i think this information has to get out because a lot of the troops over there in iraq they have no idea what they're being was so when they come back if they're not knowledgeable about what's really going on now they're not only going to get tested for these new uranium if they have headaches they just going to think they're stressed out if they get swelling they just going to think it's because of the heat you know what's going to happen when they have when they get their wives pregnant and the same thing that happened to my child have their wives do we have to have hundreds of babies to be born the way my child was born so the government say you know what there is there is a direct link between depleted uranium and birth defects i don't think any child should be the number i think is a life every life that was lost in iraq is that like it's not a number and i think their family members should start questioning the government because everything is being in a cover up nobody wants to hear that and i don't think that i should be coming on t v to expose my child to let the whole world know what's really going on but if that's the only way that i have to do it to save lives the way the government is not saving the soldiers lives then you know one that i guess my child's birth defect was not a vein and i will make sure that everybody knows what's happening because they not only hurt my husband by making him expose they hurt my child so my my child has to live with this type of hand and i might lose my husband when five years from now ten years from now so he moves his life in iraq but he loses it here in the united states in new york slowly not knowing what's wrong with him and then making him look like he's crazy i don't think it's fair i don't need to move two people because of a war radiation has a long history was discovered in eight hundred ninety five by rank and by nineteen twelve so first book was published and radiation related in nineteen fifty that talked about weakening the species you're putting lar radiation waste in the environment which is hard to cope with and you're producing people who are less able to cope with it and you know you can't keep doing this anybody with common sense knows that you know you're you're working at both hands to really destroy the species depleted uranium is a waste pr ct from the nuclear industry in the seventy's there was talk about mixing it with horrible air metal and putting it into bicycles and refrigerators stoves and free of charge to the weapons manufacturers it served the purpose of getting rid of the radioactive waste and it provided free metal for the weapons they have a weapon that is on believe a ball if you are only interested in fighting wars you have a trump card weapon nothing can withstand depleted uranium there is no tank there is no armor that can withstand depleted you one of the things we are always told around the military environment is the military takes care of its own and i think we're learning that their idea of taking care of their people is very different than our idea of taking care of their people in early november i received a call at the daily news from the mother of a soldier she found that he was very sick that he had all kinds of problems respiratory problems he had some tests on the fort dix from the told him he had the lungs of a seventy three year old man there's a whole bunch of them from his company that are at fort dix that have been brought back over the last few weeks for a variety of problems so sometime in late november i went out to fort dix and about twelve or thirteen of them met me up to burger king and sat down and basically started telling me their stories i did exactly five and a half years in the marine corps and i relisted into the army national guard to further my education so the national guard in march of  everything was still would stand or some kind of film that was on it every day just going to explain no matter how much you cleaned it it was like like sand is dripping ok this film would be like a layer of dust but it was like can do lots i'm just a little sleeping in that one of the guys i came back he he was a medic he had the same symptoms and he said he guys you know listen to what happened while you guys after you guys left the dutch marines came into the area will be will liv they conducted samples of the ground and the air and they decided not to live in the area we were living they decided to set up a base camp outside of the area where we were living because i said it was  true the radiation levels were so high you know that there was no reason to live i mean we should move out this dust gets everywhere it spreads into people's homes it gets in your lungs were it stays for a long period of time and people have gone into these areas with large quantities of uranium dioxide show that the radiation count is about a thousand times higher than what it is in terms of the natural background not let me explain just by living on the planet earth you get about one hundred milligrams per year of radiation that's a very important number one hundred milligrams per year of radiation however once you are at these sites where you have depleted uranium being emitted you can easily get up to two hundred milligrams per hour so in other words uppers of a thousand or more times background radiation in other words just like getting a chest x ray every few minutes when i arrived in country in april i started to get swelling on my face which i thought was because of the heat i just began to really feel fatigued my headache started to surf i developed some numbness in my hand i was just was not strong that i was getting headaches i had to