When we read Bozeman Daily Chronicle’s Managing Editor, Michael Wright’s article headlined, “New book examines major disasters of Montana’s past,” on the very first day of 2022, we just had to find out more.
The piece was about Butch Larcombe and his book, MONTANA DISASTERS: TRUE STORIES OF TREASURE STATE TRAGEDIES AND TRIUMPHS, published in December 2021 by Farcountry Press in Helena.
Butch Larcombe is a fourth-generation Montanan who grew up in Malta. He worked for more than thirty years as a reporter and editor for Montana newspapers and at Montana Magazine.
We spoke with him from his home near Bigfork on January 12, 2022.
The Methodist church in Three Forks sustained heavy damage from the 1925 Clarkston Valley earthquake. U.S. Geological Survey
Karen Greenberg is the Director of The Center on National Security at Fordham University. Her 2016 book, ROGUE JUSTICE :The Making of the Security State, explores the War on Terror’s impact on justice and law in America.
Her latest book, SUBTLE TOOLS: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump, is published by Princeton University Press.
We spoke with Karen Greenberg on January 7, 2022, one year and a day after a momentarily united, bipartisan Congress fled in fear for their lives from a mob, who had violently invaded the capitol, preventing the fulfillment of their obligation under the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to meet on January 6 and count the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election. They were unable to do so until January 7, 2021, one year to the day that Karen Greenberg and I spoke.
In this interview with Kristen Iversen from June 27, 2012, we learn about the history and legacy of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Site, located 15 miles northwest of Denver, CO. Iversen grew up in nearby Arvada, and worked at the plant.
The recent catastrophic fires in Superior and Louisville, CO, brought it to mind, since Superior butts right up against and downwind from the Rocky Flats site, and Louisville butts right up against Superior. On the day of the fire, December 30, 2021, winds were clocked at Rocky Flats at 115 miles per hour. But beyond that, as Kristen Iversen tells us, those winds had been blowing east from the plutonium contaminated site for 6 decades.
Local residents protested the moral and physical dangers at Rocky Flats, as well as proposed real estate developments along its borders, which were nonetheless built, in spite of the scientific findings of plutonium contamination and strong, local resistance, and which have now been utterly destroyed by the fires.
An aerial view of one of the Boulder County neighborhoods that burned to the ground on Thursday. Photo: Hart Van Denburg/AP/Shutterstock
It has been widely reported that abundant spring rains allowed the grasses to grow profusely, only to dry completely in the ensuing drought and unseasonably hot and dry Fall and early Winter. In the growing, those plants absorbed plutonium, known to have been blown there from the Rocky Flats Weapon Lab site during those six decades. The fire vaporized whatever plutonium had been taken up by that tinder dry plant material, blowing it in unknown amounts and unknown distances to the east. I have not found any reports mentioning this aspect of the fires, much less considering the fallout from it, in the most literal sense.
Perhaps this post can be a beginning of that consideration.
Fifty years ago, the publication of his book, THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SOUTH EAST ASIA, led to his testifying before the Senate Committee on Appropriations Foreign Operations Subcommittee in June 1972. His research, including traveling to Hmong villages in Laos, revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency was knowingly involved in the transportation of heroin in the Golden Triangle of Burma, Thailand, and Laos. The CIA tried to block its publication, but it has been translated into 9 foreign languages with three English editions and is regarded as the “classic” work on global drug traffic.
His new book, also published by Haymarket Books, is titled TO GOVERN THE GLOBE: WORLD ORDERS & CATASTROPHIC CHANGE.
In it, he explores the interplay of three factors—sovereignty, human rights, and energy—in shaping the succession of empires and their global systems from the Black Death of 1350 through the coming climate crisis of 2050.
It is packed with meticulously researched facts and analysis of world history of the last 600 years, examining the continuities and disruptions that create systems that rule international affairs.
He asserts that China will become the world hegemon by 2030, via initiatives such as the Belt & Road Initiative, which makes manifest Halford Mackinder’s thesis that who controls the World Island, controls the world.
Articles referenced or pertinent to this interview:
Spencer Ackerman had just graduated from Rutgers University, when the attacks on 9/11 occurred. He began his journalism career, focused on national security, with the New Republic in 2002, and then went on to write for Wired, The Guardian and The Daily Beast.
He won a 2012 National Magazine Award for his reporting on biased FBI training, and a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service (with Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Laura Poitras, and others at the Guardian) for reporting on revelations of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency based on the Edward Snowden revelations.
His recent book, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, was published by Viking in August, 2021. We spoke with him on December 3, 2021.
