I was pleased to be part of a small group meeting with Helen before her speech at Hart House at the University of Toronto. The event was titled “The Nuclear Question: Acute and Chronic Dangers of Nuclear Power, Nuclear War and Depleted Uranium Weapons”. It was sponsored by the Faculty of Medicine, the Office of Continuing Education, the Office of Undergraduate and Postgraduate Medical Education, the Dalai Lama School of Public Health and Physicians for Global Survival. The sponsorship indicates a turn around in the support of the medical establishment for Dr. Caldicott.

At 71 Helen is as captivating, beautiful and inspiring as ever. In the 1980s she could fill Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto to overflowing. She continues to speak out both in Australia and the United States, to write books and to reach people any way she can. She has a weekly one-hour radio program in Australia. Her latest book “If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Save the Earth” is a must-read. It could be the most important $21.00 you ever spent.

This is not to say that Helen is any less disturbing. I will give a few quotes.

“Things are grim on a global scale.”
“It is worse than during the Cold War.”
“Nuclear Reactors are bomb factories.”
“The waste lasts half a million years and we never will know what to do with it.”
“Students are not being told and political scientists are ignorant.”
“This is not taught in medical schools.”
“It’s easy to melt down a reactor.”
“The Indianna Point reactors were a 9/11 target.”
“Opposition will have to come from a Western country because Russia and China don’t care.”

Helen was given three minutes to talk at the one-million rally in New York city in 1983 so she just described the effect of one nuclear bomb on a city. This was the essence of the academy award-wining National Film Board film “If You Love This Planet” (Still available from NFB). Now Helen tackles subjects from global warming to toxic pollution, species extinction, overpopulation, First World greed and Third World debt, corporate power and how the media manufacture our consent. “The media are determining the fate of the Earth.”

The question is not so much what has Helen been doing, as why did we go to sleep after the Cold War was more or less over.

Helen offers a few reasons: President Clinton did not take on the Pentagon when he had the chance, corporations run the governments, the media, now almost entirely corporate owned, does not give the public the facts. We are amusing ourselves to death with mindless entertainment and infotainment.

“In the 70s I stopped uranium mining in Australia by telling the union members about the effects of radiation on their testicles.” Now in Australia things are grim. The temperature rose to 42 degrees this year causing wide scale fires and dust storms. The country is also surrounded by earthquake zones and has 85 million tons of uranium tailings.”

“There is no way to stop tritium releases from nuclear reactors”, she said. “In Germany a study found that children under age five living near a nuclear reactor were twice as likely to develop leukemia.”

In a conversation with Dr. Mark Leith of Physicians for Global Survival we discussed why men kill. “The male brain was designed for hunting”, he said. Men are so thrilled by explosions it is almost orgasmic, whereas women are more empathetic. Helen agreed that gender is a huge issue in our survival. “We are 53 percent of the global population, yet we have few women in government. The most psychopathic rise to the top. We are conditioned to serve men.”

But Helen has some hope for the future if we act now.

As far as climate change is concerned we must stop using paper that comes from CO2-absorbing trees, stop driving and flying, limit the size of families, legislate the responsibility to vote (pay a fine as in Australia), achieve the goal of half the governing bodies to be women, teach our students about their future and educate ourselves.”

“We’re talking about revolution, not just activism. We must be carbon-free and nuclear-free by 2050 — if we love this planet.”

Note: The Appendix is a marvelous list of 197 organizations that are involved in the struggle. Emails are given and a summary of their activities. Helen’s personal website is www.helencaldicott.com. She wants to know what you are doing, especially if you are a young student.