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The Green Planet Monitor

The Green Planet Monitor

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  • Zines From Gaza

    Zines From Gaza
    Jul 18 2026
    In Gaza today, rendered largely uninhabitable after a thousand days of joint US-Israeli genocide, young women and men are writing poetry — and publishing it. Inside Nazi Germany’s ghettos and concentration camps — Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Dachau, Buchenwald — Jewish poets wrote poetry too. Inside Israel-USA’s concentration camp on the Mediterranean, poets are organizing themselves. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Coastal Lines Press is a new Gaza poetry collective, currently consisting of 38 writers. Facilitated by a global network of illustrators and distributors, they aim “to turn words into life-saving supplies for their families.” “Like vessels at sea,” Coastal Lines says at their website, Gaza zines “travel from coast to coast, drawing lines of human connection and solidarity.” Coastal Lines is also a fund-raising venture. Donations can be forwarded to each of the collective’s writers. Follow the QR codes and crowdfunding links at the Coastal Lines website. The GPM spoke with two of Coastal Lines’ poets, and will be speaking with more in the weeks to come. Noor Abu Mariam (Noor Arif) is a business administration student, social media coordinator with the Gaza Great Minds School, and a prolific writer. She has written for The Palestine Chronicle, Impulse, and We Are Not Numbers. The GPM connected with Noor in Gaza. We’ll feature our full conversation next week. Noor Abu Mariam For now, listen to Noor read two of her poems, sent to us by WhatsApp — ‘Waiting for the Butterfly’, and ‘Grief Came to Me Like a Monster’. Listen to Noor’s poems in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button on the top of this story, or go here. Listen to them here: The GPM also reached out to Lama Alharazin, speaking to us from the ruined apartment where she lives in Gaza City. Lama is 24 years-old. She received an English Literature and Translation degree at the Islamic University of Gaza in September 2023, a month before Hamas’ daring assault on southern Israel, and the start of Israel-USA’s genocidal assault on its Gaza concentration camp, now past its thousandth day. Lama’s university now lies in ruins, demolished by US bombs. She hopes to continue her education in the UK or Ireland. Lama has produced one zine to date, a collection of 21 poems entitled ‘Rain Was Once a Promise’. Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button on the top of this story, or go here. Listen to our complete conversation here: Rwandan genocide museum (David Kattenburg) In Rwanda, east/central Africa, the 32nd anniversary of the 1994 genocide has just come to a close. Over the course of those awful hundred days, between April 7 and July 15, 1994, an estimated eight hundred thousand ethnic Tutsis and a lesser number of their Hutu neighbors were brutally killed by Hutu extremists armed with knives, hoes and machetes. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Over Rwanda’s airwaves, venom flowed. Announcers at Radio-Television Mille Collines (from Rwanda’s popular nickname, the ‘Land of a Thousand Hills’), urged listeners to “kill the cockroaches.” Established in July 1993 by Hutu extremists “to create harmonious development in Rwandan society,” RTLM became the genocide’s key driving force, mobilizing grassroots members of the notorious Interahamwe militia. Fueling the furnace of racial hatred, RTLM chiefs distributed both machetes and cheap pocket radios, in huge numbers. Efforts to halt the genocide, through an enforceable UN resolution, were blocked by the Clinton White House. Unlike its open support for Israeli genocide in Gaza, thirty years later, US support for the Rwandan genocide was tacit and sophisticated. “[The] US wanted to see its imperial proxy, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) led by General Paul Kagame, seize power in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali,” this 2024 analysis says. “It wanted to displace France and the French language and establish itself as the dominant power in East and Central Africa. It wanted ready access to the immense mineral wealth of Rwanda’s neighbor, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which Rwanda and Uganda would invade two years later.” Listen to my documentary about the Rwandan genocide, produced back in 2009, for CBC Radio’s Dispatches program. Click on the podcast play button at the top of this story, or go here. Listen to another story of mine for CBC Radio, here: Donate with a $15/monthly subscription
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    59 Min.
  • Ocean’s Eleventh Hour

