New World Notes - Plutopia (Second of 2 parts)

This week on New World Notes: radio program #349, November 11, 2014, from 12:00 to 12:30 p.m. (and on Wednesday from 8:30 to 9:00 p.m.), host Kenneth Dowst presents the second part of Kate Brown's fascinating history.

Current events--Halloween, early Christmas ads, and a plutonium explosion in New Mexico--lead us to Kate Brown's history of two utopian factory towns created in the 1940s: Richland, WA; and Ozersk, Russia.

Both factories made plutonium. To ensure obedient workers, each government built a wonderful town, restricted freedom, controlled the press, kept out minorities, spied--and gave workers an amazingly high standard of living.

Through radioactive poisoning of the environment, both factories also destroyed the lives of their workers and many other people in the region. Over four decades, each factory polluted the environment with twice the radiation released at Chernobyl.

It's quite a story. And it's still going on.

And maybe Richland is not just a place but also a metaphor for our whole consumer culture--and our willingness to give up liberty and even health in exchange for a luxurious lifestyle.

Today's show includes an introduction by K.D.

Kate Brown is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She spoke in Seattle on July 22, 2013. Original recording (video) courtesy of Pirate TV. Audio (here lightly edited by KD) courtesy of UnwelcomeGuests.net.

New World Notes is produced under the auspices (Latin for "counter") of WWUH-FM, a community service of the University of Hartford.

You can listen to any installment of New World Notes online or else download it (as an mp3 audio file) for later listening. The show is archived at both A-Infos Radio Project and (from #90 onwards) the Internet Archive. Either link should get you a reverse-chronological listing of available installments. Or browse the show's Web site: Each installment has a page; each page has links to the recorded audio; and a handy table of contents will quickly find the installment you want.

Series overview: Political and social commentary in a variety of genres. Exploring the gap between what we want--and what they're trying to make us settle for.

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