Articles referenced or pertinent to this interview:
Kathleen Belew is an international authority on the White-Power Movement and Assistant Professor of History at the university of Chicago.
Her 2018 book, BRING THE WAR HOME: THE WHITE POWER MOVEMENT AND PARAMILITARY AMERICA, published by The Harvard University Press, was a hugely important work toward our understanding of the international white supremacy movement.
She now has a compilation of essays, A FIELD GUIDE TO WHITE SUPREMACY, which she co-edited with her colleague at the University of Chicago, History Professor, Ramón A. Gutiérrez. It contains the writings of a diverse group of writers, among them Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Jamelle Bouie, Judith Butler, Rebecca Solnit, just to name a few.
In September of 2019, Professor Belew was a witness at a congressional hearing on confronting white nationalism. In her witness statement, she described the white power movement as a threat to our democracy and that that is was transnational. Her research and writings decry the notion that attacks such as the massacres at the Christchurch Mosque, the Tree of Life Synagogue, or the El Paso walmart are the work of lone wolves. We spoke with Kathleen Belew on October 28, 2021.
Articles referred or pertinent to this interview can be found here:
Angella Ahn is the virtuoso violinist in the Ahn Trio, MSU Bozeman School of Music Faculty member, Artistic Director of Montana Chamber Music Society, Member of the Montana Arts Council and much more.
We spoke with her on October 21, 2021 about her life, her career, her many contributions to Bozeman and Montana culture – and for that matter the world’s. She has performed in all 50 states and at least 30 countries.
From appearing on the cover of Time magazine as a child in 1987, or performing at the White House in 2011, she graces us with her joie de vivre, love of music and embodiment of how to live in a state of gratitude and giving.
You can hear this very first edition of Ecotones with Sada Schumann and view her award winning History Day documentary, “Defining Korea: How Conflict and Compromise Shaped a Nation” here: http://kgvm.org/show/sada-schumann/
In addition to having been a lead author of the fifth Assessment Report to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Giulio Boccaletti was Chief Strategy Officer and Global Managing Director for Water at The Nature Conservancy, where he led a team of over 200 freshwater scientists, policy experts, economists and on-the-ground conservation practitioners, promoting action on water issues by governments and businesses.
Earlier in his career, he was a partner of consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where he co-founded the water practice and worked with businesses and governments around the world. He trained at MIT, Princeton and Bologna University in Physics and Atmospheric Science. His book, WATER: A Biography, was published in Sept. 2021 by Pantheon Books. We spoke with him in England on October 15.
Articles referenced or pertinent to this interview:
Kay Roseen is the guiding light behind Gallatin Valley Packathon for Haiti., which is a free, inter-generational, fun work event to relieve hunger for Haitian children. She explains how listeners can help pack 6 tons – yes, tons – of rice, beans, dehydrated vegetables and vitamins into 7,500 school lunches for children whose families cannot afford to feed them every day.
If you want to join other Gallatin Valley volunteers you can find out more, or register, at GallatinValleyPackathon.org and sign up. There are 2 hour time slots on Friday evening October 15 from 6 to 8, and then on Saturday, October 16 beginning at 9a.m., noon, 3 or 6pm at Hope Lutheran Church.
Award winning journalist, documentary film producer and Harper’s Washington, DC editor, Andrew Cockburn, comes from an illustrious family of British journalists. In addition, he has been married to American journalist and documentarian, Leslie Cockburn, since 1977.
For more than four decades, he has focused on national security not just of the United States, but of the Soviet Union as well. Beginning with his Peabody Award winning 1981 PBS film, THE RED ARMY, which was the first in-depth study of deficiencies in the Soviet military, he has covered the wars in Afghanistan since the 1980s with his wife, Leslie Cockburn. In 2009, they produced the film AMERICAN CASINO on the financial collapse of 2007. His 8th book, THE SPOILS OF WAR: POWER, PROFIT and the AMERICAN WAR MACHINE, has just been published by Verso.
In it he asserts that “The record shows America’s Afghan War was nothing other than a prolonged and entirely successful operation – to loot the US Taxpayer. At least a quarter of a million Afghans, not to mention 3,500 US & allied troops paid a heavier price.”
He is proud to be descended from Sir George Cockburn, 10th Baronet, who ordered the burning of Washington in 1814, as he recounts in this interview.
We spoke with Andrew Cockburn on Sept. 29, 2021, as the Senate Armed Services Committee was grilling Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, about the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years and trillions of dollars spent, which they characterized as “a logistical success but a strategic failure.”
Articles referred to or pertinent to this interview:
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