Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 99

Episode Date: September 9, 2023

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I'm Penelope Spheras on the host of a new podcast about the life and death of Peter Ivers. Peter was the host of a TV show featuring prominent LA punk bands until he was murdered in 1983. 40 years later, we dive into that music scene and the mystery of his passing. Listen to Peter and the Acid King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes the pop culture we love just teens hits differently in retrospect. Maybe it's a tabloid story we couldn't get enough of or an illicit student teacher relationship on our favorite show.

We're Suzy Bannock-Harram and Jessica Bennett, posts of the new podcast in retrospect. Where each week we'll revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us, and probably you, to try to understand what it taught us about the world and our place in it. You're the first person that I've talked to about this for years and years. Listen to In Retrospect on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you find your favorite shows. Everyone in our country has a voice. It's something that says not just where you come from, but who you are.

Welcome to NPR's Black Stories Black Truths, a collection of podcasts and a celebration of the hosts and journalism who've always spoken truth to power. Our voices are as varied, nuanced, and dynamic as the Black experience, and stories should never be about us without us. Find NPR Black Stories Black Truths on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your

podcasts. On his new podcast, six degrees with Kevin Bacon, join Kevin for inspiring conversations with his friends and fellow celebrities who are working to make a difference in the world, like actor Mark Rapelo. You know, I found myself moving upstate in the middle of this fracking fight, you know, and I'm trying to raise kids there. And, you know, my neighbors, like willing to poison my water.

Listen to six degrees with Kevin Bacon on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know, this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened, you get your podcasts. nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. About 20 years ago, maybe 30, a circus visited Majora, the largest island on the Majora toll in the capital city of the martial islands. It came to Majora as almost everything that isn't breadfruit, pandanus,

or fish does on a boat. After performing, they couldn't find a boat to take them to their next destination and so the resident of this tiny island, which at times is no wider than the single road which travels its whole length, decided that they'd have to share the food that they themselves had imported at great cost. And they said about gathering apples, bananas, and anything else that they thought an elephant might like to eat while it waited for a way off an island that barely has enough room for its own people, let alone the largest land animal on Earth. The people of the martial islands, for whom hospitality is as natural as a times of the sea,

create each other the same way they do strangers, by saying, you're quay. The word has several meanings, but I'll let David Kabur explain them. He's the president of the Republic of the martial Islands, so he seems like he'd be a good source. I would say the word yapu is our greeting word. Yapu has a lot of several meanings. When you can't say when you meet someone first time you say yapu when you create someone and when you also say goodbye instead of say goodbye you, you also, yeah. So you can use that also. Like during the weekend, there was a tournament, fishing tournament. And if you were fishing and you caught up,

you have a big fish on the land. And you were really... You're about to land a fish but the land snapped. So what you say is, oh, yeah, yeah, wait. Not have long to go fish but you just say, yeah, because you lost a big catch. So it can't be used that way. Like when you lose someone or someone passed away,

you miss that person, yeah, wait. So once we was here, but no one could hear, so we came and said, yeah, so there's several meanings, but the deeper meaning of the is you are beautiful like the rainbow. The amines rainbow in place, so we combine the two words, you are a rainbow, you are beautiful as a rainbow. On the map, the martial islands look like little dots that appear in my photos of the beach at Majuro. But unlike those little specks of

dust that manage to sneak their way onto my camera sensor, martial islands belong here. Here is a pretty vague turn. The 29 Coralitos and 5 islands that allow 54,000 marshallies to live on 182 square kilometres of land, span an oceanic territory of 200,000 kilometres. It's like you took a small American town and scattered it across an area one and a half times the size of Alaska. Even though the RMI is 98% water, every inch of land is precious to the Marshallese, whose matrilineal society ensures that land passes from mother to daughter and ties families to the remote islands and make up the low lying atolls of the Republic. It was on one of the bigger chunks of land

that I recorded the music you heard a minute ago. Marjoros and Atoll, that's a choral ring that encircles the lagoon. And it's biggest islands about 30 miles long, but often less than 100 yards wide. There's one road that runs the length of it, and sometimes also spans the width of it. It's also home to about half the RMI's population. The highest point on the atoll lies just 3 meters above sea level. If you want to get higher than that, then you're only option to houses or palm trees. From the top of the fifth floor of the Napa Auto Parts store, which also houses the UNDP and the Marshall Islands Olympic Committee, you can see the whole island. For Marshallese people, these tiny pieces of paradise

that barely poke their heads out from the top of the ocean are everything. These tiny pieces of paradise barely poke their heads out from the top of the ocean are everything. They land and their ties to it define them. Without their place, they can't be themselves. Even though many thousands of marshallese lived in the diaspora of the United States, they still import handicrafts made from little shells and the outer islands and coconut husks. Many of them come back to the islands to retire. But slowly, the ocean is taking those islands back.

Rising sea levels and more extreme tidal surges have placed this tiny Pacific nation on the front lines of climate change. There isn't an exact estimate as to how long the Marshall Islands have, or what they can do to halt the creeping advance of the ocean. They've always existed under just a few square kilometres of land, among millions of square kilometres of ocean, and they depend on that ocean for everything, but now it's threatening to take everything away from them. One day, their fear their islands will become island habitable, assault water invades the water table, and their trees die, or storms bring more and more frequent floods that sweep away their homes and their possessions. They don't want to leave, but they can't stand alone against climate change either. But the Marshallies are resilient people. They've

weathered many storms to get to where they are now. The tiny museum in Majuro hosts artifacts of several crises that would seem apocalyptic, a nuclear bomb, the Second World War. But in the end, these did little to crush the incredible kindness of the tenacity of the Marshallese. The islands that make up the RMI have been inhabited by indigenous people for thousands of years. They have been variously ruled by the Spanish, German, Japanese and United States governments before becoming an independent republic.

Before they were named by a British sailor, the islands had their own name. I'll let Jeff, a Marshallese Renaissance man, who was at once a driver, the head of the World Health Organization's EMT program on the islands, a registered nurse, and the custodian is an incredible collection of Marshallese music, explain what they were called before that. L-O-L-L-A-P. That's before it turns into Marshall. This Marshall came from this guy that found these islands. Captain Marshall. Undeniably, the Marshall Islands are not a bad place to find yourself on the summer afternoon.

And in the time I spent there, I took several trips to the smaller islands around my droid toll. They look like the platonic ideal of a tropical island, complete with coconut palms, vibrant coral reefs, white sand, a turquoise water. I love freediving, and dropping down onto a wrecked aircraft and dozens of brightly coloured species of fish in almost infinite visibility, without even needing to pull on a wet tour or a weight belt might be the closest I'll ever get to flying. But I wasn't just here for a dip in the ocean. I'm actually here to tell you a story of incredible resilience.

Much of America, both on the left and on the right, spends much of its time and money preparing for its own imagined version of the crisis. For thumb, that's the unimaginable destruction of nuclear war. For others, it's the encroaching of the ocean on its land and the resulting loss of places to live and grow food. And for others, it's a collapse of basic services like power and clean water that we take for granted. These are all storms, so the tiny island nation

are already weathered, and it hasn't done so in the atomized and individualistic way that so many American prepos fantasize about online. It's done so as an incredibly strong, optimistic and welcoming community. There's a lot we can learn from the people of the Marshall Islands and their story, and so this week I'll be doing my best to share the stories that they share with me.

If you're familiar with the islands, it's likely because of the history of one of the other atolls in the group, Bikini at all. The name is a German bastardization of a Marshallese word, Pikini. Pick, meaning plain surface, and knee, meaning coconut tree. It's a flat place where coconuts grow. But you likely don't know the island for its coconuts, and those aren't safe to eat anymore anyway. If you've heard of Piquini at all, it's because of what the United States did there after the Second World War. On the 18th of July 1947, the Marshall Islands were placed in a strategic trust territory

by the United Nations. This territory was administered by the United States, which was supposed to administer the islands in the best interest of their inhabitants, and of international peace and security. But a year before the trust territory was created, the US began nuclear testing in the Lagoon at Bikini-Atoll. A site that would, over the next 15 years, become the most heavily bombed place on Earth, with some islands entirely removed from the map, and much of their population left dead, sick, without the land that defines them and their ability to thrive on these tiny islands amidst the endless ocean. As far as possible,

I want to let the Marshallese survivors of the nuclear tests and their families tell their own stories. They call what happened on Bikini and Enewata Katole, the nuclear legacy of their country. Talking about the nuclear legacy is a difficult topic for the Marshallese, especially the time when none of them have been paid the compensation they were allotted. And the US was negotiating a new agreement with the Marshallese government that was very far from settled, and the numbers the US were offering were very far from sufficient. I was very fortunate to join a few other journalists on the tiny island of Bokenboten, a short boat ride away from Majora, and home to perhaps the most beautiful coral reef I've ever seen.

We had lunch, walked around the island, and then had a talk on the nuclear legacy from descendants of the Thunder the Survivors. I'll let them introduce themselves. My name is Taka Bequivion. I'm from the Marshall Island. I am a student at CMI, College of the Marshall Island, and I am currently the president for the CMI nuclear club,

which we mostly work under National Nuclear Commission with our director, Mary Selk, and our commissioner, Ariana. Thank you, honey. All right, yeah, well, once again, my name is Ariana, Steven Kuluma. I work as a commissioner and nuclear justice envoy for the RMI National Nuclear Commission.

You know, once again, thank you very much for having us this afternoon. Yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu,

yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, yahu, on the director for education and public awareness. I'm thinking welcome. Enjoy the rest of your days here. Yahuayla, my name is Sincerely and pregnant. I work with National Nuclear Commission as an headman and physical officer. I'm not sure if it's necessary for me to come, but since the past that we all go, so that's the only thing supporting you.

Support the past, go work on the same boat. Welcome to the partial islands. She's from Mejato. She's from Mejato. Yeah, well the three of us are all descendants of nuclear survivors. They were exposed to fallout. Her mother was exposed to fallout. Her mother, Grace's mother was also exposed to the radioactive fallout as well as my great-grandfather. I think that's what really drives us to share this with you. Almost everyone in the RMI has a family member directly impacted by the testing and the decades of mistreatment that came after it. Although we know the name Bikini-Toll, the entire Republic was impacted by nuclear fallout, including Majuro itself, thanks to the ill-avised assumed to drop bombs on a

day when the populated atolls were downwind of the test site. In fact, right next to our hotel is showing the same parking lot as the US Department of Energy Office. I asked Jeff what that was doing there. Yeah, I saw the DOE office, the health office in the street here. The one in the next to the auto, that's the office where they do the radiation testing. And there's one near the AMI, the MRSO. That's the clinic for those survivors. Now the survivors, there's fuel, maybe less than 50.

The Aramai is still fighting in the Second World War. It's memorialized in murals across Marjoray. In 1943 and 1944, the USA bombed and then fought the Imperial Japanese military, who had been occupying the island since 1914. US soldiers and Marines, along with Marshallese scouts, landed on Majora, Kwaidjulin, and any wet top, on Higgins' boats, that were virtually identical to the boat we took across a lagoon to Bokin-Boton. The fighting was fierce, and a scale of the destruction was immense. Overall, the Americans lost 611 men and suffered 2,341 wounded. 261 were missing. Meanwhile, the Japanese lost over 11,000 men and had 358 captured. Today, the Bikini-Itole lagoon still holds a ghostly remains of the ships and planes that fought that battle.

