The one thing we lack in India are scientists. We have tired old men who repeat the same thing again and again, we have young people going into government "research" jobs only for the salary. As a nation we exhibit no curiosity, we see nothing. We are the only country in the world that had no painting or record of India before the British came. They made the maps, recorded the monuments and temples and researched our geography. Our museums are as pathetic as our Phds on the natural world. We are unprepared for the disasters that overtake us daily, the floods, famines. Imagine a country that cannot even build decent storage centers for our grain that continues to build dams when the rest of the world has stopped, when the rivers themselves have dried up. Imagine a country that refuses to stop shark killing when all nations can tell you that it is the one way to lose all our fish. Imagine a nation that willfully destroys coral reefs and mangroves on our shores, knowing the waters will come in and take the land. And all this is backed by third rate scientific prattle that bends with the demands of contractors and politicians.
Many years ago I had gone to see Biju Patnaik, the then chief minister of Orissa, to ask him not to build a port that would bring in no revenue but would destroy many species. I was armed with a report from the premier scientist of India, a man who is now in the Rajya Sabha, who strongly condemned the building of the port. Biju pulled out a report in which the same scientist had given his opinion strongly recommending the port.
We are going willfully into a nuclear power expansion program without even knowing its consequences. Simply studying the plants and insects around an existing nuclear plant would have given us the scientific rationale to say no but no research has been done because the prime minister who is 80 was so insistent on signing a pact with companies that will build the plants.
Cornelia Hesse Honegger is a researcher in Zurich who has been studying and painting insects for 30 years. Not just any insects. She collects insects that live close to nuclear plants.
Cornelia's leaf bugs are all deformed, their abdomens irregularly shaped, crinkled where they would not be naturally. She has done a series of painting of the eyes of fruit flies that have been subjected to radiation. Their eyes are bizarre, randomly placed, some missing entirely. Some fruit flies have grown extra parts. All of them are crippled and monstrous mutations. They come from a collecting trip she made to Osterfarnebo in Sweden which is in the path of the winds that came from the nuclear plant in Russia's Chernobyl when its reactor exploded. The plants in this small town, thousands of miles from Chernobyl have been equally affected: the green clover plants are now red, there are odd looking plants everywhere. She collected leaf bugs that lived on the plants. They had shortened legs, crippled antennae, eyes that grew attachments. She went to small towns even further away and out of the direct line of the winds. She found fruit flies with distorted limbs. "I was horrified by what I saw", she writes.
The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) and the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation calculate the dangers of radioactivity using a simple universal formula: higher levels of radiation in a short period will be harmful. Exposure to low level radiation, as emitted by nuclear power plants, over a long period is insignificant. It is needless for me to say that both bodies are controlled by nuclear plant sellers.
What rubbish. Scientists from the 1970s led by the Canadian physicist Abram Petkau say that there is no safe minimum dose and that low level constant radiation is far more harmful. They base their research on studying populations that live downwind of nuclear plants and test for mutations, leukemia, cancers, cells that have been genetically affected: they have found elevated levels in all the populations. There are two types of radiation: direct and from contaminated food and drink.
When Cornelia released her data, the entire nuclear industry ganged up against her, the same way as the meat industry took Oprah Winfrey to court when she remarked that eating beef was harmful. Their scientists dismissed her evidence and even the Director of the Zurich Zoological Institute, a professor of genetics, said that her research should be called off as it took too much time and small doses of radiation could be lived with.
Since the establishment in Sweden refused to investigate the fallout of Chernobyl, she decided to investigate the famously clean nuclear plants of Switzerland. She went round the five nuclear establishments of Aargau and Solothurn and collected thousands of insects. She found deformed insects: black growths on a golden bodied beetle, many headed, blistered, clubfooted leaf bugs.
She has anise investigated the health of insects near nuclear power plants in Europe and America: Sellafield in England, the Cap de la Hague in Normandy, at Hanford, Washington, the Nevada atomic test range, Three Mile Island, from the worst, Chernobyl, to supposedly the best, Aargau she has recorded insect deformities on a scale so large that they cannot be regarded as mere coincidence or, as the nuclear companies and their hired scientists say, due to factors other than the nuclear plant.
Japan's nuclear disaster is also sought to be hidden. It was apparently leaking for many years but any worker who criticized the sloppiness was instantly removed and no journalist was allowed to carry the story. Even this continuing disaster is being treated lightly as a malfunction, say, in a shoe factory. In reality, billions of fish and plants in the ocean are going to go the way of the insects and so are the people who eat them or work/play in the waters of all the oceans.
