Come join author/educator Didi Pershouse (who proposed the Peace Clock) and two peace activists/writers who inspired it and helped to get it off the ground: Alice Slater and Henry Nichols, in a deep community discussion about growing peace.
How do we decide what actions to take to grow peace? In any living system, there are places (and times) we can intervene that will shift the entire system. They may seem like small or insignificant actions at the outset, but well-chosen nodal interventions have downstream effects that are systemic. Beavers change not just the flow of a stream, but the ecosystems around it by placing sticks and stones strategically. The potential for “nodal interventions” becomes more visible to us when we learn to see the whole system as living and dynamic and relational.
We exist in a society that offers us fragmented views and linear, mechanistic thinking, unexamined beliefs and automatic behaviors, all of which continually get us into trouble in multiple aspects of our lives.
By gathering regularly, we can develop the capability to see a living system in a dynamic and much more realistic way, (rather than as static, and relying on our theoretical understanding). We can use this as a way to find incredibly effective interventions– but it happens best not by looking at a chart, but in a dynamic conversation, within a community of practice that gathers ongoingly to continually strengthen this ability.
This is why we are offering a series of opportunities to see the culture and workings of war as a dynamic living process that can transform into peace!
Featured Guests:
Didi Pershouse is well known as an innovative international educator both in-person and online. She is the founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative, and stewards a weekly community of practice. Her facilitator's guide Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function, is used in over 90 countries.
She became deeply involved in the intersection of food systems and health systems while providing rural health care for two decades at The Center for Sustainable Medicine, and wrote The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities, which dives deeply into the Cuban health care system, Cuba’s medical diplomacy, regenerative agriculture, and many other topics.
Currently she is writing a field training manual for the UN-FAO Farmer Field School Program and the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming Initiative in India, involving over 1,000,000 smallholder farmers. She was a contributing author to The Climate Emergency: How Africa Can Survive and Thrive; Climate Change and Creation Care; and Health in the Anthropocene. She was one of five speakers at the United Nations-FAO World Soil Day in 2017.
She serves on the Planning Commission for her town, is a board supervisor for the White River Natural Resources Conservation District, and is on the board of directors of the Soil Carbon Coalition and the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition. While serving on the state appointed Payment for Ecosystem Services and Soil Health Working Group, she helped to reorient the program away from the financialization of nature, and back to its public roots. She led a successful effort to conserve the Zebedee Headwaters Wetland while serving as a Vermont Conservation Commissioner. She proposed the idea of a Peace Clock as an evolution of the Doomsday Clock, a movement which is being taken up by CODEPINK and other peace organizations.
Alice Slater is a Member of the Board of Directors of World BEYOND War. She is based in New York City. Alice is the UN NGO Representative of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. She is on the Board of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, the Global Council of Abolition 2000, and the Advisory Board of Nuclear Ban-US, supporting the mission of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its work in realizing the successful UN negotiations for a Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. She began her long quest for peace on earth as a suburban housewife, when she organized Eugene McCarthy’s presidential challenge to Johnson’s illegal war in Vietnam in her local community.
As a member of the Lawyers Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control, she travelled to Russia and China on numerous delegations engaged in ending the arms race and banning the bomb. She is a member of the NYC Bar Association and serves on the Peoples Climate Committee-NYC, working for 100% Green Energy by 2030. She has written numerous articles and op-eds, with frequent appearances on local and national media. Alice was the main speaker in the webinar where the idea of the peace clock was formed, and her talk laid out why we have to move away from conversations of doom, and towards a mass movement for nuclear abolition and peace.
Henry Nichols is a peace activist and writer who works with the Vermont Coalition for Palestinian Liberation, Rural Vermont, the Land and Leadership Initiative, and the Vermont Peace/Anti-war Coalition. He has worked on municipal campaigns to divest from Israel’s Apartheid system. He helps Rural Vermont connect Vermont’s farmers with regional peace groups. He is a part of CODEPINK’s China Is Not Our Enemy and The Peace Clock campaigns.
He is researching and writing about how dangerous and unnecessary the U.S.’s imperialist approach to the world has been and continues to be.
WHEN
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WHERE
Zoom
CONTACT
Jodie Evans ·