Alongside the Nagata, the flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the ship from whose bridge Admiral Yamamoto launched the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was a shadow of this war that was evoked in 1946, when 167 of Bikini-Itole's inhabitants were forcibly relocated by the United States. They initially accepted this settlement, quote, for the good of mankind and to end all wars, in the words of the US Commodan at the time. Assisted by US Navy Seabees, they disassembled their church and moved to different atolls. Nine of the 11 family heads from Bikini elected to be transported 125 miles to Rongaric atoll and ironed with about one quarter of the landmass of Bikini atoll.

Many believed the island to be haunted and by the time the navy left them with a few weeks of water and food they had every reason to be afraid. I'll let Ariano explain what that removal process was like. They had asked the people if they were willing to give up their homelands for the good of mankind and to end all wars. And because our people are people of faith and Christianity, they, and they were very afraid,

they did not want to leave, but because of the amount of power that the military showed up with with their big ships compared to our small canoes and the amount of troops that were on that island on that morning, it was very hard for them to fight against what was being asked of them. And if you have time to look through documentaries of the nuclear legacy, you will see a certain part where the commander of Commodore, his name was Ben Wyatt, he was sitting down and asking the chief at that time

can we use this island for the good of mankind. And in response, the people all respond in unison, M-1, which means, okay. And from their testimonies, they had to take that shot over 40 times to make sure that they all said M-1 at the same time, to get the best shot they could for, you know, maybe for reports to the UN. But it was a very frustrating

time for them. Following their removal, the testing began. The idea was to test nuclear bombs on ships, so the US bought 95 ships, fully loaded with weapons and fuel. At this time, this would have ranked the navy of Bikiniatole just out there to top five biggest fleets in the world. But those boats didn't stay afloat for long. Now, you might think that given the testing was on ships, theatole's navy will be some kind of mid-century marisolest. But you'd be wrong. 3,350 experimental rats, goats, and pigs died in the service as it's strange nuclear experiment. Some of them, after being subjected to the great indignity of being covered in sunscreen, which bizarrely scientists thought might be useful in alleviating the impact of radiation.

It's rather staggering that this research was being done three years after the United States dropped nuclear bombs on whole cities full of human beings. But as you've maybe already picked up in this story, the possibility of unintended but entirely predictable human suffering does not seem to have been top of the priority list. The first test of the island somehow misfired. The gathered press were disappointed and many of them went home, but the second, codenamed baker, didn't. Chemis Glen T. Seaborg, the longest-serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, called

the baker test the world's first nuclear disaster. It drove a 2000 foot wide pillar of water into the air. It sunk the USSR consul, and released massive amounts of radiation across the islands of the Atoll, which at the time, the residents have been expecting to return to. Just five days after the first bomb went off, Louis Roya, a French mechanical engineer who is working as manager of his mother's laundry shop in Paris, introduced a new swimsuit designed, named the Biquini, after the Atoll. It was one right equipped, the atom bomb of fashion.

The people of the Atoll, however, gained little from the outfit or the testing. January of 1948, just two years after their removal, Dr. Leonard Mason visited the Bikini and Zon Rungerick, and was appalled to find that people there had almost starved his death. We were dying, but they didn't listen to us, one of them said to him. Mason, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii, asked the food and water people immediately. The US built houses for Bikiniat residents on Ujalan Gatole.

But it decided to use the its for the residents of Anewa Thakatole, where it was also about to begin conducting nuclear experiments. Instead, the Bikini Islanders were placed in tents alongside a runway, before they eventually chose Kili Island, a line of less than one squarere, as their next home. Also evacuated were any whiter, gronger lap on Watthor Islanders. They too thought this was a temporary arrangement, and that they could go home in a short period of time. They too found out later that this was not the case. Over the course of their exile, they have been moved several more times, starved half to death, cheated of their compensation and stripped of their ancestral homeland. For the next 12 years, the United States would drop increasingly large bombs, culminating

in 1954 with the braver shot of Operation Castle, also known as Castle Braver, the biggest nuclear device that we know of the US ever deploying. Within those 12 years, there were 67 known devices that were tested here. There could have been more, but all we know of is 67. One of them was the Castle Bravo shot that yielded 15 megatons, which, when scientists calculated, the equivalent of the Bravo shot would have required testing the Hiroshima bomb one and a half times every single day for 12 years. That 15 megaton bravo shot yielded more than 2.5 times the estimated 6 megaton explosion

when it was detonated on the artificial island in the Bikini atoll. The device's mushroom cloud reached a height of 47,000 feet, which is 1400 meters, and a diameter of 7 miles or 11 kilometers in about one minute. Eventually, it reached a height of 40 kilometers, and a diameter of 100 kilometers. This took less than 10 minutes. It traveled more than 100 meters per second and covered 7,000 kilometers of the Pacific Ocean and everything in it with nuclear fallout.

On the eve of the bravo shot, weather reports indicated that the quote, conditions were getting less favorable, but nonetheless the decision to go ahead with the first test was taken by Dr. Alvin Seegraves. Joint task force seven ships located 30 miles east of Bikini, and what was thought to be an upwind position, began detecting high levels of radiation just two hours after the test. Very soon after they began travelling south, full speed to avoid the fallout. But directly downwind of the blasts and unable to travel were wrong a lap and a lingo nae atolls. Ariana explained the impact of fallout there,

which residents were not warned about. American service people there were warned to stay inside, not eat or drink anything. But no such warning was given to the local residents. Some said it looked like the sky was changing colors from red to yellow to orange. It was just a very, very bright morning. And then they started hearing like thunderous roars a couple minutes later. And it was just like roars after roars. And it was a very frightening time because this was just not something, you know, does not happen every day. And then around 10 a.m. the fallout had started to arrive.

And these are accounts from Brongalab atoll, which is the closest to bikini. The fallout had started to arrive. And they were not sure what was going on. There was men outfishing. There was also stories from these witnesses that, There was also stories from these witnesses that prior to this test, the military had gone to Rungaruk and they had movie nights and they would show the community movies where it's snowing. Tomorrow, we'll hear more about the consequences of the braver shot for the people who, despite never having any quarrel with the USA, with the recipient of the largest nuclear bomb it's ever detonated. I'm Penelope Sferas. I'm a film director. I want to tell you a story about a friend of mine.

Back in the 70s, Peter Ivers moved to LA to start his music career. He scored Ron Howard's directorial debut. I didn't know one thing about Peter Ivers. I just said, okay. Let's meet him. And even hosted a late night cable TV show. It showcased LA punk bands in all their glory.

The crowd started getting bigger and bigger, and then there was Beverly Danza. There was John Baloozy. But then it all went to hell. Peter Ivers was murdered on March 3rd, 1983. And it raised a question that 40 years later, we still don't know the answer to. Who killed Peter Ivers?

Listen to Peter and the Acid King on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is In Retrospect, a podcast about pop culture from the 80s and 90s that shaped us. I'm very much a product of the pop culture I consumed. Yeah, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I'm Jessica Bennett, a New York Times writer and bestselling author. I'm Susie Bette-Kerrem, an award-winning TV producer and filmmaker.

Every week, we'll revisit a moment in cultural history that we just can't stop thinking about. From tabloid headlines to illicit student-teacher relationships, and one, very memorable red swimsuits. I found myself in Pamela Anderson's attic, as you do. I put that red swimsuit in a safe because it seemed everybody wanted it. We're digging deep to better understand with these moments taught us about the world and our place in it. I want you to really smell the axe body spray

that emanated during this time. It was presented more as kind of like a crime topic. Okay, and that's not a love story. Not a love story. It had been branded on the uteruses of every single woman from C to shining sea. Listen to In Retrospect on the I Heart Radio app,, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show. Everyone in our country has a voice.

It's something that says not just where you come from, but who you are. Welcome to MPR's Black Stories, Black Truths, a collection of podcasts and a celebration of the host and journalism who've always spoken truth to power. Our voices are as varied, nuanced, and dynamic as the Black experience, and stories should never be about us without us. Find NPR Black Stories Black Truths on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. We had virtually no evidence. We had the word of a 15-year-old who told lies, a lot of lies. A lot, a lot, a lot.

In 1995, Detective Tony Richardson was trying to figure out who killed a fellow officer, Deputy Bill Hardy. Without solid evidence, the case comes down to who is believed and who is ignored. We did come into Nnesson Man, and he's been on death row all these years, and I didn't know it. I'm Beth Schelburn from Lava for Good Podcasts. This is Ear Witness. Listen to Ear Witness on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and to hear episodes with no ads, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple

Podcasts. The music you just heard was the anthem of Bikini at all, sang at their church on Killy Island in 1997. The words translate as follows. No longer can I stay, it's true. No longer can I live in peace and harmony. No longer can I rest on my sleeping mat pillow, because of my island and the life I once knew there. The thought is overwhelming, rendering me helpless and in great despair. My spirit leaves, drifting around and far away, where it becomes caught in a current of immense power and only then do I find tranquility. Bikiniatole has a flag as well.

It looks a lot like the US flag, but in the top left blue rectangle you'll only find 23 white stars. They represent the islands of Bikiniatole. The three black stars and the upper right of the flag represent the three islands that were vaporised by the March 1st 1954 15 megatide hydrogen bomb blast codenamed Bravo. The two black stars in the lower right-hand corner represent where the Bikinians live now. Killy Island, 425 miles to the south of Bikini atoll, an Egypt island on the Maduro atoll. These two stars are symbolically far away from Bikini stars on the flag, as the islands are far away in real life, both in distance and in terms of quality of life. The Marshallese words running

across the bottom of the flag, men, otemjye Regileu Ben-Annej, translate to, Everything is in the hands of God. These represent the word spoken in 1946 by the Bikinian leader, Judah, to the US Commodore Ben Wyatt, when the American went to Bikini to us the islanders, on a Sunday after they'd just been to church, to give up their islands for the good of all mankind so that the US could test nuclear weapons there. The close resemblance of the Pequiniens flag to the flag of the United States is to remind the people and the government of the USA that a great debt is still owed by them to the people of Pequini. In today's episode, I want to pick up what we left off yesterday

In today's episode, I want to pick up what we left off yesterday, in the hours after the bravo shot. Here's our Yana again. And so when that fallout had arrived, the children, you know, they remember that they saw it in these movie nights. They thought it was snow and they were playing in this fallout. And then later on that day, they started to realize that this was maybe poisonous. They just were not sure, but quite midnight that night,

the people were not able to move around as much. They were suffering dramatically. Their stomachs were churning, their hair had started to fall out. Their skin was peeling off. And like they said, it was so itchy. And when they would scratch, the skin just peels off as they scratch and the fish that the men were out fishing for when they had came back that evening to eat when they

ate the fish they said it was like they were just munching on sand. John and Gene the mayor of Wrongle Appetol gave an interview in 1977 recounting his experience with the fallout. falling from the sky. Some people put it in their mouths and tasted it. One man rubbed it into his eye to see if it would cure an old ailment. People walked in it and children played in it. Later, people on Utrecht-Atoll experienced a fallout as mist. Minich Kael, one resident of the Atoll, said that, quote, "'Several of my babies who were healthy at the time they were born, died before they

were a year old. Altogether, I lost four babies. My son, Winton, was born one year after the bomb, and he has had two operations on his throat for thyroid cancer. The Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon No. 5 also came into direct contact with the fallout, which began raiding down on them that same morning. direct contact with the fallout, which began raiding down on them that same morning. They had been fishing outside the designated danger zone that the US government had declared in advance, but when radioactive dust began to fall on them, they scrambled to leave. Pulling their gear took nearly six hours. During which time they were covered in the dust and gathered some of it in bags to take

home and determine what this dust was. Later in the day, they began to get sick, as they headed home. One member of the crew kept a bag of the ash to have it analysed on their return home, but he hung it from his bunk bed, causing the crew to get continued exposure all the way home. It took them two weeks to get back to Japan, and doctors quickly determined the cause of their blisters, sickness and hair loss. They asked the US Automatic Energy Committee for information on how to treat the fishermen. Instead, the US sent two scientists to observe them. One of the fishermen died, and the others were sent home after 14 months in hospital. They faced stigma in public,

and most of them eventually died from liver cirrhosis or cancer. 36 hours after the test, United States servicemen were evacuated from wrong lap. 54 hours afterwards, the people of Rungalapitol were evacuated. And 78 hours after the fallout hit them, less than half of Utrecht's 400 people were eventually evacuated. Here's Ariana again, recounting the story of one of those wrong-alap residents. And so they were evacuated on March 4th, 1954, and upon evacuation, the community was ordered to strip down naked on the ships. They did not separate the males from the females.