stop because lack of water i just that's how i thought it was new environment new changes and it that they do when they hit a hard target they burst into flames and this is a very happy player it's three thousand five thousand degrees centigrade which is about  same pressure temperature you'd have and that kiln if you're making patrie and when you fire it in the kiln you use these high temperatures so what happens is the rainy and forms an aerosol which is an extremely small particle and at the same time it's fired or heated to set your head temperature that it melts actually and forms like a glass so you have a different substance then uranium dust you have a ceramic type of very small particles of uranium so what i'm saying is you have to look at this differently this is a new problem as far as texas college he goes and you have a radioactive substance which is now that i and which we found remains in the body for a very long time once you begin to inhale this material into your lungs small particles i mean the oxide will begin to radiate the nearby cells and all that radiation isn't concentrated into a very small area so you have potential radioactive hot spots in your lungs as a consequence of this we started inquiring about a plea to radium test they looked at us like we were crazy first of all they said that there was no such test for the petering and everything we have a psychosomatic there with which is all thinking about it and it's just in our heads that we all have the same symptoms my roommate who was one of the persons who was exposed to the  right is level was at one seventy two you know i just could not see this man being turned away and then not even being given answers as to the  conditions with his daughter because i had a matter of fact i mentioned his condition when i was a walter reed i mentioned gerard before he even got tested a soldier came back with the same conditions  impregnated his wife and now his wife has had a sonogram and it was so old that the baby's missing fingers i was told that depleted uranium has nothing to do with that the birth defect is the anomaly of the right hand basically she has half a palm with a thumb thing or fused into the palm of her hand you know i really didn't play any mind and then a couple weeks after that mr gonzales calls me up and says he gets to he has the results of my tests and when he said that i was exposed as like what was i said i couldn't believe it and i really couldn't believe it first thought and then he told me this is what it is and you know what you have almost point three zero time nanograms more than the soldiers who were living in the southern end of iraq in the train station so it's like he said you know that could be attributed to you child having a birth defect because there's a recent studies that show defects and there's a lot of long term effects that could happen you know the amount that we found in your urine could be ten times more that in your lungs you know this is just a minute amount that we found in the urine so i  started i had this rage in me and i feel i need to research everything and my wife started researching everything and then we found pictures of of birth defects of babies down in iraq and when i looked at the picture of the child's hand and i saw my child's hand the picture of my daughter's hand in the picture of this child's hand is the exact same if you've ever handled the you you know that way you rhenium if i were to hold it in my hand just a small smear of it you go like this it's unusually heavy deceptively heavy and small pieces smaller than a softball weighs one point seven times that of lead is one of the heaviest of all known metals because of the fact it has two hundred thirty eight protons and neutrons in the nucleus as a consequence the military likes to use it in shells and shell casings now when it hits armor steel it actually will penetrate the armor steel vaporize in the process and that's where the danger is depleted uranium is not an radioactive it's still radioactive it's still a miss alpha radiation and that's one of the main concerns approximately three hundred seventy five tons of depleted uranium were fired in the form of shells during gulf war one and during the recent gulf war we're talking about perhaps a thousand maybe two thousand tons of this material was dispersed in the form of uranium dioxide now the pentagon by the way has its own rebuttal the pentagon first of all points out that we are talking about low levels of radiation which is true however i should point out that this material has a half life the half life of u t thirty eight is more then four billion years that's approximately the lifetime of the solar system the sun the earth or about four and a half billion years old your a m is basically an alpha  three kinds of basic radiation alpha beta gamma uranium is primarily an alpha and a gamma emitter and alpha rays can be absorbed by tissue paper therefore what's the problem well there's a problem here precisely because alpha rays can be absorbed by tissue paper most of the energy is then lost in that tissue paper causing an enormous amount of damage for centimeter much more than you get with beta radiation think of a crowd and you have a speeding car plowing into the crowd the car of course does not go very far into that crowd of people but think of the damage think of the damage caused by that car plowing into a crowded crowd of people that's alpha radiation so precisely alpha radiation is not very penetrating all of this energy is deposit it in the nearby area of the the areas that are affected and the pentagon itself now mentions the fact that there's a possible kidney long and liver damage