Scroll Down in this frame for the opening chapter of our story in pictures...
Media Activism for System Change
Chapter 1
In 1982 the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement was growing in response to the horrible consequences of Hiroshima and Nagaaki and nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific. The Micronesian island nation of Palau's world-precedent-setting nuclear free constitution was vehemently opposed by the Washington. Heddle left a 15-year academic career in communications and psychology to begin a film aimed at catalyzing international support for Palau.
Heddle interviews a Palauan Rubok (village chief) with Darren Stucker on sound and Steve Naczinski on camera. The 16mm film equipment, though portable, still requires a two-person crew. Our approach as media activists has co-evolved with developing technologies and changing social movement strategies and tools. From the occasional PBS broadcast and xeroxed newsletters to posting on Twitter & YouTube.
Strategic Trust: The Making of Nuclear Free Palau is released in 1984 funded by Corporation for Public Broadcasting and foundation grants. It's broadcast nationally on PBS as well as internationally, screened in festivals, the United Nations, the U.S. Congress and parliaments, libraries and universities world wide. It helps put Palau on the map of mainstream media.
In New York, Mary Beth Brangan and Director Heddle accept the National Library Association's American Film Festival First Prize Award for their first TV documentary Strategic Trust. Brangan had left Dow Chemical determined to become an environmental and human rights activist. The pair met thanks to visionary futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard.
In Washington, D.C., the film's narrator, actress Joanne Woodward, is interviewed on the six o'clock news about Palau's right to be nuclear free. Mary Beth, while a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), organized media outreach and lawmaker-sponsors for a letter demanding Palau's rights as well as a Congressional screening of the flim. Woodward introduced the session.
(right to left) Mary Beth with Woodward, Representative Salla Burton (D-CA) and her chief aid Judy Lemon and another staffer before the showing and discussion. Congresswoman Burton was one of many sponsors of the Congressional screening of Strategic Trust, which was held in the same chamber where the Nixon impeachment hearings had occurred. Reagan/Bush officials showed up to attack the film.
Heddle waits to speak at the screening, as Admiral Eugene Carroll from Washington's Center For Defense Information (CDI) explains why Palau's nuclear free constitution is not 'a threat to America's security,' as Reagan/Bush Administration officials are claiming.
In the decade following the screening of Strategic Trust at the U.N., working with Greenpeace,AFSC, World Council of Churches and other NGOs, we shuttled back and forth many times between Palau, Congress and the U.N. Trusteeship Council, organizing, documenting and reporting on Palauans' and other Pacific Islanders ongoing efforts to defend their human and environmental rights.
Passing through Guam sometime in the '80's.
Guam is a key stronghold in Washington's 'power projection' network of bases throughout the Pacific - described, for good reason - the 'American Lake.'

The U.S military holds jurisdiction over its several Guam bases, already covering 39,000 acres, or 29% of the island's total land area, a military presence which is about to expand under Obama.

Still, Guam is a tiny fraction of Washington's far-flung empire of 865 military facilities worldwide.
1986 - We begin the Nuclear Sovereignty Project to inform and catalyze support for the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement.
We mailed out our xeroxed newsletters nationally and internationally. So 20th century! This was before internet, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Today, it would be a blog.
Heddle interviews Paluan President Lazarus Salii on a subsequent shooting trip with award-winning filmmakers Judy Irving and Chris Beaver (Dark Circle). Our reports were picked up major U.S. newspapers and used in Congressional hearings investigating corruption in Palau. Salii's later death was termed a 'suicide,' but some suspected assassination - the second violent death of a Paluan president.
Our video report 'Palalu Plebiscite '86' was presented as part of our Congressional testimony on behalf of Palauan rights to their 'nuclear sovereignty.' We began to report on the manipulation of Palauan elections - the start of our life-long advocacy of transparent, fair elections and deep democracy.
Brangan and Heddle testify on Palauan issues before an investigative committee chaired by the late John Seiberling. Palau was a U.S. 'Trust Territory' under the UN Trusteeship Council. Washington forced Palauans to vote 10 times on a so-called 'Compact of Free Association,' which would have guaranteed US aid in return for repeal of Palau's nuclear free constitution.
