Harvey speaks and writes widely on energy, the environment, history, election protection and politics. He teaches history and cultural & ethnic diversity at two central Ohio colleges, and is married with five daughters and five grandchildren.
Harvey works for the permanent shutdown of the nuclear power industry and the birth of Solartopia, a democratic and socially just green-powered Earth free of all fossil and nuclear fuels.
He writes regularly for a wide internet readership through Ecowatch, solartopia.org, freepress.org and nukefree.org, which he edits. He hosts the Solartopia Green Power & Wellness Show at www.prn.fm.
He has an MA from the University of Chicago and a BA from the University of Michigan, both in history, and has authored or co-written a dozen books and countless articles, essays, op eds, etc. Howard Zinn, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Marianne Williamson, Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, Bonnie Raitt, Dennis Kucinich, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Ed Asner, Ina Mae Gaskin, Ralph Nader and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., are among those who have introduced or endorsed his books. With Pete Seeger and David Bernz he co-wrote the "Song for Solartopia" which is featured on the Grammy-winning "Tomorrow's Children" CD. The "RockyTop" version is by Dana "Cows With Guns" Lyons.
Harvey went to his first demonstration in 1962, helping to de-segregate a roller rink in Columbus. He briefly met Dr. Martin Luther King on the Meredith March for civil rights in Grenada, Mississippi, in 1966.
As a student editor at the University of Michigan Daily, his 1966 editorial "The Use of Marijuana: It Should be Legal" went global on the wire services. His recent PASSIONS OF THE POTSMOKING PATRIOTS, written as "Thomas Paine," portrays George Washington as a gay hemp head.
Active in the movement against the war in Vietnam, Harvey marched on the Pentagon in 1967 and the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968. He helped found the legendary anti-war Liberation News Service, which was broken up in 1968 by the FBI's COINTELPRO operation. He then helped found the communal organic Montague Farm in Massachusetts, a pioneer in a new generation's movement against chemical farming.
In 1972 HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE U.S., introduced by Howard Zinn, published by Harper & Row, helped pave the way for a new generation of people's histories.
In 1973 Harvey coined the phrase "No Nukes" and helped found the global grassroots movement against atomic energy, for which he has spoken throughout the US, Asia and Europe. In 1976-8 he helped coordinate mass non-violent demonstrations against reactors being built in Seabrook, New Hampshire. In 1979 he was part of the legendary Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) No Nukes Concerts in Madison Square Garden and sister rally at Battery Park City. He edited the informational booklet that accompanied the ensuing gold triple album.
In 1982 Harvey co-wrote KILLING OUR OWN: THE DISASTER OF AMERICA'S EXPERIENCE WITH ATOMIC ENERGY, the first major book to assert that people died at Three Mile Island. In 1990 he became Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA, for whom he spoke to 350,000 semi-conscious rock fans at Woodstock 2 in 1994. In Kiev in 1996 he spoke at the tenth anniversary commemoration of the Chernobyl disaster, and then in Kaliningrad, in the former Soviet Union, where he met with "liquidators" whose lives and health had been sacrificed in the Chernobyl clean-up.
In central Ohio, Harvey co-founded the Great Blue Heron Alliance, which saved 240 acres of land for a wildlife refuge and other grassroots organizations which forced shut a trash-burning power plant, stopped a regional radioactive waste dump, shut a McDonald’s and saved the city of Bexley’s Jeffrey Park.
With Dan Juhl, Harvey co-wrote "Harvesting Wind Energy as a Cash Crop," a guide for farmer/community-owned renewables.
In 2004 Harvey and Bob Fitrakis broke many of the major stories on the theft of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio. Called "the Woodward and Bernstein" of election protection by Rev. Jackson Jackson, Fitrakis and Wasserman have published six books on the American art of vote counting and curtailment.
In 2007 Harvey joined with Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash to form NukeFree.org as part of a successful national grassroots campaign to stop $50 billion in loan guarantees to build new reactors. Harvey now edits the www.nukefree.org website which posts a constant stream of articles on nuclear power and green energy. He continues to campaign for a green-powered Earth, against federal funding and all other new nuke boondoggles, against the drug war, and for a system of automatic voter registration and universal hand counted paper ballots---key elements on the road to Solartopia. On the morning of March 11, 2011, Harvey was among the first to break the news of the Fukushima disaster, about which he continues to write at EcoWatch and nukefree.org.