i was asked why i felt out of all the soldiers in iraq that i was exposed to depleted uranium where do you get this from by that monday morning there was four colonels there from walter reed hospital that came down to see us did i know anything about depleted uranium was i in any explosive vehicles around any burning vehicles was i in any that i had this test done when the army would not test me because i had asked about the situation in fort dix and i was told that there was no known testing for depleted uranium we even brought up the fact that could be possible when the helicopters are landing and taking off could be possible that it looked up these particles or sand that have depleted uranium on it draw back into the air and we can handle it so you know  perform the test i told the doctor on the rock of rich as on the rock of it they told me yes they were aware of having he's an activist but they never mentioned that he used to work for them you know what he was a so he was an officer of the military my ass is that was you know i have not been active my position is not one of an activist by position is as a concerned soldier who has health issues that wants to have them looked into not only for myself but for the other soldiers that are there especially my unit that is still in country if i have been exposed to something i'm quite sure that they've been exposed to the same elements we've been the same areas the article came out in the news and they were on the front page of the daily news and you know and it kind of gave a wake up call to i guess a lot of people who's just been keeping it silent i started getting phone calls from everybody you know telling them that they're sorry to to know this is what has happened but from the military standpoint nobody could know nobody knows where my test is other soldiers that have returned and have gone to the a or the instructions of the army the military have gone to the v a those samples have been sent out to baltimore and have not come back with answers of the soldiers that have gone  to the the army and had these samples done at the c d c center for disease control a lot of them have not gotten ever solved back it was soldier particular had his done at fort and somehow his samples will last so as to lead to speculation something is wrong my daughter has a birth defect the way she has now she has to live with it i do not know what kind of cognitive problems she's going to have in the long run whether be ten years from now fifteen years from now i don't know but i know for right now she has a problem with a hand she can't even hold a bottle like a normal child who tries to hold the bottle or even try to creep right or push off right she has to deal with it one of the precautions i have to take every day is when she puts her hand in i'm out that she doesn't put a whole hand in our mouth because that's just one of the things that she's doing you know i mean i have to deal with it do you know what it is to have a child to have a nail growing in interest skin it starts to bleed you know some people don't even know how to call i don't even know how to cut it i have to just wait till they get soft and blow it so it peels off the military is not acknowledging anything that she has so she's not being taken care of militarily with the hospitals so as of november fourth she has no insurance but what i care about is dumb taken care of my daughter you know i'm thirty years old but she's only three months three and a half months what's going to be the problem what's going on what's going to happen to her down the road it took them twenty years to help the vietnam veterans i don't want to be the same i want to help now the thing that's very startling about radiation related cancer is that it's occurring for young people it's occurring for young mothers veterans who are in their thirty's or twenty's so it occurring too soon but there's no excuse for saying it's no better than the battlefield bullet because they leave the soldiers and able to fight and the battlefield but it makes them sick they have to go home and their life is ruined so it you know in many ways it is more  deleterious it's used in many weapon systems including the in one abrams tanks the year two bradley fighting vehicle tomahawk cruise missiles the a ten thunderbolts known as the warthog and the navy's phalanx anti missile system which is on board every ship in the us navy you heard about the weapons of mass destruction that a guy might have this so you have a gas mask to protect you but you don't know anything about the dea you which might be the weapons of mass destruction that they have that we owe china that we are hurting our own shells with here and it's got probably going to take twenty years or thirty years for them to find out how many people have died from their own stuff they're using on old people the pentagon clearly considers th contamination of its own soldiers of the environment of millions of civilians an acceptable cost and we should remind ourselves this has always been true and let's remember the atomic that turns between one hundred forty six and one hundred sixty three one quarter of a million u s troops were consciously exposed to atomic testing and then secretly studied by the pentagon they were never told the risk to their children nor the tens of thousands of people who live downwind of the test  point on our face away from the target area looking at an atomic explosion with a decade i call the cover of the impairment of vision like looking at the sun nothing serious but enough to call the curtain on the show of shows no one wanted to miss thirty seconds  and we had a natural reading and these were