    Ocean’s Eleventh Hour
    Jun 27 2026
    Snowball Earth Long before the explosion of multicellular life in Earth’s oceans, a half billion years ago, those oceans were covered in ice hundreds of meters thick. Beneath that ice, darkness reigned, and photosynthetic organisms fell silent (there were no animals back then). Snowball Earth, is how geologists describe the planet back then. Joe Kirschvink, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, pioneered the concept in the early 1990s. Viewed from the moon during the Cryogenian and early Ediacaran periods of the Neoproterozoic Era of Earth time, between about 720 and 640 million years ago, Earth would have glistened like a snowball. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Two pan-planetary glaciation events have been documented — the Sturtian, between about 720 and 660 million years ago (mya), and the Marinoan, between about 645 and 640 mya. Take a close look at the top right of this chart Last week, the Canadian geologist who popularized Joe Kirschvink’s idea, helping to overcome widespread skepticism, gave a talk at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. Having earned a geology degree from McMaster University in 1964, Paul Hoffman worked for the Geological Survey of Canada for a while, studying Proterozoic geology across Canada’s north, then moved on to the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, at the University of Victoria. Hoffman is now Sturgis Hooper Professor Emeritus of Geology at Harvard University. I interviewed Paul Hoffman back in the early 1990s, for my Earth Chronicles series. At the time, Proterozoic carbonates and the involvement of plate tectonics in Earth’s early history were his areas of specialty. Hoffman was aware of Joe Kirschvink’s Snowball Earth idea, but never dug down into the details. In the course of geology fieldwork in northern Namibia, studying the relative proportion of carbon isotopes in sedimentary rock, his interest grew enormously. When I heard Paul Hoffman would be giving a talk at Mac about Snowball Earth, I registered. Hoffman’s mid-June presentation to a roomful of Mac grads — reviewing evidence for Snowball Earth from the fields of geochemistry, paleoclimatology, biology, and molecular phylogeny; outlining how life may have radiated from that exceptionally chilling experience (“the early Ediacaran fossil record (635-575 Ma) is understudied outside China”) — was both engaging and intellectually challenging. Afterward, Hoffman accompanied me to the studios of CFMU, where we sat down for a talk about Snowball Earth. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription Listen to our complete conversation here: California tide pool (David Kattenburg) Then there’s the status of Earth’s oceans today. Largely liquid, they’re in a worrisome state. Seventy percent of Earth’s surface is covered in ocean. Currently pegged at 8.4 billion – and growing – human populations have wreaked havoc on them, contaminating them with chemical substances of all sorts, monumental volumes of plastic, and megatons of terrestrial sediment. A third of the CO2 humans have pumped into the atmosphere over the course of the last 200 years, burning fossil fuels, has ended up in the oceans, acidifying them. Acidification pushes ocean carbonate chemistry out of long-established equilibrium, disrupting the ability of shell-forming plankton — the base of marine trophic chains — to build their shells. At the same time, ninety percent of anthropogenic, CO2-generated atmospheric heat has been absorbed by Earth’s oceans, both heating and expanding them. The rate of sea level rise has reportedly doubled over the past fifty years, threatening coastal communities around the world. Over a third of humanity lives within a hundred kilometers of the coast, mere meters above the ocean’s fast rising surface. Alongside changes in the physical structure and chemistry of Earth’s oceans, the animals and plants that call them home are taking a hammering. Impacts on coastal salt marshes, seagrass meadows, mangrove forests, and coral reefs — among the most productive, carbon-storing ecosystems on Earth — and on iconic marine mammals in both coastal and pelagic zones, are easy to observe. Much less easy to monitor are the extraordinary communities of free-floating plant and animal plankton, and soft-bodied benthic (bottom-dwelling) organisms inhabiting the depths of Earth’s open oceans, especially along submarine ridges and seamounts, on abyssal plains, and at the bottom of incomprehensibly deep trenches. Research continues to highlight the extraordinary lives of creatures few if any humans have ever observed. Their ability to thrive, unbeknownst to humans, is astonishing. Donate with a $15/monthly subscription If Earth’s ocean creatures are in trouble, so are humans. But ocean experts are hopeful. Oceans need to be managed more effectively. The GPM spoke about this ...
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    59 Min.
  • Earth in Motion

    Earth in Motion
    Jun 23 2026
    Love of Rock

    By David Kattenburg

    Between the winter of 1992 and spring 1994, backpack on my back and vintage, analog Nagra III reel-to-reel tape recorder over my shoulder, I traveled across Canada – twice — visiting places and interviewing people from Prince Edward Island to the west coast of Vancouver Island.

    Out of this audio-recording adventure, thirty-two hour-length docs emerged, exploring planet Earth, global ecology, and sustainable human development. The Earth Chronicles, the series was called. Together with co-producer Peter Hutton, I raised an astonishing $120,000 for the radio project (equivalent to about $220,000 dollars today).

    Producing The Earth Chronicles was a task of epic proportions. In a room at the Yellow Brick House, on Strathcona Street South, countless hours were spent listening back to all these voices, recorded on dozens and dozens of reels of quarter-inch tape; wax pencil and razor blade in hand, slicing, splicing and assembling voice sequences; lengths of magnetic tape around my neck, over my shoulder and knees, and piled up neatly across the floor.

    Across town, in the production studio of 93.3 CFMU, McMaster University Radio, thirty-two editions of the Earth Chronicles got mixed down, all perfectly narrationless — voicescapes.

    Here’s one of the first editions in the Earth Chronicles series, ‘Earth in Motion’. It features the voices of some of Canada’s most eminent geologists and Earth system scientists (William Fyfe, Digby McLaren, Paul Hoffman), and a host of other geologists and humble rock lovers.

    ‘Earth in Motion’ also features a singer-songwriter named Shawn O’Halloran.

    Shawn was one of Hamilton’s most talented artists. ‘Tectonics’ is one of fourteen songs he wrote for The Earth Chronicles, and performed, on guitar, accompanied by veteran Hamilton-area percussionist (and CFMU jazz host) Paul Panchezak. Shawn O’Halloran passed away in 2019, way before his time.

    Listen to ‘Earth in Motion’. Click on the play button above, or go here.
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