The entire community stood naked, this community stood naked on the ship, and they were a hose down with the pressure washer. When you talk stories with them today, they recall it as, you know, they say, you know, the hose was so strong and felt like those hoses that they used to put out fires. And after they were pressure washed, they were given a soldier's underwear and t-shirt to wear for their journey to

Quajolin at all. And for the bigger women that were a part of this group that could not fit these soldiers, underwards and t-shirts, they were given just a small towel to cover while they were journeying to quadriline. And also from these testimonies, one of my neighbors, she was seven years old at that time. And she said, you know, she's just a kid, and when everybody was standing naked,

and she saw her uncles, and she thought it was funny at that time but she realized later that that was such a breach of privacy and a moment of humiliation and she recalls her grandmother's skin falling off and she said it looked like we all were like in a burning house and everybody had these scars on like just the peel burning off and but at that time, she did not really realize it. She did not have a lot of burns. She's still alive today, but she did not have a lot of burns because when the bomb was

detonated, she was told to go inside her house. And so she had a little bit of protection. They were taken to Quadriline Naval Base, where things became even worse for them. A week after the test, the Atomic Energy Commission and the US Department of Defense sent a joint medical team to a quadriline. And these doctors drafted a memo stating that the exposed people should have, quote, no exposure for the rest of their natural lives. 111 traditional martial-eas leaders petitioned the United Nations to be more cautious with testing

and to stop it entirely if at all possible. The UN decided to continue, but without it precautions. It urged, but did not compel, the US government to compensate the Marshallese people. In fact, the United States was only beginning the damage it would do to the people of the Marshall Islands, and compensation would not come for another three decades. I'll let Ariane explain what actually happened next. to the people of the Marshall Islands. And compensation would not come for another three decades. I'll let Ariane explain what actually happened next. On March 9, 1954, the Project 4.1 scientists arrive,

and then on March 11, 1954, the Project 4.1 officially commenced without consent from the people. And this Project 4., was a study of radiation on human beings. And if you look at declassified files, we have a lot of them at the College of the Marshall Islands Nuclear Institute. There's all different types of projects.

And for example, one project, 2.3, could be the study of radiation on corals. And then 7.2 is study of radiation on corals. And then, you know, seven point two is study of radiation on the trees. And 4.1 just so happened to be the study of radiation on human beings. And when they were in Kuala Jilin, they were there for a couple days.

They were ordered to bathe in the lagoon, salt water, and scrub their burns three times a day. Every single day also they were ordered to provide urine samples three times a day. They also had to give blood samples three times a day and this went on for for the people of Uduruq it was three months and for the people of Rangalapu it was almost a year and then they were moved here to one of the small islands here where they lived and waited for their home to be cleaned up for them to return. And the thing is while they were taking these blood and urine samples and having them bathed in the lagoon and scrubbing their burns and saltwater three times a day, they all had clinical numbers. And so even the pregnant

women, their babies and their wombs also were assigned a clinical number because even if there was still a baby, they were already monitoring these babies. And the thing is, even with their hair falling off and their skin peeling off, and their fingernails turning black, and just feeling very nauseous and having severe headache, they were not given pain medication. They were not given any type of telenole or any of that.

They were just being monitored. And this whole time, they thought they were being treated. They didn't realize that they were a part of this project that was just there to study how their body reacts to exposure to radiation. Three years after being evacuated, the people of Wrongelap were allowed to return. And then they moved them back in 1957 because the bomb that they was exposed to was in 1954. And they were there for 28 years. This wasn't a benevolent effort. It was a continuation of the USA's use of the people of the Republic of Marshall Islands as subjects of experimentation.

Later on, when they were going to move the people of Ronellab back to Ronellab, what they wanted to study now was how radiation evolves in the food chain. Because when they had moved them back to Ronellab, this was the original exposed group. When they went back, it was not just the exposed group anymore because they were here for three years and they took their family members that were on medial, and some of them got married. When they went back, there was 400 of them. I always switch up which group was given a green card and a red card.

But if it was a red card, they were the exposed group, and the green card was now the new control group that was going to eat the crops on the land and eat off of the land to see how the radiation has moved in the food chain. And that's when my mother's father was born on Rangalap in 1959. Eventually, the people of Rangalap were evacuated in 1985 thanks to Greenpeace, who moved them to other rituals when the US government refused to help them or acknowledge responsibility. It was not just the people on Rangalap and the other rituals when the US government refused to help them or acknowledge responsibility. It was not just the people on wrong lap and the other rituals at a time who were impacted by the radiation. The consequences have lasted for generations. And also we've had many cases of birth

defects or babies that were born and according to the testimonies of these these mothers that had given birth, their babies were born sometimes looking like jellyfish. Sometimes their babies were born without a head, without limbs. All they could see was the heart beating and the blood flowing through their veins and their intestines and they just were not sure whether they should bury this baby when the heart is still beating or if they should wait for the heart to stop beating and some mothers had told their stories of giving birth to babies that they recalled looking like octopus some others recalled their babies looking like turtles.

Some of them, on many occasions, they also had babies that were born looking like grapes, the fruit. It just looked like a bunch of grapes long together. And for many of these cases, these women were not speaking up at that time, because what they were told by the Atomic Energy Commission's officials was that this is the result of incest. And so it was a very humiliating experience. Many of these women had no idea

that their own sisters were also giving birth to these monster-looking babies that they were giving birth to. And they would oftentimes bury their babies alone where nobody else was watching. And it's a worldwide culture that when someone passes away, we all gather to mourn this loved one. But for the women, the Marshallese woman at that time, it was a very heartbreaking moment for them because they did not want anybody else to see this baby that they had given birth to, not realizing that their own sister was also enduring the same faith.

Things were not much better for the Bikiniens, who had been evacuated at the start of testing in 1946. After a failed attempt to settle them on another atoll, many of the Bikiniens elected to try living on Kilius' new home. Kiliainen lacked a coral reef, and this made their traditional lifestyle of island hopping and fishing in the Kamla-Goon impossible. The Bikiniens, inhabitants of the most remote atoll in the already remote martial islands, were legendary for their ability to navigate using the stars and seas, but on their new island, the waves were so big that their traditional canoes couldn't sail at all.

Soon, the boat the USA had given them to import food had sunk into the ferocious seas around the island, and they were entirely reliant on air-dropped food. Some families moved to other islands, or split their time between Killy and the atolls with better resources. But life on Killy was hard, and the lack of protected lagoon made every delivery of food or supplies by boat a high-risk endeavor. Along with the loss of their homeland, many generations of Bikini and began to lose their navigation skills, and their connection to the agoon that provided so much sustenance and material

for their traditional lifestyle. They had suffered severe starvation because for the people of Bikini the atoll that they were now living in was just uninhabited in the first place because all the fish around the atoll are sick at their fish, so they could not eat off the ocean, they could not grow any crops. Are you guys familiar with what a noni fruit is? A noni tree? And it does not smell good, right? But they started eating the noni fruit because they did not have any bread fruit or papaya or anything growing on that land.

And the men oftentimes had to sail out in their canoes and they would be gone for almost a week because they sailed out as far as they could to be able to get fish that was edible for them. And then for the people of NNW, from their testimonies, but at all that they were evacuated to was rat infested and so their babies had to sleep in boxes.

They had to build like boxes for their babies. Otherwise their rats would come in nibble at their toes while they're sleeping. And there was a lot of ways that they were trying to figure out how to solve this rat infestation. And at one time they were giving people incentives. I think it was five cents if you brought a rat's tail or something. Because they were just trying to get rid of the rats and they could not. And yeah, it's just a lot of trauma and a lot of moving around. When the people of Bikini were first moved from Bikini to this new home of Romurig et al, where they lived for the next two years. By the time the military had gone back to pick them up, he's a very elderly man now, but he was six years old

at that time. And the way he describes it is that he says it was a very traumatizing moment for him, because they were carrying some of the people on leaves to the ship. They were very fragile. He said, if you have seen photos of the Holocaust, this is what our people looked like because there was just severe starvation at that time. In 1968, LBJ promised the bikini

and the chance to return to their beloved home. And the US trust territory began rebuilding the structures and decontaminating the soil. These efforts were hampered by infrequent flights and delayed by the discovery that the large coconut crabs on the island were still dangerously contaminated. In 1972, 100 people from three extended families moved back and began rebuilding their paradise, but it wasn't long before it became clear that their home was far from recovered. A visiting team of scientists from France, not the USA, found dangerously high levels

of radioactivity and fruit, well water, and in the urine samples of islanders. The islanders have sued the federal government, and more research was done. By 1978, scientists had found an 11-fold increase in the cesium 137 body burdens of the people living on the island, a level which the Department of the Interior called, quote, incredible. Once again, the islanders were removed from their home. In 1983, the Republic of the Marshall Island gained its independence, signed the Compact of Free Association with the United States. When the Compact came into effect in 1986, the Marshallies received their first financial

settlement from the USA, courtesy of section 177 of the Compact of Free Association, which pledged reparations for damages to the former inhabitants of Bikini, Enewata, Rungelap, and Uttrika tolls. They were promised 12% rate of return on the trust fund, which would be administered by the US and would provide health care and property damage reimbursements. However, this fund relied upon the fiction that only four tolls were impacted by the nuclear fallout. There is considerable evidence to suggest that the entire Republic of the Marshall Islands was directly impacted by fallout from the Bravo shot.

The Trust Fund also tied the interest of the Marshallese to those of global capital. A value of the Fund's investments went up, so did their ability to fund healthcare, and improve their living conditions. But I found financial reports from that trust fund in 2016. At the time, it had funds invested in U.S. domestic public equities, 29.5% of the portfolio, as of September 30th, 2015. International equities made up 27.4%. Fixed income funds made up 18%. Real estate made up 5.5%.

