Now that I take the bus or the bicycle, I rarely catch The Current. Today, however, I drove to SFU for a meeting and was treated to two pieces worth listening to. The first was on Indonesia and its spate of recent disasters, natural and otherwise:
In the two-plus years since an estimated 160,000 Indonesians were killed in the 2004 tsunami, thousands more have died in earthquakes, hundreds have perished in landslides and floods and hundreds more in plane crashes and ferry accidents. There have been three aircraft accidents involving Boeing 737s since New Year's Day. Infact, more people died in disasters in Indonesia than in any other country last year. And as if to add insult to injury, the environment ministry says 2,000 of the archipelago's 17,000 islands could disappearing under rising sea levels caused by climate change over the next 25 years.
The most interesting speaker was Debby Guha-Sapir, the director of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Leuven in Brussels, Belgium. She correctly laid a fair amount of blame at the feet of corrupt government officials' failures to avoid and / or mitigate many of these catastrophes.
The second segment dealt with the battle over creationism in science classrooms in Turkey, and touched on how Muslim and Christian fundamentalists are finding common cause in their desire to push back the Enlightenment.
Now THAT was high quality radio.
The audio can be reached by clicking through the link above.
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