A Nobel Mandate

John Dear

ìWe will never win a war against terror as long as the conditions for poverty and injustice remain,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu said. ìPoverty breeds terrorism. So we should stop spending billions on weapons of destruction and instead feed the hungry people of the world. Then, we´ll stop terrorism. If we want to live in peace, we have to realize we are all members of the same family.”

Archbishop Tutu was just one of ten Nobel Peace prize winners speaking to three thousand youth last weekend in Denver at PeaceJam, an international program which brings youth from around the world together with Nobel Peace Laureates — ten of them in this case — the largest gathering ever in North America. Founded by a dynamic young couple, Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff, PeaceJam is one of the most exciting, empowering youth programs in the nation.

My friend Mairead Maguire, the Nobel laureate from Belfast, whose writings I edited into the collection, ìThe Vision of Peace,” asked me to accompany her to the events. I had traveled with her before, along with our friend Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the Nobel laureate from Argentina, to Iraq in 1999. And recently, Archbishop Tutu, laureate from South Africa, wrote a forward for my forthcoming Doubleday book, ìTransfiguration.”

Besides reconnecting with these heroes of mine, I got to meet Jose Ramos Horta, Prime Minister of East Timor; President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica; Jody Williams of the Landmines Campaign, Shrini Ebadi of Iran, Rigoberta Menchu Tum of Guatemala, and Betty Williams of Northern Ireland. And at one point during the weekend, I received a blessing from the Dalai Lama. The weekend concluded with a ìGlobal Call to Action with the Youth of the World,” a plea to fight poverty, racism, environmental destruction, war and nuclear weapons.

Such wondrously inspiring days. The weekend over, I drove Mairead to New Mexico, where she spoke in several churches and gave media interviews and toured Los Alamos.

It was gratifying to meet young people from around the world. At one point, hundreds lined up at the microphone to say briefly what inspires them, before they received Tutu´s blessing. One fifteen year old said, ìI´m inspired by all those who stand up against the current and speak out for peace. After all, only dead fish go with the flow!”

Still, I found myself moved most by the message of the laureates.

ìWar doesn´t work,” Mairead said over and over to the thousands who turned out. ìNuclear weapons don´t work. I don´t believe in a just war. The war on Iraq is totally immoral, totally illegal, and totally unnecessary. So we need to say no to war, and no to nuclear weapons. We need to learn the way of nonviolence.”

Said Shrini Ebadi, the brave judge from Iran: ìEvery nation with nuclear weapons should dismantle them immediately. I wish, for example, that after 9/11 the U.S. had built thousands of schools in Afghanistan in honor of each victim.”

Jose Ramos said, ìI´m worried about the consequences of nuclear proliferation. I´m worried that one day we will wake to find Washington, D.C. or London destroyed by biological attacks from non-state terrorists.”

And Jody Williams asked, ìWhat has the war and violence done in Iraq? It´s only turned Iraq into a training ground for terrorists. You cannot bring change through the barrel of a gun. If we really want to disarm the world of nuclear weapons, we should begin first here at home.”

ìWork for peace is really hard work,” she continued. ìPeacemaking means getting up every single day and working hard for global peace. It´s not doves or nice paintings or bad poetry; it´s hard work. And that´s the only way to make the world better. Peace is economic and social justice, and we have to work hard for that.”

President Oscar Arias pointed out that ìthe U.S. spends over half a trillion a year on militarism, but only a tiny fracture on food, medicine and education for the world´s poor. Real security means first of all security against hunger, disease, and poverty.”

And Rigoberta Menchu cut us to the core: ìIf there were no wars in the world, the U.S. economy would not prosper. Therefore, there must not be any more prosperity in the United States, if the world´s poor are to prosper.”

ìWorld peace begins with our personal inner disarmament,” the Dalai Lama taught. ìWe need to take seriously our religious traditions and inner life, then try to educate young people and future generations about the life of peace. And we have to recognize that all six billion of us are one.”

ìWhen I was tortured by the Argentine Junta,” Adolfo Perez Esquivel told us, ìI saw on the ceiling of my cell, written in blood, the words, ‘God does not kill.´ We need to learn that lesson, and resist the forces of death and destruction, and struggle for life and dignity for all. If we focus on this task, we can build peace.”

Betty Williams told us flatly: ìIf you are not trying to change what´s wrong in the world, you are part of the problem. Every one of us has a responsibility to look after humanity.”

And again Shrini Ebadi: ìWhen you believe in your cause, you will find strength to take another step forward, and you will make a difference. One day, God will ask us what we did with our lives, how we served humanity, so we better get on with that work.”

ìHow about exporting your generosity instead of your bombs?” Archbishop Tutu concluded, as he addressed thousands of young people. ìYou are the future of the world. Don´t become cynical like us old folks who made a mess of the world. The world is hurting. Go and heal it.”