Hege fund made up 15% and a private equity fund made up the remaining 4.6%. But the interest to a low-lying atoll nation and those at global tapital will never really be fully aligned. The only reason hedge funds could offer such astronomical returns for their investors is that they are comprised of businesses who don't pay the full cost for their production. This is nowhere more obvious than the rapidly shrinking of tolls of the Marshall Islands, where the rising sea levels, driven by the need to ensure rising stock prices, are posing a new threat to the people who endured and survived the largest nuclear bomb the US has

ever known to have deployed. In 1987, a stock market collapse known as Black Monday reduced the value of the fund. And even to this day, despite other settlements and agreements, not one single person in the Marshall Islands has received the full amount of compensation that they were allocated. A great many have received less than half. In 1995, the island council learned that the Environmental Protection Agency standard for radiation reduction requirements was a lot lower than those of the Department of Energy scientists have been using thus far. 15 millerMs as opposed to 100 millerMs.

Between this and the demand on settlement funds for services that would lift the surviving islanders and their families out of poverty. The cleanup of Bikini atoll began to lose steam. Today, 600 people still live on Kili, subsisting largely on a US settlement fund. Their children, like many other marshallese, go to boarding schools and other atolls. But they still can't sail their canoes at home. Other bikiniens live on one of the islands or Maduro atoll, but with no matrilineal ties to their land, they don't have access to that which defines them in their culture. Despite being so isolated that the government thought it could safely nuke the island without damaging the mainland, or really anywhere it cared about, the island's trust fund is still privy to the rising and falling of the stock market,

and it took a significant hit in 2008. In 2017, Trump's Department of the Interior allowed Bikini's mayor and council to supervise the use of the fund in order to, quote, restore trust and ensure that sovereignty means something. When turned over, the fund was valued at $59 million US dollars. Today, it holds a little more than $100,000 US dollars. The islands mayor, Anderson Jevers, oversaw the fund at the time of its depletion and has admitted to claiming personal expenses from the fund and spending six figure sums on his trip to the USA. He's also made more popular purchases, like a small aircraft and two cargo ships to help supply the more isolated bikiniens, as well as construction equipment to build seawalls

to protect the islanders against another crisis, rising sea levels, which threaten to thwallow their whole country in a few decades. Sadly, this spending has left the fund virtually empty, and the Chex bechelians got, which amounted to about $80 per person per month have stopped coming. These stipends help feed bechelians and pay for medical care, and without them things are even harder. Today, a few caretakers live on bikini at all and you can visit to scuba dive. But the community that once existed there is gone. Edward Madison, one of those caretakers, was grandson of one of the residents removed in 1946.

Madison helped lead dives in the islands, tested cleanup methods, and monitored the pollutants for the US Department of Energy, as well as mapping the lagoon's World War Two wrecks. He passed away on March 29, 2020. On any Wattakatole, the cleanup will never happen, even after ended nuclear testing. The US tested conventional and biological weapons there. It shot missiles from California at the toll and tested airborne bioweapons. From 1977 to 1980, the US began scraping radioactive topsoil off the various islands it had tested for both nuclear and biological weapons and transporting that waste along with some race from Nevada to run it island.

Once on run it, the waste was mixed with concrete and secured in a giant concrete dome. Jeff's family is from the island, but thanks to the levels of radiation which rival Fukushima and Shinobu, he can't go back. My grandfather is from the Zylin. Oh wow. Yeah. But I never been to that island. Is that where you're like, did his father live there and his whole, did they live there for a long time, your family before?

Yeah. Yeah. That's your traditional one. Do you want to go? Uh, I'm you want to go? I'm going to go guys. The dome is there. Yeah. Like all the people from the

Ireland they get to test their radiation level. Today, thanks to the other extinction level threat, the US has helped create climate change. The dome is slowly sinking and cracking.

Hundreds of US servicemen developed cancer building the dome, six died, and many others have struggled to get full VA benefit. As the ocean rises, the concrete cap could simply slide off the dome, and the 33 Olympic swimming pools worth of nuclear and biological waste could flood out into the ocean. Locally, this dome is called the Tomb. On the 5th of March 2001, the nuclear claims tribunal handed down a decision on a 70-year

lawsuit that the Bikiniians had bought against the United States for damages down to their islands and their people during the nuclear testing on Bikini. The tribunal was created by the Compact of Free Association, and it always had been underfunded. The settlement and the $563 million awarded at Sturder Limbo is the island to sue the federal government for it. On the day we left Majora, the Republic of Marshall Islands negotiations with the USA over the renewal of the Compact of Free Association had gone on until two in the morning, Marshall East time. We ate breakfast that day with Hill Lehighine, the first woman to be president of the Marshall

Islands, and the first woman president in the Pacific. I didn't get great audio there, but she shared with us the ongoing struggle that the Marshallese people have had to secure adequate and fair compensation. With the US offering 700 million, and the calculated costs of healthcare and clean up closer to 3 billion. There is a long way for the US to come to make the islanders whole. They also, even six decades on, haven't apologized to the people who had no quarrel with them and whose homes and lives they destroyed. The case of the people of the Pacific Proving Grounds illustrates rather well how we can't find financial settlements

they're going to offset the kind of disasters the climate change is bringing. This doesn't mean the people who are harmed shouldn't be compensated, but it does mean that no amount of cash can write the wrongs done. This is why I wanted to anchor this series, which is about the future with a story about the past. to anchor this series, which is about the future, with the story about the past. Because in the next couple of episodes, we go to hear a lot about what might happen to the Marshall Islands, and again, how virtually none of it is the fault of the islanders. That doesn't mean we shouldn't accept their leadership on these issues, though. As we saw at the negotiations that led to the Paris Accord, the Marshall Islands can and

should take a place at the heart of global discussions about climate change, because they are the ones most impacted by the constant growth neoliberal model that makes other people pay for its negative externalities. As we will learn in the next few episodes, we should ask the people impacted how they want to be helped, and not tell them what they need. I want to end today's episode with a poet, and a very marshly's moment. I tried to meet the poet who wrote this when I was on the island because I remembered the impact of her poetry

at the UN Climate Summit. She was off island while I was there, but it turned out that Hilda Hine, the former president who I was having breakfast with, was her mum. Here's Kathy Gentel Kitchener, reading a poem she wrote for her own daughter to the United Nations. Thysard are thunder, shrieks that are lightning, so excited for bananas, hugs, and arm-morning walks along the lagoon.

Dear Mathew Filipina, I want to tell you about that lagoon. That lazy lounging lagoon, lounging against the sunrise, men say that one day that lagoon will devour you. They say it will not at the shoreline, too, at the roots of your red fruit trees, gulp down rows of sea walls and crunch through your island shattered bones. They say you, your daughter, and your granddaughter, too, will wander rootless with only a passport to call home.

Dear Montefelib, be known. Don't cry. Mommy promises you, no one will come and devour you. No greedy whale of a company sharking through political seas, no backwater bullying of businesses with broken morals, no blindfolded bureaucracies, gonna push this mother ocean over the edge. No one's drowning baby, no one's moving, no one's losing their homeland, no one's becoming a climate change refugee. Or should I say, no one else. To the Carter Red Islanders of Papua New Guinea and to the tarot Islanders of Fiji, I

take this moment to apologize to you. We are drawing the line here, because we, baby, are going to fight. Your mommy, daddy, boo-boo, jima, your country, and your president, too, we will all fight. And even though there are those hidden behind platinum titles who like to pretend that we don't exist, who like to pretend that the martial islands to value Kiruba's Maldives, Typhoon Hayan in the Philippines, floods of Algeria, Colombia, Pakistan, and all the hurricanes, earthquakes, and tidal waves didn't exist. Still, there are those who see us. Hands reaching out, fists raising up. Banners unfurling. Megaphone's booming and we are. Canoes blocking co-ships. We are the radiance of

solar villages. We are the fresh, clean soil of the farmers past. We are teenagers. Blooming petitions. We are families, biking, recycling, reusing, engineers, building, dreaming, designing, artists, painting, dancing, writing, and we are spreading the word. And there are thousands out on the streets marching hand in hand, chanting for change now. And they're marching for you baby. They're marching for us because we deserve to do more than just survive. We deserve to thrive. Dear Matafelibinam, you are eyes heavy with drowsy weight so just close those eyes and sleep in

peace because we won't let you down. You'll see. I'm Penelope Spheras. I'm a film director. I want to tell you a story about a friend of mine. Back in the 70s, Peter Ivers moved to LA to start his music career. He scored Ron Howard's directorial debut. I didn't know one thing about Peter Ivers. I just said, okay. Let's meet him. And even hosted LA Night Cable TV show. It showcased LA punk bands in all their glory. The crowd started getting bigger and bigger and then there was Beverly Danzola.

There was John Baloofer. But then it all went to hell. Peter Ivers was murdered on March 3rd, 1983. And it raised a question that 40 years later, we still don't know the answer to. Who killed Peter Ivers? Listen to Peter and the Acid King on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is in retrospect a podcast about pop culture from the 80s and 90s that shaped us. I'm very much a product of the pop culture I consumed. Yeah, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I'm Jessica Bennett, a New York Times writer and bestselling author. I'm Susie Bette-Keram, an award-winning TV producer and filmmaker. Every week we'll revisit a moment in cultural history that we just can't stop thinking about. From tabloid headlines to illicit student-teacher relationships, and one, very memorable Red Swimsuits.

I found myself in Pamela Anderson's attic, as you do. I put that Red Swimsuit in a safe because it seemed everybody wanted it. We're digging deep to better understand with these moments taught us about the world and our place in it. I want you to really smell the axe body spray that emanated during this time. It was presented more as kind of like a crime topic.

Okay, that's not a long story. I'm not a love story. It had been branded on the uteruses of every single woman from C to shining C. Listen to In Retrospect on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Everyone in our country has a voice. It's something that says not just where you come from, but who you are.

Welcome to NPR's Black Stories Black Truths, a collection of podcasts and a celebration of the hosts in journalism who've always spoken truth to power. Our voices are as varied, nuanced, and dynamic as the Black experience, and stories should never be about us without us. Find NPR Black Stories Black Truths

on the I Heart Radio app App or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Hillary Clinton back with a new season of my podcast, UN Me Both. On this show, I'll be talking to people I admire about many things, including one of my favorite subjects, getting things done. We'll hear from folks in positions of power like Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries, but also writers and actors, community organizers really anyone who shows up every day and keeps doing the work. There's so much

out there to distract us, but all of my guests bring tremendous passion and commitment, an ability to block out the noise, and I should probably warn you lots of sports metaphors. You stay calm and focused on releasing the ball, getting it to a receiver, and hopefully getting it into the end zone on behalf of the American people. So join me for this conversation and more. Listen to you and me both on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. United Airlines Flight 154 starts on Olu.

