From the Editor

By Metta Spencer | 2009-04-01 12:00:00

There's a lot of good stuff going on, now that Obama is in the White House. For example, he removed all funding for nuclear weapons from any of his appropriations requests. He's going to set up an office just to deal with nonproliferation and nuclear disarmament issues. (We are guessing who will head it. Next time I'll tell you whether my guess was right. Hint: to find out, read the recent issues of Foreign Affairs. ) Obama is having a salutary effect on Canadian politics too. Probably there will be some cooperation between us on climate change mitigation policies.

We are glad to offer an article by Helen Caldicott and Tim Wright. It was Dr. Caldicott who recruited a lot of us into anti-nuclear weapons activities 25 years or so ago and here she is, still going strong on the subject, goading us not to forget nuclear weapons just because we have other pressing worries to address, such as climate change.

And, speaking of climate change, Joanna Santa Barbara has produced an excellent, informative piece on"biochar," which is, according to James Lovelock, the last trick humankind has up our sleeves. It's too late to stop carbon emissions, he says, so we have to start removing the stuff we have already put into the atmosphere. The best way to do so is by burying charcoal on a massive scale. What! You hadn't heard? Well, not many people have heard. That would be a form of geo-engineering -- a topic that we broached last time in the article about Gwynne Dyer. Some readers did not take well to his high-tech proposals for reversing climate change, but maybe charcoal is okay.

Read the interesting article by Marko Kananen about the polarization of Middle Eastern countries. We had trouble editing it because we couldn't find a good term for such groups as Hamas and Hezbollah. He called them "non-state actors," but Hamas is (more or less) the government of Gaza and Hezbollah is powerful in Lebanon. In some places we called them "administrators." Anyhow, read it.

Also, Mel Watkins is treating us to his analysis of globalization, and we have a smart piece on Iran and the IAEA.