Peace in our time?
CCPA MONITOR: February 2005
When the Nobel Peace Prize was presented last Friday to an environmental activist, it raised more than a few eyebrows. What does environmental protection have to do with peace? some critics asked. The answer is, quite a lot, actually.
In making Kenyan Wangari Maathai the latest recipient of the prestigious award, the Nobel Committee has yet again broadened global thinking about the prerequisites of peace. Traditionally, recipients have been recognized for brokering peace accords. More recently, advocates for human rights and democracy have been rewarded. This year, in making the connection between a healthy environment and peace, the Nobel Committee has made a vital contribution in the fight against growing threats to our collective well-being. And in recognizing the founder of a grassroots organization in Africa, the Committee has provided inspiration and hope to every non-profit and community group around the world that is standing up to an unmotivated or hostile government and powerful corporate interests to protect their environment.
Ms. Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya in 1977. By the time she stepped to the podium last week in Oslo, Norway her organization, comprised largely of poor women, had planted 30 million trees across Africa. The idea of her group was simple. Trees slow soil erosion, reduce water pollution, and provide a renewable source of fuel for households. In a continent where deforestation and desertification are common and many people depend directly on the land for their survival, her group provided real solutions. “Foresters without diplomas,” is what she called the women of her organization, which also promoted women’s rights and democracy.
Her group’s model suggested that economic wellbeing does not come at the expense of a healthy environment, but rather because of it. Protecting the environment and feeding your family go hand in hand. Her model was refreshing in a world where a popular corporate and government message is that our desire for a clean environment must be balanced with our desire for a strong economy. In other words, you can have a job but we have to poison you a little bit in return. This balancing is usually done on the backs of the most vulnerable — those least able to protect themselves from the effects of dirty air, contaminated water, or climate change impacts such as heat waves.
Maathai’s way of thinking has already taken root in other parts of the world. Over the last decade Germany, for instance, has developed 14,000MW (equal to half of Ontario’s entire electric power capacity) of clean wind energy while creating many thousands of jobs.
The Nobel Committee was not the first organization to suggest that environmental degradation can upset peaceful co-existence. The point was emphatically made earlier this year by the U.S. Pentagon, which predicted that major conflicts could arise from food shortages caused by mega-droughts from climate change over the next twenty years. “Once again, warfare would define human life,” the report is quoted as saying. Climate change, not the effort to combat it, was recognized as a threat to the economy. In making these observations the Pentagon sounded less like U.S. President George Bush than Ms. Maathai. She recently wrote that, “When natural resources get scarce, wars are started. If we improve the management of our natural resources, we help promote peace.” Mr. Bush stubbornly sticks with the view that fighting climate change will hurt the U.S. economy.
The political context in which the Nobel Committee made its decision is also important. World leaders such as George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair suggest terrorism is the biggest threat to our security and peace. The committee (and the U.S. Pentagon) clearly believes otherwise. The evidence also paints a different picture. Heat waves across Europe last summer and violent weather events in the Caribbean this year — events that are consistent with climate change — have alone claimed tens of thousands of lives. Terrorism, on the other hand, has claimed fewer American lives since January 2002 than lightning, according to a recent Harper’s Index.
Thus, it was not purely coincidental that the award was presented during the same week that 194 countries were meeting at a United Nations climate change convention in Buenos Aires, Argentina. U.S. representatives, still proudly wearing their environmental dunce caps, wondered out loud why they were being singled out as the “bad boys” of climate change. The U.S. still asserts that the science around climate change is weak, despite the finding of its own National Academy of Sciences, which advises Congress, of the reality of the threat.
“I came to understand that their problems were symptoms of a poorly managed environment,” Ms. Maathai recently wrote. She was speaking about the women of Kenya but her words could equally apply to Americans and other Westerners. Despite America’s significant domestic petroleum resources, for instance, some years ago it became a net importer of oil. Much of its own supply continues to be squandered on transporting individual citizens in 5,000-pound vehicles to the mall or work and back each day, and other similarly comical uses. America’s current tragedy in Iraq is at least partly explained by the poor management of its natural resources.
In accepting the Nobel Prize Ms. Maathai, now Kenya’s deputy environment minister, said that today’s challenges call for “a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening it’s life support system.” The advice will hopefully be accepted by our own federal leaders in Ottawa who are still more intent on brokering a compromise with certain corporate and regional interests than dealing with the major threat from climate change that we all face.
History shows that it is always popular movements that have had to rise up to force reluctant government to take action against polluting industry. Ms. Maathai and her humble organization are just one example but a powerful inspiration. Thanks to the Nobel Committee, people who have made the connection between a healthy environment and a healthy economy will now have a better platform for their message. Perhaps this Nobel Prize will be a first step towards restoring what Ms. Maathai calls the “world of beauty and wonder.”
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