Book Week

Ralph welcomes six authors to discuss their books: “Beyond Nuclear” founder Linda Gunter; trial lawyer Sean Simpson; law professor Elizabeth Burch; naturalist David Schmidt; industrial hygienist Marc Axelrod; and educator and advocate Jonathan Kozol.
Linda Gunter is the founder of the US-based non-profit Beyond Nuclear and serves as its international specialist. Previously, she was a journalist at USA Network, Reuters, and The Times. She launched, and writes for Beyond Nuclear’s online magazine, Beyond Nuclear International. And she is the author of No To Nuclear: Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress and Provokes War.
We need to reduce the most carbon, the fastest, for the least cost—and that’s renewables every time. But it’s also an issue of: as we divert funds towards nuclear power (new reactors, which are not here now, they’re just aspirational ideas on paper, none of the designs have certifications or licenses yet) as we divert time and our money towards waiting for something that will perhaps take a decade or two (or never) to materialize, and as we squeeze out renewables in the process, what do we do? We continue to burn fossil fuels. So actually, choosing nuclear as an answer to climate makes the climate crisis worse.
Linda Gunter
Sean Simpson is an attorney specializing in civil jury trials, representing individuals who have been harmed by someone else’s carelessness or intentional wrongdoing. He is the author of Punitive Damages: The Lawyer’s Tool for Shaping Society.
[Punitive damages are] typically not covered by insurance. But oddly enough, there’s a trend coming now where these corporations—because they’re in control, we’ve let them have the reins, and now they’re getting insurance companies to sell them coverage to cover their punitive damages, which is totally a 180. If somebody else is going to pay your punishment for you, it’s not going to sting your rump if somebody gets spanked on somebody else’s behind.
Sean Simpson
Elizabeth Burch is a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, and co-author of Perceptions of Justice in Multidistrict Litigation: Voices from the Crowd. She is the author of The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America’s Lawsuit Factory.
Imagine that you are sitting in your kitchen and you get a phone call one night. And you answer, and the person on the other end of the line knows an inordinate amount of information about you—they know your name, they know your birth date, they know the name of your doctor, the name of your hospital, the date and type of medical implant that you had put in you. And then they tell you that you have a ticking time bomb in you. And if you don’t have this removed immediately (that in this case was pelvic mesh, which is designed to deal with incontinence and pelvic organ prolapse) that you are going to die. But not to worry, they are setting up appointments down in South Florida to have the mesh removed. What they don’t say is all of the important things.
Elizabeth Burch
David Schmidt is lifelong San Francisco Bay Area resident, naturalist, and environmental historian. He worked as a writer in the public affairs office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in San Francisco from 1991 to 2021, led dozens of hikes for the Greenbelt Alliance in the region’s extensive public parklands, and volunteered on habitat restoration projects for the Golden Gate National Parks and the California Native Plant Society. He is the author of San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History.
I think [the environmental movement in the Bay Area] is the most successful regional environmental movement in US history. Its victories have had a tremendous impact on protecting the natural landscape, the agricultural landscape. And this is a landscape that is famous for its scenic beauty. It’s among the world’s most biodiverse landscapes with more than a thousand species of plants and wildlife. And persistence pays off. T...