On this weeks edition of Enviro:

• Dolores O’Riordan: We celebrated the wonderful singing of Dolores O’Riordan deceased. She is an iconic figure with messages of hope and also messages of how fame can be transformative and be a negative force in one’s life, how sexual abuse as a child can blight one’s life, how a young and shy woman with a powerful voice can take the world by storm with the beauty of her eerie sounds, and for a time rise above the very stars. Her life also teaches us the lesson that psychological problems need to be approached in totally new ways and that society and the health services need to examine their consciences in order to save lives at risk from various forms of self harm. We played some of Dolores’s songs including ‘Daffodil Lament’ and referred to her catalogue of the Cranberries great albums. We pointed out that in just a few weeks Ireland will be full of daffodil.  This wonder is captured in the song.
• Venezuela: At the end of August, the Trump administration imposed harsh sanctions on Venezuela that prevent the country from borrowing or selling assets in the US financial system. The new embargo will exacerbate shortages of food, medicine, and other essential goods, while severely limiting the policy options available to pull the country out of a deep depression. Fertile ground for IMF ‘vultures’
• Fukushima: A Nuclear War without a War: The unspoken crisis of worldwide nuclear radiation: Source Prof Michel Chossudovsky ‘Global Research’ December 16 2017. What is unfolding today is “A worldwide process of nuclear radiation. “One millionth of a gram of plutonium, if inhaled can cause cancer”. Fukushima 3 was leaking unconfirmed amounts of plutonium. Chossudovsky has also written a best seller entitled “The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity” global Research Montreal 2015. “The long-term repercussions of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster are far more serious than those pertaining to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine, which resulted in almost one million deaths” See: Global Research September 10 2010 and May 25 2011. Nuclear energy is not a civilian economic activity. It is an appendage of the nuclear weapons industry which is controlled by the so-called defence contractors. The powerful corporate interests behind nuclear energy and nuclear weapons overlap. Michel Chossudovsky is author of ‘the Globalization of Poverty’ and the New World Order (2003) and America’s ‘War on Terrorism’ (2005. He is signatory of the Kuala Lumpur declaration to criminalize war and is recipient of the Human Rights Prize of the Society for the Protection of Civil Rights and Human Dignity (GBM), Berlin, Germany: https//www.globalresearch.ca/ There were unprecedented nuclear alerts in Hawaii and Japan last week
• Reference was made to a report by Oxfam to the effect that in 2017 82% of wealth created went to the richest 1% while the poorest half of the world got nothing. While the political and business elites gather at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland it can be seen that the global economy enables the super-rich to accumulate vast wealth while hundreds of millions of people struggle to survive. Billionaire wealth increased by 762 billion dollars last year, enough money to end extreme poverty seven times over. With the global gap between rich and poor widening, people in developing countries are being hit the hardest, facing poverty exploitation dangerous working conditions and unfair wages. (Source: Oxfam report)
• Laudato Si Pope Francis’s recent letter concerning the environment stated that ecosystems ‘have an intrinsic value independent of their usefulness. This is in line with the approach of the Norwegian environmentalist Arne Naess who wrote about ‘deep ecology’ in the 1970s. He and ecologist George Sessions spoke about moving from a shallow to a deep ecological ethos. They wrote ‘The wellbeing and flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes’ English ecologist Sir Frank Fraser Darling wrote ‘It is at this point that the cry grows loudest for a new morality, a new religion which would transform man’s attitude to nature which would lead him to believe that it is intrinsically wrong to destroy a species, cut down a tree, clear a wilderness….these demands strike one, at a certain level, as merely ridiculous’ Source Michael Viney ‘Reflections on Another Life’ irishtimes.com/irishtimesbooks, viney@anu.ie-Irish Times 20/1/18
• The Young Scientist winner 2018 has found cures in common plants including the humble blackberry leaf: Simon Meehan from Colaiste Choilm Cork won the Young Scientist competition
• Minister Denis Naughten announced details of his Department’s 2018 budget re climate change.
• The Minister for Agriculture Food and the Marine, Michael Creed, TD has announced that vaccination of badgers against tuberculosis (TB) will commence as an integral part of the bovine TB eradication programme from January 2018.
• We discussed and commented on these subjects and read two poems on the theme of daffodils: ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ by William Wordswort (read by Joe Dunne) and ‘To Daffodils’ by Robert Herrick read by John.

Presenter/Producer:  John Haughton: Panellist: Joe Dunne.