When it leaves, it carries only a full load of passengers passengers but also a mechanic and spare parts for the plane. On its journey it stops in a martial islands at Majuro and Quadro before heading west to make three stops in Micronesia and finally it stops in Guam. The next day it turns around does the same route in reverse. Landing in Majuro you can see the ocean on both sides of the plane. In fact, you can see the ocean on both sides of the plane from a disturbingly low height. And despite this being one of the larger islands in the Marshall Islands, it almost looks like the plane wouldn't fit on it without a wingtip over hanging the lagoon. The plane does fit, of course, and has even room left at Marjoro Airport for the best

airport by that I've ever seen. But even after a couple of hours in the company of the islands, finest whiskey collection, it's very clear that the martial islands are in a great deal of danger when it comes to rising sea levels. The martial islands don't have much land to begin with, and through no fault of their own, their island paradise is being gradually lost to the ocean. Start with, I want to let Kathy Gentile Kitchener, the poet who he heard from yesterday, outlined the scale of the threat.

Climate change is a challenge that few want to take on, but the price of an action is so high. Those of us from Oceania are already experiencing it firsthand. We've seen waves crashing into our homes and our breadfruit trees, weather from the salt and drought. We look at our children and wonder how they will know themselves or their culture. Should we lose our islands? Climate change affects not only us islanders,

it threatens the entire world. To tackle it, we need a radical change, of course. This isn't easy, I know. It means ending carbon pollution within my lifetime. It means supporting those of us most affected to prepare for unavoidable climate impacts. And it means taking responsibility for irreversible loss and damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The people who support this movement are indigenous mothers like me, families like mine, and millions more, standing up for the changes needed

and working to make them happen. I ask world leaders to take us all along on your ride. We won't slow you down. We'll help you win the most important race of all, the race to save humanity. Currently, Pacific Island nations are responsible for less than 0.03% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but the United Nations estimates that more than 50,000 people in the Pacific have displaced every year, many of them by climate change. Of course, people leave for other reasons. Perhaps they're looking for work which can be hard to find in a small island, or perhaps they

want the opportunities at the United States Life Office. Thanks to their compacted free association, Marshallese people can live and work in the USA without a visa. Most Marshallese people who do leave the islands move to Springdale, Arkansas. It's where the largest off-Island Marshallese community is gathered, and they tend to cluster around the reliable jobs offered by the Tyson Chicken Factory. In 2020, the Tyson Chicken Factory remained open to a lockdown, and people who had left the islands for a more steady income and a better chance for a stable future suddenly face more great risks at work. Life is by no means easy for Marshallies people,

both in the US and at home. And the choices they face because of climate change, constricting global economy and the United States refusing to pay its fair share of compensation, don't make that any easier. On my last night in the Marshall Islands, I was having a beer in a bar and chatting with a local journalist.

I asked him what I should write. He said that I needed to tell you that people in the RMI aren't moving because they're afraid of waves. We're not afraid of the ocean, he said. We're ocean people. We go in the ocean every day. He was right, of course. The drivers of migration are complicated and they always have been.

I always tell people who ask me what I cover, that I cover climate and conflict and migration, because in fact they're largely the same things. There are many reasons for migrating from the martial islands, if there are people who have left, and all of them are valid. But everyone I spoke to, whether they'd left or come back or stayed there the whole lives, were pretty clear that nobody wants the community to leave. The people of the martial islands love their islands, and they want to raise their children and grandchildren

on their ancestral land. But the people making the choices to impact their ability to do that are a long way from the lagoon that's creeping closer and closer to the houses around Maduro atoll. Climate change making the islands unhaves wall doesn't necessarily mean they'll be swallowed entirely

by the ocean. Long before the last scrap of land disappears, the rising saltwater will kill breadfruit trees and flooding will destroy homes. To get a scent of that threat, we spoke to a meteorologist. I'm Reggie White, regional wife and I'm the meteorologist in charge here. Ready explained what climate change might do to make the islands less easy to live on. And eventually, perhaps impossible to live on if something doesn't change.

It's hard for people to see these kind of creeping changes. When we think about climate change rendering and island uninhabitable, we think about that island ceasing to exist, or the house is being swept away by a storm surge, or a massive king tide perhaps. But in fact, a change is a more gradual, but no less destructive. We have to go back to the emission scenarios that IPCC produced, and based on that, worst case scenario, if we look at it, I have to open up the computer and look at the table.

But in a hundred years, we may be not completely sick. And that's not what's important here. What is important is the islands will be inevitable way before they sink. Because we will not be able to drive on the road. We will not be able to rely on our water lenses, because they'll all have salt water into them. And it's more and more frequent salt water intrusion get on top and down into

the water length they will be undrinkable. So at what stage can we put that target? I'm not comfortable at this moment to point that out but I think anyone of us can look at the numbers and decide based on this emission scenario. This is the day, based on that emission scenario. That is the day. So there is another set day. Are a, what do you call it? They hear that broke the camel's back. I mean, I can't call them.

What was it? What was the emergency? Yeah, that's the thing. As Reggie explained, the impact of rising sea levels is already being seen, particularly in the case of flooding. Oh, there are many, but in a low lying at all, your most concern is flooding, coastal flooding. So we've seen more frequent flooding during Lanyinia.

Lanyinia is the phase where in the Marshall Islands, specifically, you get elevated sea levels. About 10 centimeters or so, 8 to 12 inches on top of the normal sea level at any given time. So, when there is a storm surge, king tide, those things come down one another to give us more frequent coastal flooding in the low-lying areas. If you go in the back of Mejaro, you will see people building up seawalls to protect their properties. With those seawalls, the impact has been lessened a bit. But without those seawalls, nuisance flooding has been almost a monthly occurrence during el Niño phases.

In 2021, the World Bank and the Marshallies government produced a report which allowed visualization of the impact of climate change on each building in Maduro. In broad strokes, the report stated that, quote, rising sea levels in the atollation of the Marshall Islands are projected to endanger 40% of existing buildings in the capital, Marjoro,

with 96% of the city at risk for frequent flooding introduced by climate change, according to a World Bank study. Change seems to be very hard for the corporations and governments most responsible for it. Indeed, one could argue that seeing that change is hard because of those corporations and governments. Naomi Arresquez, a Harvard historian of science, studies the propaganda that has allowed major corporations to deny the damage they do to the planet and generate massive profits by not paying for the negative externalities of their actions. Negative externalities, if you're not familiar, are the costs that their business imposes on other people

that they don't pay. In her book, Merchants of Doubt, a rescuer's traces how nuclear testing did huge damage to the ozone layer. Indeed, much of the technology we use today to track global climate change was to fell up using government money. Part of the reason why was to assist of the Soviet Union was doing nuclear testing by

tracking the environmental damage that was done. Using some of the data these instruments created, scientists, among them Carl Sagan, began to discuss the possibility of a nuclear winter and the fact that any use of nuclear weapons or even a nuclear accident could put the future of all humanity at risk. Unsurprisingly, a huge public relations effort spun up to dismiss the idea of nuclear winter and attack the concept of nuclear war being an unwinnable proposition. There was, after all, a huge amount of money at stake. In an excellent New York or essay on the subject, Jill Lapor, another Harvard historian, outlines

a campaign to discredit those scientists and their claims. In 1984, in an effort to count to Carl Sagan and to defend what was called the Strategic Defense Initiative, the George C. Marshall Institute was founded by Robert Jastor, a NASA physicist, Frederick Sites, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, and William Nirenberg, a past director of the scripts institute of oceanography right here where I live in San Diego. The Marshall Institute began trying to get PBS to not air documentaries opposing the strategic defense initiative. The so-called Star Wars program wouldn't be of any use of a single nuclear incident could trigger a devastating change in the global climate.

Another Master Institute scientist, Celts' cousin Russell, who was a physicist at Harvard Center for International Affairs published an essay in the National Interest in the fall of 1986, dismissing the idea of nuclear winter and saying it was nothing but a series of long conjectures. He describes the nuclear winter theory as dead, court of death, notorious lack of scientific integrity. By 1988, the Institute of Pivoted and it began publishing the first of many papers on climate change. Other scientists are including Fred Singer challenged the model that predicted a nuclear winter.

They've gone on to do the same with climate change, claiming that in both cases it was far from certain that catastrophic consequences would occur. Singer, incidentally, was a consultant for Arco, Exxon, Shell Oil and Son Oil. He died in 2020, after serving for years as a director of science and environment policy at the Heartland Institute, which was founded in 1984. Its position on global warming at a time was, quote, most scientists do not believe human greenhouse gas emissions are a proven threat to the environment or human wellbeing, despite a barrage of propaganda, insisting otherwise

coming from the environmental movement and echoed by its sick offense in the mainstream media. In the Marshall Islands, this kind of denialism, no matter how well-funded and qualified, really isn't going to stick. Everyone here has personally seen the impacts of rising sea levels eroding away on their precious land. But it's the actions of people everywhere that impact people here. So they have to persuade the rest of the world to care about them. I will bet that every Marjolese understands impacts.

Because every Marjolese has been a victim of some coastal inundation has been impacted by those. So they understand. The youngest ones, maybe they experienced their first, but the older ones, they've been around during those days when they were, you know, coastal flooding was an issue. One of the things I like to do in my free time is to free dive. Sometimes I can collect sea urchins or cool shells, but lots of the time I just like to be underwater. I've never done scuba diving. All the gear and equipment kind of scares me, but holding my breath and swimming around the reef is probably the closest thing I'll ever

feel to flying. To be able to hold your breath for a minute or two underwater, you need to get your heart rate very low. And this means being very calm, letting tension and stress float away. It's a magical feeling and one that I've tapped into even outside the water in stressful situations. Sometimes, that ability to calm yourself could be a bit too effective. I remember once, starting to walk off a broken pelvis and passing out from blood loss later. Sometimes, that calm focus can be exactly what you need. Like, when you're holding your breath on the bottom of the ocean and you realize that you've got your fins tangled in the banded fishing line, and you need to cut it so you can get back to the surface and breathe. I saw that same ability to remain calm and even happy despite what

seems like another impending crisis every time I spoke to Marshallies people about climate change. Between their nuclear past and their perilous future, the Marshallies people have every right to be angry and maybe they are when they're not talking to British journalists. But whenever I ask people, they still seem hopeful, upbeat, and excited about the future of their country. As we're going to see tomorrow, Marshallese people are still very much investing in their shared future. I think there's something we can all learn

from the resilience of the Marshallese community, even in the face of what seems like a second apocalyptic threat. His Reggie discussing how climate change makes him feel. Well, I try not to dwell on what could happen. I could try to think of what we could do now, to change people's heart, to change how we behave, how we treat the world. I mean, it's our only home. You go out in space, it look back. It's one lonely place

in the entire galaxy of stars and whatever. But when you look at it that way, you begin to realize, I must respect my place. Who else will respect the divide? It's worth noting that some people we talk to are less concerned about climate change. My name is Juliet Miranda from Masalaam. I live on Takan. Juliet's an older resident of Rongram, one of the Outer Isles on Marjoro Atoll. Her life there is in many senses a delic. Her cook house is built around a large breadfruit tree.

The tree also serves as a work surface. It's like a solar punk vision of the future where we live in harmony with nature, but for her is just a place she makes lunch. Along with the other wrong wrong islanders, she served a visiting group that I was part of a delicious lunch of coconut, breadfruit, pandanis, crabs, and rice.

While we talked about what brought her back to the Marshall Islands after 30 years living in the United States. Well, you always are always a home sick when I'm in USA. I miss my walk around freedom. You can't go to the next door because you trust passing. But around here, you do everything. It's different.