entered into one log then we have a second set of books which the records were to reflect that he did not exceed his daily allowance process them dupont or general electric we were human guinea pigs do you contamination is a form of environmental racism it effects poor communities and people of color here in the u s targeting them around the world it's on native american reservations eighty percent of uranium is mine and where most almost all uranium waste is dumped but in ninety three we went back the doctors were telling  were seeing something that really worried them that they hadn't ever seen before and it tended to come from bedouin families it would bring people in from the desert to the west and south of basra where iraqi forces have been dug and your member and did try to stop by an invasion from kuwait where the heavy heaviest have was heavily concentrated bombing of men in trenches and tanks and sand barriers and today there is no weapon that can challenge the pentagon militarily there's only one thing the pentagon fears that's people informed and mobilized and angry and information when it's mobilized it actually undergoes a chemical transformation it becomes outlined and then it has explosive potential but potential question the question rather is how do we maintain both strands global and local and i believe on the end it means us coming together and concretize in practices that bind us together it could mean a ritual it could mean some kind of food network it could mean anything but it just means us interacting with each other how do we maintain the global aspect of the world it also means that we have to open up species for learning and to learn from other people good cannot cannot come in quickly or one of the things in my life that i am very happy that i did as a young man i went to nicaragua in the immediate aftermath of the nicaraguan revolution and i specifically went there not to carry a g coffee and i picked coffee for three months in nicaragua as part of the international solidarity if it nonviolent activism to help the economic basis of that new country for many many years i would make  one coffee ok i wanted to keep buying coffee it meant a lot to me personally and politically what i want to and i want to follow the young man's question is is that one of the things that concerns me about american coffee because those people have a huge economic challenge is i want to ok is it better that's deep question is it better to want to engage in your exchange support nothing in fact what i've experienced is that when people feel secure and they need to feel secure in their identity as well as materially you know especially for men it's incredibly important that they should be able to provide for their families and to feel that they're contributing in that way and the current global market which is marginalizing the ninety nine percent is creating an absolutely clear and dramatic increase in violence abuse of women abuse of children from particularly from man who are feeling so frustrated that they've been robbed of their identity robbed o their livelihood and across the board one sees this increase so we mustn't lose sight of this that we're talking about this economic shift away from a few banks and corporations corporations that are making it illegal very clear need to try to transition and in costa rica what we were trying to say earlier is that when you have established this relationship where in costa rica there is less money and more poverty it's going across this global divide of currency speculation and manipulation it's going to be very difficult for you to guarantee that your coffee board here has gone through a system that's going to make them worse off i mean one of the ways that i've tried to lobby the fairtrade movement is both with the ecological issues they have not paid attention to long transport miles have only thought of how can we tr bring some money in there and they haven't thought enough about the vagaries of the of the financial speculation and the changing value of currency and locked in the market that has led to so many small producer only producing coffee only producing cocoa suddenly getting a tenth of what they were getting before this is why we have a wide movement that is the biggest social movement in the world please remember that name the biggest social movement in the world the compass in two hundred million small farmers who are saying please please please let us grow food for ourselves they are for food sovereignty and i want to thank stopped at ages ago putting money into people who were starting businesses in cities because i was thinking or try to support people who are in the countryside and i'll try to support people in the countryside you want using the money fertilizer and and so i think i know reducing and reducing the people who do send their stories to you so you do feel having some sort of exchange with people so i was thinking all along through this personal process or thank goodness i finally hit on something where i feel quite happy that doing that and but i guess what on you if you could report back on their reaction so my question is on the fear of me and especially in the context of life and death with the globalized world you've started  i think one of the conditions for the system that we currently inhabit together is that there has been a demonization of death as a as a void kind of you know life itself i think that's in how medical facilities medical services have been you know set off basically it's about keeping life keeping life at all means at all costs no matter what but you know indigenous traditions would lead you and you know bring into a place