Waging Peace for a Living

About the Book

Abandon Despair!

Our nations across this Great Island, now called North America, continue to have an obligation to the Creator to care for and protect our lands for seven generations into the future. This obligation remains a sacred sacrament.

--George Manuel, former President,
Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs

The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to everything else. This book will touch on many things, but the connecting purpose for everything discussed here will be the survival and well-being of Mother Earth and the life which depends on her.

My motivation for writing this essay came from two stimulating sources-the extreme danger threatening our world in the twentieth century and the extraordinary opportunity beckoning to us as we enter the twenty-first.

Ever since World War II we have been receiving authoritative warnings from deeply concerned scientists and other profound thinkers. More than half a century ago, in 1946, Albert Einstein sent out a memorable but anguished message to the world:

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. ¹

The danger we now face is certainly daunting. At the same time a commensurate opportunity is opening up. An effective response to that extreme danger is not only necessary but also possible. By taking bold, responsible action to change our modes of thinking we have an exhilarating opportunity now to redirect our course away from unparalleled catastrophe toward survival, together with other priceless benefits. Now is the time for us to appreciate and take full advantage of this opportunity.

Waging Peace
Genuine peace demands far more than the mere absence of war, beneficial as that would certainly be for all life. Peace is the very antithesis of war, but waging peace and waging war do have much in common. Both call for high courage, training, apprenticeship, skill, imagination, cooperation, sacrifice, fortitude, dedication, and persistence--with invigorated ingenuity--in the face of disappointing setbacks.

Waging peace means planning and doing all the work required to inspire respect for our planet, recognition of the dangers we face, and acceptance of responsibility--like the responsibility assumed over scores of centuries by most aboriginal peoples--responsibility for the next seven generations of life on earth.

This book approaches the extraordinary dangers of our era as challenges to be translated into a catalogue of the specific work that must be done for the survival and well-being of our own and future generations.

In spite of many persuasive predictions that gloom and doom will overtake us in the twenty-first century, that will not happen unless we continue to belittle or ignore the warning signals so generously provided for us in the twentieth century.

Instead we can achieve joy and hope in abundance when we begin to make full use of our opportunities to keep this planet habitable and life worth living.

How can we do it?
In the following chapters I offer an action plan for survival of life on earth. Although I have great confidence in this proposal, I do not want readers to begin with any false or exaggerated expectations. This plan of mine is only a draft and it is wide open to improvement. Some individual or group may transform this proposal into a workable blueprint with many more details all figured out. Maybe some coalition of non-governmental organizations will even develop an entirely new plan, a better plan, and then take the first steps toward implementing it.

In the beginning I was deeply concerned about the wasteful extent of unemployment in Canada and around the world, especially tragic when there is so much necessary work right in front of us that is not yet being done. As this action plan developed further, however, the main purpose became clear: concentrate first on getting the urgently needed work underway. Then virtually full employment will follow naturally as an inevitable by-product of actually doing all this work that is absolutely essential for life.

This action plan emphasizes two complementary priorities: first, to identify the specific work that needs to be done and secondly, to invent ways to pay for it in spite of the deficit hysteria and the taxpayers' revolt which now prevent governments from financially supporting the work of preparing for enduring peace the way they have always provided whatever money was required to prepare for war.

We know there is lots of work to be done, although much of the most desperately needed work is non-profit. We know there is lots of money in the world, although an astonishing amount of it is held at present by a minority of wealthy people and corporations.

The action plan will begin with a year of research to identify the work that must be done and to invent realistic ways to provide enough financial support to pay for it.

For readers already familiar with the bad news
Some readers are already well aware of the many attempts by distinguished citizens of the world to document our unprecedented global predicament and to help us all understand that any effective response to these discomforting dangers will require bold-even revolutionary-changes in our modes of thinking, in our ways of living, and in our ways of earning a living. These readers may want to move directly to the action plan beginning in Chapter 2. People who are not familiar with the increasingly dire warnings of our day may find them overwhelming at first, but I hope they will begin with Chapter 1 anyway. It provides the disturbing but absolutely necessary motivation for exploring what we can do about this danger. By facing facts squarely we can better appreciate that we have an enormous amount of work ahead of us and not much time left before our responsive action which is already too little might also become too late.

Good news
Virtually full employment across Canada and around the world will be a fortunate-even priceless-by-product of waging peace for a living. Full employment is required for genuine peace as much as it has always been considered necessary for total, all-out war. Many of our worst problems, including financial deficits, will become far more tractable in a global climate of universal, meaningful, dignified employment.

This book is about the opportunities we now have available to us, unprecedented opportunities to discover, imagine, develop and invent unprecedented solutions to the unprecedented problems that confront humankind at this turn of the millennium.

I am simply transforming a horrible old warning attached to Dante's Hell into a warm invitation to readers of this book. Instead of "All hope abandon, ye who enter here,"² I suggest as soon as you turn this page:
abandon despair, all ye who enter here.

Notes

1. (a) Albert Einstein, quoted by Mike Moore, "Midnight Never Came" in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. November/December 1995, pp. 16-27. On page 27 the quotation reads, "In May 1946, Albert Einstein, one of The Bulletin's more notable godfathers, looked toward the future and said: 'The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.'"

(b) Albert Einstein, a telegram to The New York Times on May 24, 1946, in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 268. This quotation reads, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalled catastrophe." The development of atomic energy became possible through Einstein's own brilliant scientific wor