Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Robert Hunziker, Richard Atwell, Janine Bandcroft September 21, 2016

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Gorilla-Radio.com

September 21, 2016

It's hard to believe, five and a half years have passed since the devastating earthquake and tsunami that rocked Fukushima prefecture. Harder to believe still is the International Olympics Committee buying prime minister Abe's assertion that Fukushima is ready to host events at the 2020 games. Or maybe it wasn't the IOC doing the buying?

That in recent years the Olympic Games, both Winter and Summer, has become less associated with excellence and the upper limits of human achievement than with deceit, base corruption, and unparalleled venality - where the purity of amateur athleticism, and ideal of international cooperation, if only on a playing field and for a short while, is entirely transmogrified by a corporatist, win-at-all-cost ethos - is news to no-one; hardly worth mentioning, but what is interesting is the accelerating sense of doom the five-ringed circus has come to forebode.

Listen. Hear.

Whether the tremendous environmental price of industrial hyper-development, as glimpsed through Beijing's choking smog shroud, the spectres of Sochi's ethnically cleansed original inhabitants, or Rio's erased favelas and emergent Zika contagion, it's almost as though those rings carry a curse. If that's so, nothing seen so far can compare with the horror potential currently lurking just below the surface of the next planned Olympics in Japan.

Robert Hunziker is an environmental journalist whose climate clarion calls appear in numerous journals and multiple languages around the World and across the internet. He's also appeared in a variety of media to talk about global climate change and has written extensively about the ongoing aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Robert Hunziker in the first half.

And; now they've done it! Last week, Capital Regional District directors voted to fund a new sewage treatment plant to be located at McLoughlin Point in Esquimalt. The controversial issue of how best to handle the region's effluent has livened council meetings, and the local press for years now, but is the CRD greenlighting of the McLouglin Point plant an end to the contentious project, or just another log on the fire?

Richard Atwell is Mayor of Saanich, the region's largest municipality, and represents the sole dissenting vote on the CRD board's "almost unanimous" sewage vote. It was Atwell's advocacy for an alternative sewage plan for the region that led him into politics, and a stunning political upset rookie win against the near two decades-old administration of incumbent mayor, Frank Leonard in 2014.

Richard Atwell and finding a lasting regional pollution solution in the second segment.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher emeritus and CFUV Radio host, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us news of good things going on in and around our town and beyond in the coming week. But first, Robert Hunziker and the Fukushima disaster past, present, and forever.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Wednesday, 1-2pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca.  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.