Jakob VonUexhall, then Member of the European Parliament and founder of the Right Livelihood Foundation, testifies on Palau's behalf. The Right Livelihood Award -known as the 'alternative Nobel Prize' - was awarded in 1983 to Palau's High Chief Ibedul Gibbons on behalf of the Palauan people's efforts to save their nuclear free constitution.
Sebia Hawkins, then Director of the Greenpeace Pacific Campaign, testifies on her organization's opposition to Pentagon plans to make Palau a US naval base for nuclear armed and powered warships.
Hawkins and Greenpeace were a major force in international organizing in support of Pacific Peoples' rights.
As a result of corruption, political murders and a "reign of terror" by opponents of the nuclear free constitution, Palau finally gets mainstream media attention (thanks to support from Michelle Syverson and Sue Dakin), from Hugh Downs, Barbara Walters, Judy Woodruff, Jonathan Kwitny in the U.S., on the UK's Channel 4 and Australia's Dateline.
Having broken the story, we provided consulting and footage, particularly for the Frontline and British Channel 4 piece produced by our friend Alan Hayling.
1994 - Palau revisited. We were awarded a PBS production grant to report on Palau 10 years after Strategic Trust. The result, Islands on the Edge of Time found Palau's elite had illegally reversed the nuclear free constitutional clause after 11 forced elections. Palau was now under assault by 'development' and pollution, yet a decade of work by local and international activists had kept it from becoming a US nuclear base.
Here we are at Islands' premiere at San Francisco's Asian American Film Festival with co-writer, Palauan poet Meikam Weers and cameraman Fred Cook. The film was screened at the Hawaii Film Festival and toured nationally by the Margaret Mead Film Festival.
Co-Produced with award-winning filmmaker David L. Brown in 1989, Free Zone: Democracy Meets the Nuclear Threat was an international portrait of the worldwide movement for local, national and regional nuclear free zones.
Free Zone was broadcast in the U.S. and internationally, cited in a film history textbook, and remains a definitive film history of that period's grassroots nuclear free zone movement. Through including them in the film, we connected with anti-nuclear activists in Kazakhstan, site of U.S.S.R. nuclear testing. By this time we were living in Northern California in a (somewhat) intentional community, Laughing Cat Farm.
At the beginning of the first Gulf War we held a dispair and empowerment retreat for our anguished activist friends.
Laughing Cat was visited by many international and national activists over the years for rest and rejuvenation.
1991 - Mary Beth discovers that the nuclear industry intends to locate a radioactive waste dump in California's Mojave Desert near the Colorado River, the source of drinking water for Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson and northern Mexico. The lethal dump was to be unlined trenches on land sacred to Native American tribes and critical habitat for the endangered ancient desert tortise.
MB became a key original organizer of citizen opposition to the Ward Valley dump plan, which evolved over several years into a state- and nation-wide force of diverse citizen groups and indigenous tribes.
Here we are at the proposed dumpsite with the late, beloved activist and organizer Anthony Guarisco, an atomic veteran and Founder/Director of the International Alliance of Atomic Veterans.
Mary Beth and a friend painting the Coalition's official 'Tortisemobile,' used catalyze public opposition to the Ward Valley nuke dump, which would have endangered water supplies for 23 million people. Our film Choicepoint: California's Water and Radioactive Waste documents the campaign.
In a scene from the film Brangan speaks at a Sacramento press conference against the dump plan with then Representative, now Senator Barbara Boxer. We had begun the Nuclear Democracy Network to insist on our rights to be free from the threats of nuclear power and weapons.
After a ten year fight, the dump was eventually defeated.
We subsequently produced Peligro!: Nuclear Showdown on the Rio Grande, a documentary on the grassroots fight to stop a proposed nuclear waste dump near the Rio Grande in Sierra Blanca, Texas.
Peligro! was screened at the Dallas International Film Festival and used in Univ. of Texas libraries. It also tells the story of a successful campaign - the Sierra Blanca dump was stopped, too.
Democracy, Nukes and Human Rights