Yes, it's different. Blood different. So I love a USA. That light is good. And a lot of different things, you use it to then, modules. So I love it here. I do all my old thing.

I use it to breaking and make my home chicken and swimming. On Pigeon, Santa Barbara, you have to get a diet to go to the beach over here for the beach. I'm tired of wanting it. Yeah, very much. She clearly loves that little piece of paradise and it's easy to see why. She was happy to share it with us as we're all the islanders on the wrong room. She clearly loves her little piece of paradise and it's easy to see why. She was happy to share it with us as we're all the islanders on wrong room. A short walk away from her house, her neighbours children played in a sand with their pigs,

chickens and dogs. And it's certainly a very different place from Santa Barbara, where she spent much of her time in the United States. But it's no less special. Like many martialies, she has a very strong faith. And that faith is helping her explain why climate change is happening. I believe in God. When they do the weather and say that it's going to rain tomorrow, and tomorrow is not going to be rain. God is going to make it rain. The news don't know. You know it. You're minister. For others, the threat is already here. Here's one conversation with Malican Francine from Kaura in Okorami, a local NGO who you'll hear a lot about tomorrow. They're doing incredible

work investing in the future of the martial islands by installing water filters and smokeless stoves in homes across the nation. You might never have had to worry about clean water, or never been concerned by cooking your food, my hurt your lungs. But both of those things are massive public health issues. You don't have access to electricity, gas, and clean water from a pipe that comes into your home. One night before dinner, we talked to them about climate change. The scientists are saying that

you've got so many years until all the ice, we've got melts and affects us. We don't have mountains to run to. But some places they can just run to the mountains we don't. And it's Marshall Islands and all these. Here by the way. We're at the front lines. So you're also blessed that you get to see the martial violence. Yeah, and really see firsthand what the possibility of being.

The impact goes beyond the individual though. When we heard from the Ministry of Health on the impact the climate change is already having on a well-being of Marshallese people, they reminded us of both the physical and mental health of residents has been affected. I do secretary, my name is Nathan Carman, I'm a climate change and I'm a midwife. Well, first of all, welcome to our web, we're full of ideas to visit us. I think Michael Jackson said it best. If you want to see change in the department climate impacts on health and wellbeing. Nathan went on to explain what that means both in terms of mental health and in physical

health as mosquitoes and other disease vectors adapt to the changing climate and rising sea levels. keep them. We have our seminar that's ongoing right now partnership with Joe Jugu, which lets the youth express how climate change based their field. And also in involving the community and getting their feedback on climate climate issues not just at a national level, it's mostly at the community level. All of these changes are hard to predict, but it's easy to see the impact climate change has already had. We spoke to the island's Environmental Reocation Agency to get a sense of what that meant. My name is Maureenna Philip and I'm the General Manager here. As you can see we're a very small organization with a very broad mandate. Anything environmental related we are accountable to and we're supposed to provide advice to the government and the

Marshall and his people about new issues that are coming up. And so, you know, we're easily overwhelmed and outmatched. And then, you know, you throw in climate change into the mix. And suddenly, I can't even imagine what the change is going to be like in the next five years or ten years. It's hard for me to imagine. When I was a child, I used to go to the school across the street it's a DES is a public school and we would cross the road and swim from here all the way to Delaware and then cross the road and go home. This was all white sandy beach. You know obviously that's not the case anymore.

One way that the Marshallies community has responded to climate change is to take a position of leadership on mitigating carbon emissions. We heard about this all over the island, with solutions ranging from electric canoes, to sailboats, to a grid that runs on renewable energy. They've also taken leadership in how aid money has spent. Rather than just accepting the projects as funders suggest them, the RMI has been vocal in making sure that the unique challenges that they face

are reflected with unique solutions that they propose. For example, they simply don't have the space for larger solar farms, even if they do have the funding. My name is Angelene Heine-Ramers. Other than being part of PEO. I'm also the director for the National Energy Office. And then I'd like to introduce you to Ben. He's the deputy director, so we're a very small office.

It's newly created. It was developed in 2018. So we're trying to be creative and we partnered with our local government in exchange building them basketball courts. The reason why there's so many basketball courts is that we'll be installing rooftop and on the rooftop that's where we're going to be housing the solar, connecting it to the grid and it's with this project we had it took us I think more than a year been right to went back and forth with our partner because they just wanted to go ahead and put on solar.

Sometimes the scale of the programs larger countries use simply isn't a good fit for the Marshallies. We get funding to go on trips to places like Korea, Japan, Okinawa to see all these systems that in the eyes of big countries they see as islands, like Jeju Island and Korea. But they're like so advanced compared to here, you go there and they have ocean thermal and to us we're like, okay, what about our corals? That's where our reef fish lives in. Do we have to get rid of our corals? Maybe we should rethink it that or.

They also make sure to incorporate traditional methods and their culture along with M-Bodden solutions. institutional way, you know, we're way through it's a ignoring level, trying out things. Is that something that the energy community is at something that's being built here at the WAM? And can you talk about how social is conviction, how much human is my save, the experience? Then do you want to start with our UK mobiles, the idea for the, and then where we are at, yeah. Yeah, um, so WAM started the initiative of the boat building and they wanted to, it's

strictly started with WAM. We had no idea about their project, but initially they got a project from a donor for boat building where they would modernize these traditional canoes just to make modifications to make the hull bigger for catching fish or just one knot. And then out of the blue, the director for once said, hey, what if we put solar on this boat?

I think there's something in the market. So we just out of the blue just wanted to test it. Unfortunately, when we purchased the motor and they want to start the testing, one burnt down. And the motor burnt down with it. But they did a few runs in the lagoon with it. And it was really awesome.

I wrote on it at one point they started using wind and the wind died down. Turned on the motor and it started using the motor and the wind pick up. Turned off the motor. It was really awesome. But we, in Io, the director wanted to pick her another one so we pick her another one with our own funds. So it's on its way. And she should be here very shortly to do some real testing Thanks, but we wanted we also partnered with WAM

Because of that just pilot project we saw the need to build more of the similar kind canoe so we We asked another donor if we can use their funding to fund the second phase of that project. So right now they've been approved and they're building an additional 18 more canoes for each island. And so the process is they bring in these boat builders from the outer islands. They train and moldy build these new style canoes with modern technology. And then they ship it back out. One success story without the motor is in the at all of Likip. They completely stop using their motorized boat because they're 100% using the canoe.

And the canoe can carry up to a ton. So they've been carrying copper out from one island to another back and forth with the canoe. And they said they'd save so much money that they decided to do a fishing tournament at their outer island from the money they save. You know. His Reggie, talking about how he sees his role

in combating climate change. I don't enjoy being helpless. I don't believe that the impacts of others should impact me. I make the changes where I can. I try to behave in a manner that is not detrimental to the Earth. And I preach that to my kids. And hopefully the compounding effect or it will grow exponentially from them to other ambassadors to spread the word that.

We need to do something. It's not about politics, it's about your overhead or how much profit you gain at the end of the day, it's about how you gain those by being a good ambassador to preserving the earth and the climate, all the other inhabitants, not just humans. Wherever we went in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, it was hard to find doom and gloom with regard to climate change. What we found everywhere was people adapting

and making changes, both the kind of changes that reduce their carbon emissions, and the kind that made their homes more defensible because the rest of the world is not making that first kind of changes. Resilience doesn't just mean seawalls and houses on Steltzik and Wittanflod, are those those are important. It also means making hard choices and forming strong communities.

Here's Mariana again. There's a lot of attention on us as like frontline countries, you know, in the face of climate change. And we get a lot of reporters come in asking us questions, we get a lot of consultants that come in and out and collect data. You know, of course we're seen as sort of the sad countries that will eventually face the reality of having no land to live on. So forced relocation displacement. I don't want to say migration because it does not exactly migration if you have to leave. You're being displaced.

Our concern is that we're not, we don't have all the capabilities and the signs to help inform the government or everyone interested donors about how much is changing, how much is going to change and especially how that change is going of changes, you know, it's overwhelming. We have a national adaptation plan. I hope that you will get into that when you get the chance to. That's the survival plan. In that survival plan, there is, you know, there is very scary reality that we may need to take down some islands to elevate some islands, you know, and every island have their landowners and what

happens to those people, marshallies are connected to their land so much culturally. And so how do we adapt to that change when it comes so quickly? That's scary. to that change when it comes so quickly. That's scary. Everywhere you go in the martial linings, you see the impact of climate change and rising sea levels. But you also see the community responding

and supporting itself through the existential threat. The RMI isn't a sad place, quite the opposite. It's a tremendously happy and beautiful place. And I had one of the most enjoyable weeks I can remember there. I'd go back in a heartbeat. But the joy with which people approach every day doesn't mean they aren't concerned, it certainly doesn't mean they're not worthy of our concern. Tomorrow, we're going to discuss how the people of the Republic of Marshall Islands, and in particular the women of the Republic of Marshall Islands, and making sure that Marshallese people have a safe and healthy future. I'm Penelope Spheras, I'm a film director.

I want to tell you a story about a friend of mine. Back in the 70s, Peter Ivers moved to LA to start his music career. He scored Ron Howard's directorial debut. I didn't know one thing about Peter Ivers. I just said, okay. Let's meet him. And even hosted LA Night Cable TV show. It showcased LA punk bands in all their glory.

The crowd started getting bigger and bigger, and then there was Beverly Danzola. There was John Baloofery. But then, it all went to hell. Peter was murdered. Peter Ivers was murdered on March 3rd, 1983. And it raised a question that 40 years later, we still don't know the answer to.

Who killed Peter Ivers? Listen to Peter and the Acid King on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. This is In Retrospect, a podcast about pop culture from the 80s and 90s that shaped us. I'm very much a product of the pop culture I consumed. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I'm Jessica Bennett, a New York Times writer and bestselling author. I'm Susie Bedeck-Harram, an award-winning TV producer and filmmaker. Every week, we'll revisit a moment in cultural history that we just can't stop thinking about.

From tabloid headlines to illicit student teacher relationships, and one very memorable red swimsuits. I found myself in Pamela Anderson's attic, as you do. I put that red swimsuit in a safe because it seemed everybody wanted it. We're digging deep to better understand what these moments taught us about the world and our place in it. I want you to really smell the axe body spray that emanated during this time. It was presented more as kind of like a crime topic.

Okay. And that's not a lot of story. It's not a love story. It had been branded on the uteruses of every single woman from C to shining sea. Listen to In Retrospect on the I Heart iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Everyone in our country has a voice. It's something that says not just where you come from but who you are. Welcome to MPR's Black Stories Black Truths, a collection of

podcasts and a celebration of the host and journalism who've always spoken truth to power. Our voices are as varied, nuanced, and dynamic as the Black experience, and stories should never be about us without us. Find NPR Black Stories Black Truths on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jerry Luggen, store manager of BioW Viwell Number 3842, and I want to invite you behind the scenes to a section of our store that is strictly employees only. Victor, you didn't bring your co-broad of work, did you? Oh my God.