where you start to see that you know there's no mutual exclusivity between life and death life is part of death and death is a natural part of life as well so  we live i think that's what the local brings into the situation what the descent chant meant of our modern context leads us to think that life is just one long straight line that ends up in the black void and then that's it for ever i think we need to reclaim the story that says that look i die when i live and even death is not the end of it  another question i question for the panel my question is there a lot of questions have been raised during the last few days about what we can what can we do what action can we take what we change  question before i say the question what i've noticed in terms of what you said make about solidarity and localization i consider myself a global citizen and i noticed living in the u k is in australia and a lot of people said to me the better l are you living in london and i've worked with groups all over the world and done lots of work as everyone has in this room and to me i'd like to ask the group your view on having people find the voices we my experience again and traveling and living with people lots of wonderful amazing women is they have a lot of them have their voices we don't know their languages and i think that's i mean a really really fundamental thing because i've seen it even in my when i was talking to a friend she has a company and she was saying my all these local indigenous people come and work and they're very demitted know them and i said what language to speak into them just like some english and some hindi said speak to them and their local language you'll see totally different system is a total fraud it is denied any kinds of local governance leadership structures that existed before it assumes that people didn't know how to manage their lives their resources their comments and has removed all of that and l nationalized and corporate ties party system political party system and said this is now the democracy that you must live in practice so i think the fundamental even this again is a very some other things are unfolding is bringing in these structures like democracy means this and this is how you have to practice it otherwise you are disempowered i think some of these things we really have to come back and look at what are we talking about that these people have been living for thousands of years you didn't think they had any governance any putting a system and saying well now we have to teach them we have to empower them we have to make them literate on how to govern their lives they must know much more of than we do about those things and so again it's a question of how are we listening are we taking in a people fly in and out development consultants i mean are the ones who are doing this they have never bothered to really learn the language to know what people are going i mean i when i used to work in international development it was insane how many couldn't paste reports and once in a while a consultant would forget or you know when there was another thing i forget to change with time and do you know nigeria and you're just like where does this come from you know so i think these are that there's something much deeper which i would like you know love to explore with you that we really need to ask about what are the stories we're caring about the other the and what we think they are i mean it's it's  really for me there's a whole narrative has been around that we're still continue his around dehumanizing people from the global south and people from all human beings actually the system is doing that to us all in various ways  if i could just it does have value when it's going into the wrong pockets for the wrong things like doc good time myron bay nine hundred seventy small it's the population problem corporations would not exist if there weren't people to sell them things from ok thank you to people want to address that issue  hit yeah i actually as i think from our point of view the biggest problem is not the or it's not overpopulation it's not the driver of this system that is using more and more energy using more and more psychological expertise to turn more and more children all around the world into absolutely ardent frightened consumers sinnott among them aside every corner now is being in this message if you don't buy this right clothing on the right food look the right color you are nobody here can damned to nothingness and people will say to you we are as stupid as animals we are backwardness animals we don't speak the language meaning english and i've heard that across the w come to your country should learn a bit of your language then all of the elders will say release come back and say that no one has ever ever said that to us and our young people need to hear that but anyway this message ha possible fast as they can get away with so the regulation of speculative finance supported deregulated giant global corporations that is the biggest problem and of course population is also an issue and we have to try to become aware of how we're being trained to consume and the biggest antidote the most effective stream strategic line to turn away from population as always and so there's a there's a certain kind of alarmist nature that shifts the conversations from very essential things that need to happen and you move into alarmist mode and there's a fundamentally racist element to part of the population debate because i've always ends up it's those indians and those chinese and then in the indians it's those muslims in the villagers and those are the ones who are creating all the problem and i as a middle class