caldicott was speaking about a poll commissioned for the Lowy Institute for International Policy, a center-to-right organization in Australia, not exactly a group inclined to view relations with America poorly. The poll shows that 79% of Australians are at least somewhat worried about American foreign policy and that 57% are at least fairly worried. Within the poll's margin of error, these numbers match Islamic fundamentalism.

The United States, she points out, "uses 40% of the earth's natural resources. It produces 20% of the carbon dioxide but it only has 5% of the world's population."
Indeed, a typical worry in the United States is that our Middle East policy and wars may foster resentment in the world's Islamic community. But in countries where global climate change is on people's minds, the combined effects of U.S. consumption, and military and environmental policies may create a far more widespread resentment.

Caldicott was born in Melbourne. When she was 15, she read a "On the Beach," a novel by Nevil Shute that was set in her hometown. The book chronicled the aftermath of a nuclear war and "the last people alive in the world in Melbourne, and it described how they died." This book opened her eyes to the consequences of unintended events in a nuclear world. Two years later, she started medical school, where she learned about radiation and cancer.

The next step in raising her awareness occurred in the U.S. "I lived in America from 1966 to 1969, in very tumultuous times: MLK was shot, RFK was shot, Nixon was elected. I was a young mother with three children, and I was radicalized. Though I wasn't politically active, I became empowered to understand how democracy functions."
On returning to Australia in 1971, she found out that France was testing nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, violating the test ban treaty. "We got a lot of [nuclear] fallout where I lived, and I led a movement against the French testing, which took nine months to complete. 75% of Australians rose up. We took France to the international court of Justice and France was forced to test underground."

Caldicott says it's valuable to know what people think about issues facing their country from an external perspective. As someone who as lived in the United States, she can do a good job of offering that perspective. Listening to Dr. Caldicott is like a reprise of the positive attitude prevalent in the late 1960s that said we can shape our future for the better. Now it's being restated, after years of consideration and activism, after it has been integrated into an Australian perspective.
The problem with American policy is that it centers around consumption. The military presence we assert around the world guarantees access to the raw materials and goods we seek.

"So, the United States government and corporations use the earth as a 'farm' for cheap or slave labor, and to mine, pillage and plunder the earth's natural resources, that includes timber, minerals, oil and LNG," says Caldicott.

"In order to obtain fossil fuels from around the world, America maintains an armada of weapons of mass destruction. The Pentagon's budget is one half a trillion dollars a year—the iron fist in the velvet glove. Much of this necessity is related to energy, the voracious energy use of the Untied States."

Dr. Helen Caldicott

A common concern among many activists is that, as we blow through one fossil fuel after another, we'll invest a lot of money in dead-end solutions. Without paying enough attention to conservation and alternative energy sources, we may be forced to choose between building many more nuclear power plants or mining the ocean floors for methyl hydrate crystals. In the large scales that these fuels sources would be needed just to keep up business as usual, they would pose enormous environmental, safety and security risks.

"The whole process of systemic mining the earth for its natural resources, was put into place by the GATT accord and by multinational corporations, mostly from the United States," Caldicott observes. It was signed by many countries whose leaders haven't read its 23,000 pages. They signed away their futures and their riches and the heritage for their children.

"A few companies control the whole world now. Cheney wanted only nuclear and energy companies—oil companies and military-industrial companies—to create his national energy policy. I write about this in the book 'The New Nuclear Danger.' When I first wrote it, 32 people in the Bush administration came from the military-industrial complex.
"War is good for business. War is good for maintaining control of the planet, it is good for sucking the life out of the Earth. We can't be on a more aberrant and devious track than the one we're on now.

"Military-industrial stocks shot sky high with the American invasion of Iraq, they shot up as they steal more from the American taxpayer. It's the most obscene thing. The robber barons of the 19th century are nothing compared to these people.

"A lot of Americans have stock in companies that are intent on destroying the planet," Caldicott adds. It leads to the thought that we could affect policy not only by letting our concerns be known to elected leaders, but by policing the funds that our retirements are invested in. One small step would be to more our investments from companies that exploit fossil fuels and LNG to those that support a sustainable economy.

It's not new for Australians to have concerns about the United States. However, the concerns, Caldicott points out, "have increased since Bush. Never before have seen a more dangerous administration in the United States than now.

"I think there's always specific times for political movements, one can't contrive the times. I think a new time is emerging, where people are starting to wake up to what on earth is going on. That's my experience from talking to hundreds of thousands of Americans through the commercial and public media, and that there is a great desire by millions to fix what is going on.'"

Caldicott doesn't worry that much about the modern robber barons. She says "I don't worry about the aberrant people. I worry about the sane people who are sitting on their hands. They have no right to be sitting on their hands at this point in planetary evolution, or we may have no planet to evolve, because we are facing the most critical time in the history of the earth.”