Okay, A number one, it's a Burmese python. This is where we unwind and have a chat about the news of the day. Looks like Chris Christie might be running. Honey, if you finish one thing, Chris Christie ain't doing its running. Employees only. That means no normies. Keep out, buddy. It's just for us by well employees.

He did an insurrection. Honey, it didn't work. You can't hold somebody accountable if it didn't work. I love that so much. We should apply that to my criminal record. This is where we talk freely about all the stuff happening in the world. It's employees only. courtesy of Ron Howard, the new podcast from Imagine Audio, pretty fast in iHeart Media.

Listen on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Twice in the week I spent on Majora. I didn't get to sleep until after midnight because the hotel's event space was about 8 feet from my pillow, and someone in that event space was having an absolute rager. Before trying and failing to go to sleep, I chatted with some folks throughout the party to see what was going on. The first night was a first birthday party. Infant mortality has been so high in this area in the past that children making it through the first year of their life was a first birthday party. Infant mortality has been so high in this area in the past that children making it through the first year of their life was a cause for massive celebration. It was rather sweet to see adults enjoying such a good time around a one year old who had no

idea what was going on. The next party, a few days later, was no less festive but for a much more somber reason. It was a celebration to remember an eight-year-old girl who died exactly one year before. People showed me her photo and, despite my condolences, they assured me that it wasn't a sad affair. I don't want to make this series a sad affair either, because despite the incredible challenges they have faced, Marshallies' people have persevered, and they clearly have a great pride in their islands, and I don't think they would want to be seen as helpless and acted upon by global forces beyond their control. Instead, they should be seen as a strong community that has wasted some of the worst things a history can throw at a community and continue to thrive.

As we spoke about yesterday, they're taking huge steps to ensure that they lead the way on sustainable development. They're also ensuring their future in other ways. Some of this might not be as shiny and glitzy as solar power grids or canoes powered by the sun, but which have made a huge difference to the residents of the country, particularly in the outer atolls. What I want to talk about today is one of those projects. It's a project imagined, implemented, and executed by the women of Corre in Okrani. The name means women who rise at dawn and it's very appropriate. Every interview you've heard so far and every place we went to

was thanks to the women of Kio. The trip I was part of was there to witness the installation of the final water filters on the island of Rongrom, that would bring to a successful conclusion a five-year project to ensure that every single person in the Marshall Islands had access to clean water. I'll let them introduce themselves to you, as it did to us. My name is Francine Wassie-Jackwick, but most people around town call me Mappu, so if you hear Francine, they're not going to know who that is.

I am a QO member. I'm one of the officers as the secretary and I've been a Q-O member of gosh, I can't remember when, but you know we've got, we've come a long way Q is about 17 years old right now. Wow. 17, yeah, it's been a very fun ride. It's my fun job. Outside from Q-O as my fun work, I work at the Ministry of Health and Human Services. My permanent position is the Deputy Secretary, overseeing Office of Health Planning, Policy Preparedness, Personnel, and Epidemiology. And three months ago, I was also given the authority of rule as the acting secretary of

health because the secretary was not the new politics. So yeah, Q is Q. Karina Rani and we're very happy because our founder is here and it's Monique. So we'll do introduction and then we'll go into the agenda. Is that okay? So I will hand it to the back which is our founder Monique. Somebody go ahead. Hello everyone.

Hi. Welcome, Monique. I am the co-, who actually not so much but we're really happy that you've made it. Your fight wasn't canceled. Last week so many fights are canceled. But welcome in our language we say yakui. I mean rainbow and kue is you so you are rainbow to us. I am a mother for now. I don't work. Most of us have their work but I'm a full-time mother and this is my baby actually, Kio, started 16 years ago. My husband, a friend, we were in school, many schools and graduated and we all came back.

We were raised with this mentality to get back. We have lots of marshallies, proverbs. You would, bagayo means to turn the tides. It was our time to turn the tides. We banded together, always like my mid-smart ladies and created Q. And it's a volunteer organization. We do this in our sleep basically. All alone too. We don't get paid. So we do various work from small projects like you know reading with the kids and just a small project, reading the kids'

two big projects, like water, this water, what's it called? My name is Kathy. I work for the Ministry of Natural Resources and Commerce with the Fisheries Memoron. And I've been into a member since the first year, I think, 16 years ago. It is, like MoVie said, it's an honor. We have very humble, but we visit.

Welcome you all and hope you have a great visit. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, my name is Amanda. I work at the Ministry of Finance as an accountant and I'm Kio of trade. Thank you. Thank you. Hello everyone and welcome to our show. My name is Grace, but everyone call me Kuma. So I'm very pleased to meet all of you. When they say we have all these media, big news media,

I will let coming from this day, I was kind and nervous. I've been a few members since 2014 and I was so amazed by all the work that these ladies have been doing for the martial islands and I'm very proud to be part of Q-Club. I work at Rona at Oloca Garouin and I'm not sure if you know, but we're only one of those. It's all that was affected by the nuclear testing. So again, welcome. Kia Work was Sawyer, the people who make the ubiquitous water filter, which is a favourite for through hikers and other outdoors people. To provide a water filtration system that allows marshes,

these people to filter the rain water they collect, and remove harmful bacteria that can cause diarrhea and vomiting. While these might seem undesirable for listeners in the US, they can be fatal in other settings. 2019, around 1.5 million people died from diarrhea diseases. That's more than all violent deaths combined. Around half a million of those deaths were children. One thing that's remarkable about a project is a way it was realised. Kio began distribution in the most remote and hard to reach the tolls, taking tiny boats across choppy seas for days at a time to get

to remote islands and then working with traditional women leaders to ensure that everyone on the islands knew how to use the filters. Then they began working towards Majora, the capital. I've seen lots of NGO projects in dozens of countries. I've worked with someone, but I've rarely seen a model that prioritizes need this well. In far too many cases, proximity to power ensures access to resources. This is a global problem. Just look at how the US distributed masks and COVID resources to reservations last. Or if I step outside, I can see how the lowest income parts of San Diego, the city I live in, have the worst roads and get the least infrastructure spending.

The fact they killed in things differently is a testament to the strength of their commitment to their community. In fact, the project for this drew in my trip to the Marshall Islands, completing the last island on Marjoro Tull in early July. But a few days later than that, when Q invited myself and some other journalists to a goodbye breakfast, they presented a filter to the former president of the Republic of Marshall Islands, Hill Behind. Despite being the last person to get one, she was very grateful. And it served to the great illustration of the priorities of the group. They wanted to go to the hardest places first because they knew people there needed help the most. His president held a high after receiving her filter. I was telling morning that we don't drink from our tap water. We have our own system,

but we don't know if it's clean, so we buy our drinking water all the time. So with this one, I probably will stop by... by... by speaking pure water. I joined Kio and several other journalists for the final leg of their project, which involved installing the water filters. This doesn't really take long. They're basically a soil filter attached to a 5-gum and bucket with a length of flexible hose, and then explaining their value and upkeep to the community. As we heard yesterday, ground water is harder and harder to come by in the Marshall Islands thanks to climate change, and so people rely almost exclusively

on rainwater. They collect rainwater in giant plastic tanks. They've only recently replaced a hodgepodge of different collection vessels. Incidentally, a visiting scientist from a CDC told me that the installation of these tanks has increased the safe disposal of waste because people no longer need to take their bins to collect rainwater when it rains. Once water is in the tanks, the residents can draw it out into their five gallon bucket and then filter it for safe drinking. The Sawyer filter system may seem very simple, and it is, but that's what makes it a perfect solution here. A complicated electric filter, a one that relied on pipe water pressure, or had a ton of moving parts, would require constant maintenance, which is hard given a long journey to the outer islands. In my career in journalism and in non-profit,

I've seen countless well-intentioned aid projects completely fail to consider the need for sustainability and become useless solidities in a few years. Cargo bikes made a huge difference to coffee farmers in Rwanda until they needed new brake pads and there wasn't an importer for them. The same goes for countless glue comitors I've seen distributed to people who can't access the batteries they use or the test strips they rely on. This won't happen in the Marshall Islands. In part because the project was led by the community itself and not by outside nonprofits looking to maximise donation dollars or media opportunities. And in part because the only maintenance of solar filter needs is a backflush with a filtered water that it makes.

Yesterday, we heard a little from the Marshallese environmental protection agency about how they grapple with climate change. Today, I want to explain how they're working alongside Kio to ensure that even as sea levels rise, Marshallese people will have access to safe water. The Marshallese EPA works to ensure that the water in people's tanks isn't contaminated,

and the filters that Kia provided work to make sure that even if it is, people won't get sick. They often travel to the outrowns together to reduce the cost, sharing a small boat. It's a rare example of a nonprofit in the government working together without competing or doing the same thing twice. At first, Marianne explained, people weren't sure that such a tiny filter could make such a big difference. So, Kio worked with the EPA to use a visual test

for microbial activity to show people how effective it was. Here she is explaining how the EPA help Kio build trust in the efficacy of the soil filters. When sires and Kio approached us with the filters, before that, a lot of people were already asking us. So can we trust this? Can you do a test in your lab to tell us and confirm that this is as good as they claim it to be. Doing the test allowed the EPA to help KIO get greater uptake for their filters

and allowed KIO to help the EPA achieve one of its mandated goals. And so when we produce these very visual like quanta, quanta or quantitres the experts will get into it. But when we produce them and show a visual contrast between the water before the filter and then the water before the after the filter, filtration, it was you know amazing like it's so clean and clean and we make decisions based on science and that science right there. And so we use that visual photograph outside of that meeting to show people, we're not going to get into the microbeals or whatever.

This is the difference, the water before the filter and then after. And so we're just really happy that Kio was able to include us. This is one of our mandates, but we never resource that way to do all of the things that we want to do to address water quality issues. Of course, it's impossible to deal with a water issue in isolation. Everything in the martial islands are really anywhere else where your paying attention has to take into account the impact of climate change and how communities are going to survive when faced with an increasingly hostile home planet.

Marianne explained how access to clean water helps make the community in the Marshall Island even more resilient. Well, if you're trying to survive, the last thing you want to worry about is an outbreak of diarrhea or epitides, say, or, you know, water-borne diseases that are preventable and so clean water you know you're much much more better as a community if you can thrive and on clean water it's as simple as that water is life. One night during my trip to the Marshall Islands, I was able to join Kia for a dinner that celebrated the completion of their water project,

meaning that everyone in the Marshall Islands had access to water that won't make them sick. To get a better sense of what this really means, I wanted to talk to some families who had received those filters and to see what the clean water access meant to them. We've all heard that water is life, and that was a slogan used for Kio's project. But it's difficult to appreciate that if you live in a place where you can just turn on a tap and have access to clean, safe water in every one. When Kio made their posters for that dinner, they included a photo of a little girl on Arno Island who had been one of the first to receive their filters, happily drinking from a jar of clean water.

That was back in 2018. Since then, they thought they'd heard the terrible news that she died, but just before the dinner they found out she hadn't. And so they invited her to join the celebration. I was able to sit down with her, her mother, and other recipients of the filters, for a quick interview via translator, on the tiny island of Bokunvot. water before they would drink straight for water wells or the water catchments. Sometimes she said people would get sick. We also spoke to Aniti, a resident of wrong wrong on the day that she got her filter. Francine helped to translate her responses. Yeah, what? I buy 90.

Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome, dad. Yeah. Go with dad. Yeah. Okay. But she had heard about that there was going to be filters coming to the island.

When she first heard, she thought the filters were going to go directly to the water tanks. And now that it's more accessible, it's like she saw this bucket, she's happy. It's better. It's better. Yeah. Yeah. Recently, there had been an It's better. It's better. Yeah. Recently, there had been an outbreak of diarrhea around the atoll. So this was a welcome relief.

So she had heard that there was uptick of cases in Maduro, the capital, and when she had first learned about it, she was scared and worried. But to hear that there's folks coming here to the island to check on the water, it made them feel a little bit more, you know, at ease. The family from Arno, who traveled a long way on a small boat to meet us, were looking forward to getting back to their home.

Life on the outer of tolls isn't easy, but it's not one they want to walk away from. With the threat of climate change already putting their home in peril, having access to clean water must be a welcome relief. I asked you to say preferred life here on the capital of toll, or back home. Yeah, she says life in the outer islands is better, there is more space, more freedom to move around for the kids. There are things she'd like to change, of course, but mostly her concern was preserving

their little piece of paradise for future generations. She'd like her kids to be able to enjoy access to clean water, whether it be through more water catchments that are being available to the family, and also electric city, as mentioned, perhaps with the generator, stuff like that, to make life more easier in the outarounds. She'd like to, you know, like in the future be able to see the fishing grounds preserved as well as the land

or their farming needs. The way Kio works with local communities, because they're from local communities, enables them to be much more effective than a non-profit which comes from outside the community. On wrong wrong, they joked and laughed with local women. Monique's husband comes from the island, so they were already welcome. And then after some time bantering, they explain the way to water filters work. In Marshallese families, there's still a fairly gendered division of labor in many cases, and it seemed to be that the women on the island were the ones who stayed to learn about

the filters, so it was appropriate that it was women who were teaching them. Preservation doesn't mean there can't be change. The Marshall Islands have seen a huge change in the last few years. And much of that is down to the dedicated work of a large number of women who have formed community groups to empower each other and address social, ecological and public health issues that are facing their communities. The umbrella organisation that works with these women's groups is called Wutme. I'll let Maria from Wutme explain what that means and why they started the group in

the first place. First of all, welcome. As you know, Wutme stands for Women United to the other martial elements. It also means in martial arts your flower. And that's how we wanted the acronym to be to mean both English and martial arts. And as Daisy said, it was established in 1987 to fill a gap with respect to the advancement of women.

In 1975 there was the decade for women, you end decade for women. And there were two conferences that took place and there were a lot of issues that came about in those two meetings. They were dealing with domestic violence, alcohol abuse, suicide abuse, other problems, child abuse and neglect.

So from those women started to meet at least some women, started to talk about this, because they were no representatives of women in the decision-making bodies, whether at the local government level or at the national level. So that's... And we got the support of our traditional women leaders. What made works alongside traditional leaders are not around them. The same was true of all the programmes that have been successful on the islands. On our last day we visited WAM, the programme that builds the canoes we heard about. Although the programme was founded to preserve the cultural heritage of the islands and their unique seafaring technologies, some of which are only just being replicated in modern

craft in Europe and the USA, it also responded to a need that the community had, in this case that need was education. So, we are a training program for at risk young men and women of the martial arts. It started out as a project back in the 80s, one of our co-founder of this program, the museum contracted him to go through various islands within the Republic. And we were talking about back in the 80s and we were losing our designs fast. People were coming to Maduro or going to the States, which is going off islands to the many regions. And because of that, they wanted to capture that uniqueness of this design.

But when he was going through from one at also another, he noticed that there were a lot of young kids not going to school. So I'm not sure if you're aware of it, but throughout the Republic, there's only about four or five ice pools, and most of them are 40 schools. So for example, I grew up in Jaluit and in that at all there's a ice pool boarding ice pool and then it gators to about six or seven other athletes. So parents have no choice but to send their kids if they want to pull beyond angry, you have to live home and go to these boarding schools. In addition to offering a skill set and an education, the programme has counsellors in mental health and addiction. They teach young men and women maths, literacy and how to build the canoes.

But they also empower them in creating the sustainable alternative transport method that will be vital in building a sustainable future for their home. Likewise, what neither approach is based on listening to people. Women, chiefs, we let them know what we'll be doing and what they want us to do. And we asked them to talk with their, you know, like, because these women chiefs are owning some of the neighboring islands and they know their people. And do need the assistance of the end. We understand what their needs are because all the neighboring islands are different needs. They make an effort to tie their efforts to traditional Marshallese principles and in doing so, they keep their cultural life.

So being together and getting this, the other thing that would be asked is connect our being to our culture. Being a motorlinial society, we have different sayings or traditional goals of women. And then we have the domestic balance when it's called, where do we know? Where do we mean it not to be killed? As opposed to being abused. So, where do we live somewhere you go to and you're able to live freely or in being, I mean, you're well protected. So, all our conferences, we do use these traditional, so that it's something that it's not new, it's traditional. So they cannot do that because it's a tradition,

and we keep the culture alive through that way as well. Almost everyone you've heard from in this series, aside from the man, is a member of Kio or Whitme or both. Kio is one of the chapters of Whitme, and many of the Kio leaders as the daughters of Whitme's leadership. Whitme have implemented parent as teacher early childhood education programs, domestic violence prevention programs, and many other social, economic, and political programs across the islands. The results are easy to see. All over the Marshall Islands, government offices and NGOs are run by women now. The Marshall Islands had the first woman president in the whole Pacific, and she was elected in January 2016, a year when rampant misogyny was more evident than ever in the United States presidential election.

Of course, many marshals women go to the United States, and what these members are no exception. One of the major challenges has been to make sure that we keep the organization intact. Because it's especially in present time, because there's a lot of migration that we have to constantly work, especially with women in the Arab and where they come and then they'll stay long in the urban areas that just migrate out. So now there are so many of them that they're trying to form women's group in the Arab, in the United States as well. Now they're very interesting. women's group in the United States as well. Now we're very interested. So we'll take a moment to visit us

and we communicate with them occasionally, sharing information or other issues. Because what issues they experience here, they also experience in the United States. And so they need to be aware of how we're trying to deal with those. But many women also go to the US for their education and then return to be part of their community

and help lift their community up. Now, thanks to Whitby's hard work and the government's efforts, women don't have to leave to get these skills. The energy department has trained women on outer islands, for example, to fix their empower grids. Yeah, so we're kind of all over the place and one time we went and actually trained a community of all women. We had to include men to allow women to be part of the training. And we have nine women that graduated, certified trainers. And we awarded them with tools and everything.

So when there is power outages in their solar home systems, they can address it. And Grace, who's in the middle, that's the island where she's from, where we train the woman to become trainers. And it's our first ever. So when we found that it was successful, we tried to extend it out to the other islands. So I think that's one of the reasons why it's

difficult for countries such as us, where we've been colonized and trying to find a balance between a modern-day government, form of democracy, where your taught that individualism is important and your rights are important. And then you have your traditional structure when you grow up, you're taught that it's a collective society. Your priorities are important, respecting, your thoughts are not worth it, your elders and your chiefs in. So I think that's where we have to find the balance. This comment that Angeline made in our chat after her excellent presentation on energy

sovereignty really got me thinking about the post-colonial future of the martial islands. Today, they're empowered as an independent nation, but they still have to exist within a framework where corporations and more powerful governments don't have to pay for the consequences of their actions. In 2022, the US unsealed an indictment of a Chinese couple who bribed five Marshaly's members of parliament and attempted to bribe a six in order to help them carve out a kind of mini-state, a so-called special economic zone, as a tax haven on wrongful appertoll. This is one of the places heavily impacted by the nuclear testing we spoke about earlier.

Hilda Hain, among others, opposed this. She said, economic development is and should be encouraged, but not at the expense of money laundering and other similarly ill activities that are usually a part of money laundering. As was obvious in the Rungal Appetol Special Administrative Region legislation, the people of Rungal App deserved better standards of living and economic development. Well, there's no evidence of CCP involvement in the scheme, it came as part of a large panic about Beijing's influence in the region. In 2022, the Solomon Islands signed a pact with China to help improve their internal security. And China has already provided the Solomon's with police training and donated replica

guns and riot control equipment such as water counter vehicles. The Solomon Islands are still covered in bombs from the US and Japan's fighting in the Pacific, but instead of helping dispose of these, this form of investment is sending more weapons to the government, not help to the people there. According to a recent published study in the journal Science, the world's corporations produce so much climate change causing pollution that it would eat up 44% of their profits if they had to pay damages for the impact of their activity. Your reusable straw might help and it's good that you're using it. But until the world and giant corporations especially listen to the voices of people impacted by our choices, things won't change.

I want to end by talking about the future of the Marshall Islands and how Marshallese people are determining that. In the last century, they've been let down by the League of Nations, who reallocated the islands to the Japanese under Southeast Mandate, then let down by the US and the UN after the war, and they're still being let down by international institutions today when their demands for climate fail are ignored. But this doesn't mean they can't benefit from international solidarity. It was American-made water filters, and a significant donation from a company better known for hiking,

that helped every single person in the Marshall Islands get clean water. It was green peas who relocated people when the US government wouldn't, and it was Marshallese women who took weak long-northes are inducing boat rides across dangerous seas to distribute those water filters that save lives in places where there's less access to care. With access to the right resources, and international solidarity and goodwill, the possibilities for the Marshall Islands seem endless.

They've endured world war, survived the dropping of the atom bomb. And they're adapting to climate change by centering community and their obligations to each other, rather than trying to each take what they can and get out. With access to clean water and homes free of smoke, their children will be healthier, and every child I met on the island seemed to have bright hopes for the future. I met one kid who wanted to be a basketball player, and another who aspired to apparently be as tall as I am. People in the islands don't focus on their past, but on their future, and with a little

solidarity and decency from the rest of the world, they have a very bright one. I wonder if any series with the explanation we got from what me of the Marshallies flag? It's a great flag by the way, and you should look it up if you haven't seen it. It's one of the most common flags of convenience for merchant vessels all over the world. I've seen it in several continents but never really knew what it meant. At least for now, it seemed to mean that these tiny islands, which have been through so much, still have great hopes for the future. The Martian is black. There's two, the orange and the white right. And they represent the red, the chain and the red and the chain.

The sunrise, chain of diamonds and the sunset, chain of diamonds, which form the martial arts. So there's two lines. But those lines, there's one orange and one white. Orange is for courage. It's called peel and the white is for peace. So what these lines are not parallel. I mean they they become larger as they move up and they don't start from the corner. They start from a little bit over the corner of the flag, meaning that we have a past.

We didn't start from the beginning when we started this new government in 1979. And then you move south, it doesn't go all the way to the corner at the top, because we're always growing. So, you know, we're always growing. We need to grow. It's very important. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media.

For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit website, CoolZoneMedia.com, or check us out on the IHART radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here, update it monthly at CoolZoneMedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. History meets excitement at Senna Gbuffalo Creek Casino. Walking distance from all of Buffalo's best attractions, Senna Gbufflo Creek Casino is the perfect addition to your Buffalo to-do list. Enjoy the thrill of gaming and gourmet cuisine

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