Anything that mutates an insect can do the same to you. Before getting into the frenzy of more nuclear plants dictated by the lunatic ambitions of a very very old prime minister, let us do the research on the insects and plants outside our running plant.
Maneka Gandhi
To join the animal welfare movement contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Many years ago I had gone to see Biju Patnaik, the then chief minister of Orissa, to ask him not to build a port that would bring in no revenue but would destroy many species. I was armed with a report from the premier scientist of India, a man who is now in the Rajya Sabha, who strongly condemned the building of the port. Biju pulled out a report in which the same scientist had given his opinion strongly recommending the port.
We are going willfully into a nuclear power expansion program without even knowing its consequences. Simply studying the plants and insects around an existing nuclear plant would have given us the scientific rationale to say no but no research has been done because the prime minister who is 80 was so insistent on signing a pact with companies that will build the plants.
Cornelia Hesse Honegger is a researcher in Zurich who has been studying and painting insects for 30 years. Not just any insects. She collects insects that live close to nuclear plants.
Cornelia's leaf bugs are all deformed, their abdomens irregularly shaped, crinkled where they would not be naturally. She has done a series of painting of the eyes of fruit flies that have been subjected to radiation. Their eyes are bizarre, randomly placed, some missing entirely. Some fruit flies have grown extra parts. All of them are crippled and monstrous mutations. They come from a collecting trip she made to Osterfarnebo in Sweden which is in the path of the winds that came from the nuclear plant in Russia's Chernobyl when its reactor exploded. The plants in this small town, thousands of miles from Chernobyl have been equally affected: the green clover plants are now red, there are odd looking plants everywhere. She collected leaf bugs that lived on the plants. They had shortened legs, crippled antennae, eyes that grew attachments. She went to small towns even further away and out of the direct line of the winds. She found fruit flies with distorted limbs. "I was horrified by what I saw", she writes.
The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) and the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation calculate the dangers of radioactivity using a simple universal formula: higher levels of radiation in a short period will be harmful. Exposure to low level radiation, as emitted by nuclear power plants, over a long period is insignificant. It is needless for me to say that both bodies are controlled by nuclear plant sellers.
What rubbish. Scientists from the 1970s led by the Canadian physicist Abram Petkau say that there is no safe minimum dose and that low level constant radiation is far more harmful. They base their research on studying populations that live downwind of nuclear plants and test for mutations, leukemia, cancers, cells that have been genetically affected: they have found elevated levels in all the populations. There are two types of radiation: direct and from contaminated food and drink.
When Cornelia released her data, the entire nuclear industry ganged up against her, the same way as the meat industry took Oprah Winfrey to court when she remarked that eating beef was harmful. Their scientists dismissed her evidence and even the Director of the Zurich Zoological Institute, a professor of genetics, said that her research should be called off as it took too much time and small doses of radiation could be lived with.
Since the establishment in Sweden refused to investigate the fallout of Chernobyl, she decided to investigate the famously clean nuclear plants of Switzerland. She went round the five nuclear establishments of Aargau and Solothurn and collected thousands of insects. She found deformed insects: black growths on a golden bodied beetle, many headed, blistered, clubfooted leaf bugs.
She has anise investigated the health of insects near nuclear power plants in Europe and America: Sellafield in England, the Cap de la Hague in Normandy, at Hanford, Washington, the Nevada atomic test range, Three Mile Island, from the worst, Chernobyl, to supposedly the best, Aargau she has recorded insect deformities on a scale so large that they cannot be regarded as mere coincidence or, as the nuclear companies and their hired scientists say, due to factors other than the nuclear plant.
Japan's nuclear disaster is also sought to be hidden. It was apparently leaking for many years but any worker who criticized the sloppiness was instantly removed and no journalist was allowed to carry the story. Even this continuing disaster is being treated lightly as a malfunction, say, in a shoe factory. In reality, billions of fish and plants in the ocean are going to go the way of the insects and so are the people who eat them or work/play in the waters of all the oceans.
Anything that mutates an insect can do the same to you. Before getting into the frenzy of more nuclear plants dictated by the lunatic ambitions of a very very old prime minister, let us do the research on the insects and plants outside our running plant.
Maneka Gandhi
To join the animal welfare movement contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.