ìWe need a new nonviolent, non-killing world. Is such a world possible? Of course it is,” Mairead Maguire said. ìBut we have to work for it. Get to work!”

A noble mandate for all of us.

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Reposted from Common  Dreams. The author John Dear is a Jesuit priest, peace activist and author of ìYou Will Be My Witnesses” (Orbis) and ìLiving Peace” (Doubleday). For information on the Nobel Laureates gathering, see: wwwpeacejam.org. For information on the campaign to stop the war on Iraq, see: www.declarationofpeace.org. See also: www.johndear.org.

September 11, 2006

James Howard Kunstler

This was the day five years ago that war began between the US and Jihad, an unincorporated combine of Islamic nations, gangs, sects and tribes united in a campaign to harm, disable, defeat, and exterminate “infidel” Christians and Jews. There are various explanations for why this started. I have my own.

It’s essentially an ecological crisis, conveniently pegged on an old religious beef. The population of many Islamic nations, fed by oil wealth, has reached critical overshoot. In particular, there are too many young men with no positions, no incomes, no prospects, and no hopes. Their glandular energies have been enlisted to act out the righting of real and imagined grievances against their”infidel”enemies. Their actions range from the sheer sadistic thuggery of small gangs to the strategic geopolitical maneuvers of major nation states.

We will be fighting with them for as far ahead as anyone can see, because our society can’t function without their leading (in some cases only) resource, oil, and we are used to getting regular supplies from them. To aggravate things, the world is in a peculiar situation with this resource. The shorthand phrase for it is “peak oil.”

Peak oil means that the oil-producing nations have reached their all-time maximum output and now face a certain relentless decrease in this resource and the wealth derived from it. This is especially problematical in a global economy based on steady incremental growth. Peak oil promises only incremental contraction in everything from industrial activity to available food. The people of the world will fight over what’s left and they will divide into teams to do this. Right now, two teams facing off in the arena are the US and Jihad. Perhaps a few years from now Team China, Team Russia, Team Europe, and Team Japan will jump into the contest. Anything can happen now. Peak oil has the capacity to drive the world crazy.

It is certainly driving the US crazy. Last week, Chevron announced the discovery of a major oil “play” in the Gulf of Mexico, a collection of deep-water fields code-named “Jack.” The announcement was uniformly greeted by the news media with headlines that said, in effect, ENERGY PROBLEM SOLVED.

There are reasons to be unpersuaded. Chevron’s “Jack” has been estimated to contain as little as 300 million barrels and as much as 15 billion barrels of oil. Nobody really knows yet. It will be years before we find out. During those years, production from the other oil fields of the world will decline by an amount that will cancel out any purported gain from even the best estimates of “Jack.” The world uses about 30 billion barrels of oil a year. The US alone uses about 7 billion.

The oil from “Jack” will be expensive and difficult to produce. It is more than a mile underwater and another four miles under the rock under the water. It will require a lot of pipe and a lot of pressure to move that oil up, and the seabed in these deep-water operations is too far down for pipelines, so the oil will have to go directly into tankers. If oil’s future is in deep-water, then its future is expensive and precarious.

It was interesting to see the price of oil on the futures market plummet down into the mid $60 range last week. I take two conclusions from that. One is that the psychological stress of peak oil has increased the emotional dimension of the trade to a dangerous degree, i.e. driven the traders crazy. The intense wish to solve the energy problem has momentarily overcome the reality of it not being solved. The second is that the US economy may be in greater trouble than the news media realizes, especially the economic “engines” of “home”building, real estate sales, and the associated mortgage rackets, with their spin-offs in the financial markets. There may be a hell of a lot fewer 18-wheelers shlepping chipboard and sheetrock around the nation this fall, fewer family trips to the WalMart, fewer Di-tech Mortgage customers dredged out of the sub-prime muck, and fewer bundles of interest-only ARMS passed through to the hedge funds.

Thus we would have a profile of exactly what oil geologist Colin Campbell and other peak oil opinion leaders have predicted: roller-coaster-style economic activity pegged to up-ratcheting oil prices, with increasingly deep economic troughs and ever higher oil price peaks. In short, massive economic instability.

Meanwhile, in the deep background of all this looms Jihad. We will have to be resolute in the face of Jihad and much more adaptable at home. So far, on the home front we have done nothing but defend and rationalize a stupid mode of existence — suburbia — and an insane economy based on building more of it — the housing bubble. We have no leadership in politics, business, science, news media, or education informing the public that we have to make other arrangements for daily life — not ten years from now, but right away.

Five years after 9/11/2001, the “progressives” want to wish away Jihad and the “conservatives” want to wish away the need to change daily life in America. Real political leadership, if it emerges at all, will have to come from some place off the normal political scale.