person i had my one kids only so i'm i'm a leave from the larger responsibility i have for life and you go into schools all over the world people are overpopulation problem the population and the blame is centered on the people who are actually living the most right so i'm going to ask you not not to call out and you're going to follow richard who's been waiting patiently so that is the protocol i'm going to adopt please come and ask a question but which is been waiting just like to address this issue of the educational disconnect because education is becoming much more global in a very rapid way we're talking about universities offering degrees all over the world and competing with each other we're talking about vocational education is trial which is now the only area that government gives money to if there's a fully nationalized creditor courses there's no sense that we're talking about any kind of public support for local education programs so in terms of trying to look at the significance of those programs the question i've got to you as a panel is if you were to imagine one critical education program you would like to get involved in after this conference that maybe is not happening at the moment in your local communities what would that one there's a problem in africa and streamline it in nigeria we're building more and more universities every day on the delusion that that is the only way we can know i think the challenge of today is deconstructing the sites of knowledge production most of the time it's all about certificates and degrees and great points and we find people graduating with first class degrees in nigeria diversity's and know nothing about nigeria and so they go out there and it's all about how they can translate to the bank no matter what you finished with if i were to imagine an education program it will have to have at its heart it a problem that has to connect with the community so it's not i no more about disciplinary coming from the top professors approving what i have to know according to the op proved ways of knowing them it's no longer about that it to be about what the community decides is gnowledge for them  before this panel and in fact that's one of the things that's wonderful about this conferences it's the micro conversations and thank you again for making this possible but what i what i think what i come away with with a new  education program is we were talking about how kids are learning you know kindergarten first grade to start doing their banking and put away a little bit of money in their passport bank account and it and i would like to start teaching kids at that level that they should burn their bike accounts and their money together in a class kitty and spend it on school improvement so i would give two little ones first i would look for a program which encourages meaningful child labor and that sense that children are being allowed to do meaningful work with their communities ways of knowing the ways of knowing that it comes from the heart that looks at the heart of what's important in the present and works with that space and also looks with the heart of connection to a much larger ecology and set of relationships and so the grandmothers in the center any kind of program which is which is doing that would be valuable as well tsunami of interlinked capital and corporations that are getting a bigger and bigger and edgy appetite a bigger and bigger appetite for minerals and resources we know now i think spoke a bit about it she could tell you more th just realization just rapidly heating up our planet we need to raise awareness about that and the wonderful thing about localization is that we have practical grounded evidence that when it comes to food production and every other kind of production we could dramatically reduce our energy and generally our resource consumption by diversifying and i think make may not have heard the arguments about the fact that small scale diversified farming is actually much more productive per unit of land and water than big monocultures so we have the evidence we c show that there is another way and other type of banking and other type of farming we have a paradigm that could above all build up that huge choir so i'm i'm very keen on trying to get that vision out as globally as possible as quickly as possible and so i'm very keen on the books and the films using the internet using our sources of of all forms of communication and information and part of what we've been demonstrating is also the really experienced grandmother based a relational more holistic wisdom that we need to regain thank you all to you to right but i do want to give a big shout out to any of you who are watching me right now let's just acknowledge you're watching it on people's media wherever it is that you're watching me right now some unpaid volunteer took the time to record it thank you some unpaid volunteer took the time to upload this to create the infrastructure for you to watch it so we support people's media yes to the local cable access program that this is going to be played on and also can we get a big shot up to your community radio station it is a people's own people's operated radio station so the point i'm making is this ma'am let's build alternative people's media so that we can talk to each other and let's have those kind of conversations and let's build political power that is serious that takes ourselves seriously because we have to because a just world is at stake and frankly not only a peaceful and just world but we know that the ecology that we depend upon for life itself is in the balance so let's do our work joyously but let's also be serious about it peace