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,[1] 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."[2]
In 1973 he helped pioneer the global grassroots movement against atomic reactors, and helped coin the phrase "No Nukes" in 1974.[3] He was a media spokesperson for the Clamshell Alliance, and helped organize mass demonstrations at Seabrook, N.H. against reactors being built there. Rolling Stone magazine featured Wasserman in its 1979 cover story on the Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE), which staged five concerts organized by Wasserman in Madison Square Garden in 1979 shortly after the Three Mile Island accident, including New York City's 1979 "No Nukes" concerts and rally (featuring Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, CSN, James Taylor and others).
Wasserman's widespread appearances throughout the major media and at campuses and citizen gatherings have focused since the 1960s on energy, the environment, nuclear power, United States history, and election protection. In 1968 he helped found the legendary anti-war Liberation News Service, and Massachusetts' communal/organic Montague Farm, now home to the Zen Peacemaker Community, International.
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[4] and the WinterStar Symposium (a Starwood interview is documented in the book People of the Earth by Ellen Evert Hopman[5]. 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.
Wasserman has been an instructor of history at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, and in Ohio at Columbus State Community College and Capital University. Based in Ohio, Wasserman works to replace the Perry and Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant with renewables and efficiency, and has helped his friends shut a trash burning power plant, a proposed radioactive waste dump, the two Zimmer and Perry nukes, a refuge-threatening housing development and a McDonald's. He currently works through Farmers Green Power in Ohio and elsewhere to promote farmer/community owned wind power and other renewables.
Wasserman's articles have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and other major newspapers, and in Rolling Stone Magazine, The Nation, Mother Jones Magazine and other magazines. His first book, Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States, was first published by Harper & Row (NY) in 1972 (introduced by Howard Zinn), with approximate sales of 30,000 copies. (The book has been republished by Four Walls, Eight Windows (NY), and through www.harveywasserman.com.)
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.[6]