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 Visit  James  Howard Kunstler’s  Website

How Things Might Have Differed

Richard Handler

Stephen Jay Gould, the great evolutionary biologist who died in 2002, had a saying that he would continually return to in his many essays and books: Rewind the tape of evolution, and when you play it again, everything will come out differently.

Gould was a paleontologist at Harvard, a student of evolutionary history and a marvellous writer who believed in writing for everyday readers.

He fell in love with dinosaurs when he was a little boy after visits to the Museum of Natural History in New York. And his hero was Charles Darwin, whom he said everybody constantly misunderstood.

Evolution can be an evil word for religious fundamentalists. For example, Anne Coulter, that slinky American zealot, believes Darwin is the devil who has dethroned God and ruined our lives.

Gould, for his part, had no quarrel with religion. He believed religion and science addressed different questions. Science can tell you what happened after the Big Bang created the universe. But it can’t tell you anything about what went before or why the universe was created in the first place.

Life is not a highway

Gould said evolution isn’t an onward and upward highway, a straight line from simplicity to complexity, from bacteria to human beings. What’s behind evolution is natural selection. That’s what’s meant by “survival of the fittest.”

But survival of the fittest is not a moral dictum or judgment – organisms adapt to local circumstances. And natural selection works by genetic jumps and mistakes or mutations.

Those who can’t adapt, no matter how beautiful or monstrous, are just out of luck.

According to Gould and the misunderstood Darwin, the tree of evolution is a huge, branchy structure, not a CN Tower with a pointy top. Luck and contingency rule: Chance and uncertainty are nature’s solemn arbiters.

Sixty five million years ago, a meteorite struck Earth and caused a great cloud of dust to envelop the planet.

This was the world’s first “nuclear winter,” without the bomb, of course. Vast forests shrivelled and died. And the imperial dinosaurs perished because their habitat was wiped out.

Sticking out from all the rubble was our ancestor, the tiny tree shrew. Enough was left over for it to get a meal. Mammals descended from this small animal. And we are the result.

Rewind the tape

If you think you’re such a big shot, just think of your beginnings: The gopher-like tree shrew, crawling over dinosaur corpses, nosing about, afraid and alive.

Nothing is determined in evolution. That’s why we must come back to Gould’s unrolled tape. In his book, Wonderful Life, Gould tells the story of the Burgess Shale, tucked in the Canadian Rockies.

Half a billion years ago, organisms competed for resources. Some came out ahead and evolved further. A multitude of others became extinct. Rewind the tape of history, and something else could have happened.

That’s why I have come to see Charles Darwin, that 19th- century genius, as history’s first news director.

For example, people today talk of “Bush’s War,” meaning Iraq. But let’s rewind the tape of history and see whose war it really is.

If Ralph Nader had not run for president against George W. Bush in 2000 (as many of his admirers pleaded), it is very likely that Al Gore, the Democrat, would have been elected.

Gore might well have invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. But, as a more cautious man, more steeped in Washington’s ways, it’s highly unlikely Gore would have made that Bush leap of faith and invaded Iraq as well.

So it’s “Nader’s War.” Not Bush’s. But let’s unroll that tape even further.

If Gore had not been so puritanical and not disowned Bill Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky affair, thereby keeping his former boss from much of the campaign trail, it’s likely Clinton would have brought in a bigger African-American vote to offset Nader.

So we could call this “Gore’s War.” Or is it Clinton’s, or maybe Lewinsky’s. That’s my favourite.

After all, the economy was humming along in 2000, the time of that fateful election. The Democrats could be seen as a shoe-in – without a sex scandal.

Poor Monica. She was just a White House intern. She just wanted to play around a little, not rearrange the Middle East.

Survival by circumstance

You get the drift. Chance, luck, contingency, adaptation. Find your examples. If Paul Martin had not been so virtuous and had he ignored the referendum ad flap (as Jean ChrÈtien would have), the Liberals might have been re-elected. And Canada would still be global warming fighters in good standing.

Had Ariel Sharon not had a stroke and fallen into a coma, he might have responded to the killing and kidnapping of Israeli soldiers in a more nuanced way. Who knows? Or he could have waged a more sophisticated war on behalf of the Israelis.

Take your pick, from history or your personal life.

I met my wife in a tutorial class. Had she picked another, or arrived five minutes later to sign up (and found it full), I might never have met her. Our sons would never have been born. They don’t know how lucky they are.

We all can find a dozen twists of luck and adaptations that changed our lives forever. It’s not just survival of the fittest. It’s “survival by circumstance.”

The title of a Hollywood movie says it all: History is Made at Night. And evolution keeps us spry or dead. But either way, it keeps us in the dark.

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This essay was published under the title Iraq is ‘Monica’s War’ on September 1, 2006. The author Richard Handler is a producer with the CBC Radio program Ideas.