Yes, "we need to make sure the answer is in the affirmative."

The powers that be have decided to allow protest in volume, which is why the Internet is not yet banned here in America. It is why Common Dreams exists - another safety valve where we can all blow off steam.

But blowing off steam does not drive an engine forward, does it? But it is at least, an indication of potential energy - a silver lining if you will to the very dark cloud of majority rule democracies.

The people are restive.

To effect change, however, more is needed.

Entrenched 'power and privilege' does not respond to other than demand backed by force. Short of revolution, that force must be the courts, which are themselves suspect at this time in history. But they are our last resort I think, prior to collapse.

And we the people must drive this legal course forward, and see to it that natural law and justice are the benchmark by which 'progress' is measured.

To that end, I refer you to a countryman of yours (I am a Canadian), Professor of Law Christoppher Stone, who wrote :

"Should Trees Have Standing" in 1972, a legal argument for rights for the environment.

And I refer all of us to Bolivia, where legal rights for the environment are being enacted as we speak, and where legal rights for the environment are being pushed forward by Bolivia at the United Nations.

You will notice that this post in Common Dreams is about the German initiative, Christopher Stone is an American, and I, a Canadian, am suggesting that the lead in the world today vis a vis the ecosphere has, in fact, passed to a thrid world country in South America, led by an indigenous president, Evo Morales, and his extraodinary spokesman at the United Nations, Pablo Solon.

The global village is aware, finally, to an increasingly clear and increasingly present danger - collective ecocide.

In Common Law, when all is on the line, unanimity, i.e., consensus, by representatives of the country, selected at random to represent the country, are required, in law, both by the Constitution and by natural principles of justice, to agree, unanimously, and beyond a reasonable doubt, as to the law itself, the justice, if any, of such law, and the intentions of the accused, before judgement is passed.

Since the health of we the people is completely and utterly dependent on the health of our collective common environment, the ecosphere, surely a consenual process such as Trial by Jury, is something we should all demand - and then see that it is made so.

We have poisoned the environmental commons with radioactive wastes, with industrial chemicals. We have changed the acidity of the world ocean, and the chemistry of the world atmosphere.

And we have allowed a select few to poison the democratic process, and to subvert justice - worldwide.

If I ever figure out what to do - I'll let you know. In the meantime, perhaps we could all find out more about Bolivia's United Nations initiative?
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Radiation: Children at Risk
by Russell Mokhiber
Multinational Monitor magazine, June 2000

