Harvey Wasserman

Harvey Franklin Wasserman (born December 31, 1945) is an American journalist, author, democracy activist, and advocate for renewable energy. He has been a strategist and organizer in the anti-nuclear movement in the United States for over 30 years. He has been a featured speaker on Today, Nightline, National Public Radio, CNN Lou Dobbs Tonight and other major media outlets. Wasserman is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, an investigative reporter, and senior editor of The Columbus Free Press where his coverage, with Bob Fitrakis, has prompted Rev. Jesse Jackson to call them "the Woodward and Bernstein of the 2004 election." He lives with his family in the Columbus, Ohio, area.

Anti-nuclear work

In 1973 he helped pioneer the global grassroots movement against atomic reactors, and helped coin the phrase "No Nukes" in 1974.

Education

Wasserman received a Bachelor of Arts in American History from the University of Michigan in 1967, where he was a member of both the Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi academic honor societies. He also earned a Public Teaching Certificate from New York University in 1968, and then a Master of Arts in American History from the University of Chicago in 1974.

Public appearances

On behalf of Greenpeace USA, Wasserman addressed 350,000 concert-goers at the Woodstock 1994 Festival. He has been a frequent speaker at both the Starwood Festival and the WinterStar Symposium (a Starwood interview is documented in the book People of the Earth by Ellen Evert Hopman). According to records from the Greater Talent Network (NY), he has addressed several score campus audiences since 1982 on issues of energy, the environment, politics and history.

Written works

In the book Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation, Wasserman relates stories about people and animals living near nuclear weapons facilities, mining and waste storage sites, uranium processing plants, and nuclear power reactors. For example, farmers in central Pennsylvania whom he spoke to reported abnormalities in their animals in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. Farmers living near the Rocky Flats plutonium factory in Colorado, and near the West Valley Reprocessing Plant in upstate New York, have also complained of defects and illnesses among their animals.