Infant death rates near five U.S. nuclear plants dropped immediately and dramatically after the reactors closed, a recent study shows.
Moreover, dramatic decreases in childhood cancer cases and deaths from birth defects, which are affected by radiation exposure, occurred near one of the closed reactors.
The study suggests that the health of 42 million people in the United States who live downwind and within 50 miles of a nuclear plant may be affected by these reactors, according to the study's author, Joseph Magnano.
The study was conducted by the New York-based Radiation and Public Health Project and published in the spring issue of the scientific journal Environmental Epidemiology and Toxicology.
At a press conference in Washington, D.C., model Christie Brinkley joined Representative Michael Forbes, D-New York, and others in calling upon the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to consider whether adverse health effects are associated with nuclear plant operations before renewing nuclear power plant licenses.
Brinkley is a board member of the STAR (Standing for Truth About Radiation) Foundation, a group formed in 1997 by concerned Long Island residents.
"As a mother of young children who lives near nuclear facilities, I worry daily that radiation from these plants may be deadly to our children," Brinkley said. "So far, the federal government has buried its head in the sand. If closing the nuclear power plants was not responsible for the decline in infant deaths, what was?"
The nuclear industry condemned the press conference as "another misleading instance of science by celebrity."
In a one-page rebuttal to the study, the Nuclear Energy Institute said that the annual exposure to the nearest resident from a U.S. nuclear power plant has been less than one millirem, compared to the annual average exposure from nature of 300 millirem.
And the industry cited a March 1991 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association which examined more than 900,000 cancer deaths using county mortality records collected from 1950 to 1984.
Dr. John Boice, who conducted that study, said that "from the data at hand, there was no convincing evidence of any increased risk of death from any of the cancers we surveyed due to living near nuclear facilities."
The NRC does not consider the potential adverse health effects of radioactive emissions when evaluating license renewal applications.
Owners of 28 nuclear reactors at 17 nuclear facilities around the country are scheduled to seek license renewals by 2003. The NRC has never voluntarily studied the link between radioactive emissions from nuclear plants and patterns of cancer.
Mangnano, the study's author and a research associate at the Radiation and Public Health Project, examined infant death rates in counties within 50 miles and in the prevailing wind direction of five reactors: Fort St. Vrain (located near Denver, Colorado), LaCrosse (near LaCrosse, Wisconsin), Millstone/Haddam Neck (near New London, Connecticut), Rancho Seco (near Sacramento, California) and Trojan (near Portland, Oregon).
In the first two years after the reactors closed, infant death rates in the downwind counties under 40 miles from the plants fell 15 to 20 percent from the previous two years, compared to an average U.S. decline of just 6 percent between 1985 and 1996. In each of the five areas studied, no other nuclear reactor operated within 70 miles of the closed reactor, essentially creating a "nuclear-free zone."
The study detailed the plunges in newly diagnosed leukemia and cancer cases and birth defect deaths in children under five years in the four-county local area downwind from Rancho Seco. This decline has continued through the first seven years after the
June 1989 closing. In contrast, the local infant death rate rose in the two years after Rancho Seco began operations in 1974.
"This article is the first to document improvements in health after a nuclear plant closes," says Mangano. "It supports many other studies showing elevated childhood cancer near operating reactors. The federal government allows nuclear reactors to emit a certain level of radiation, saying that the amount is too low to result in adverse local health effects. However, this study clearly calls that assumption into question, as do other studies."
The press conference was held on the fourteenth anniversary of the catastrophic accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power reactor. Increased infant cancer and death rates after Chernobyl have been documented, not just in the former Soviet Union, but in Western Europe and the United States, where Chernobyl fallout levels were deemed by regulators to be within safe limits...

U.S. nuclear plants seeking relicensing this year include Oconee Nuclear Station in northwest South Carolina, Arkansas Nuclear One in Russellville, Arkansas, Edwin I. Hatch in southern Georgia, and Turkey Point near Miami, Florida.
In 2001, plants expected to seek relicensing include Catawba, which lies on the border between North Carolina and South Carolina, North Anna, located near Fredericksburg, Virginia, Surry, near Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Peach Bottom, located near Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Recently, the government approved a license renewal application for Calvert Cliffs, near Baltimore.
For some of those who live near reactors, the government's inaction has been maddening. Randy Snell, a New York resident who lives near the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), learned several years ago that his 8-year-old daughter had developed a rare soft tissue cancer called rhabdomyosarcoma.
Snell has uncovered 19 other cases of the same rare cancer in Suffolk County. In one area near BNL, the rate of this cancer in young children since 1994 is 15 times the national average.
"I have no doubt that radiation from nuclear reactors sickens people who live nearby," Snell says. "What is really disheartening, though, is that state and federal public health agencies haven't lifted a finger to confirm the link between Brookhaven and all these rare child cancers. I hope this study forces them to act."
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Health/Radiation_ChildrenRisk.html

has any legislation been passed in Germany to demonstrate this reducing of nuclear power plants?

always interesting to have other situations held up as examples, only to find enormous detail missing...like, actual progress...

holding a sign, chanting and singing, even screaming...these are not actual changes in a country's business...

are we viewing a politician's promise as a done deal?

~ A Little Levity ~

This is too good to pass up:

Discovery! The Japanese are tougher than the Ukranians!!

At Beyond Nuclear, it is reported that the Cesium 137 levels outside of the twelve mile exclusion zone around Fukushima are from approximately six to sixty times higher than the levels around Chernobyl which were the threshold values for evacuation twenty five years ago, and which still render these areas uninhabitable by the Ukrainian government.
http://www.beyondnuclear.org/home/2011/5/10/usjapan-release-radiological-readings-around-fukushima-hot-z.html

An aside - The Levee Busters!!

Meanwhile, here in Canada, we too are dynamiting our levees (in Manitoba).

Evidently, Plan A is to build dikes to tame wild nature.

And Plan B is to blow them up.

I'm off to climb a mountain - it's just too much.

Manysummits
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