Living Together Within Nature on a Path to Peace
Steven Leeper
Since 1984 my life has been in or dependent on Hiroshima, Japan. As far as I know, Hiroshima is the birthplace of a concept called peace culture. I have found no references to peace culture prior to 1967, when the city of Hiroshima created its Peace Culture Center. In 1976 the Peace Culture Center became the Peace Culture Foundation, which I chaired for six years from 2007 to 2013. Although the term has been in use since then, you will not find a definition of peace culture on the Foundation website.
In addition to Hiroshima, the terms “peace culture” and “culture of peace” are used commonly in and around the UN. The first reference I can find on the UN website is from UNESCO in 1989. The definition on the UN website was written by David Adams in 2005:
A culture of peace is an integral approach to preventing violence and violent conflicts, and an alternative to the culture of war and violence based on education for peace, the promotion of sustainable economic and social development, respect for human rights, equality between women and men, democratic participation, tolerance, the free flow of information and disarmament.
As you can see, this definition is minimal and vague. It says we should educate for peace and promote sustainability but offers no concrete content. It does call for human rights, gender equality, democracy, tolerance, free flow of information and disarmament, but offers no concrete differences between peace culture and how we are living now. In my humble opinion, “peace culture” is inadequately defined, largely unknown by the general public, and tragically underfunded. As far as I can tell, “peace culture” is a non-thought for most of the competitive, aggressive warriors leading most countries on our planet today.
The term “peace,” of course, has been defined by hundreds of writers in hundreds of ways, but my favorite definition is, perhaps not surprisingly, my own. I think of peace as social health. Your body comprises approximately 60 trillion cells. When every one of those trillions of cells is getting enough nutrition, has clean water to drink in a clean environment, and has what it needs to perform the functions for which it was born; and when no tissues or organs are damaged or impaired, we call that “health.” “Peace” can be found in families, classrooms, companies, cities or countries that have achieved health and wellbeing for their members, but “peace culture” inherently implies an effort to restore our entire planet, including our plant and animal relatives, to that state of health and happiness.
Since 2015 I have been working on a project called Peace Culture Village. PCV is a peace training camp where we work on three arenas of peace – peace with nature, peace in the community, and inner peace or peace with self. We created this village as a way of working on the most important project of our time – developing a sustainable, enjoyable alternative to the way we are living now.
Everyone in this room knows that the way we are living today is unsustainable. We are destroying the ecosystem that supports us. We are filling the air, water and soil with radiation, plastic and thousands of other poisons. We are heating and destabilizing our climate, which is already affecting food production in many areas. We are heating, acidifying and filling the oceans with plastic, which is already killing coral reefs and creating numerous dead zones. An article in 2007 in Science magazine says that if we continue living the way we are living, there will be no fish at all in the oceans by 2048. If the oceans die, we all die, because that is where we get over 50% of our oxygen.
Economically, we live in a system that distributes power and money upward such that the gap between rich and poor is destabilizing our political system. And we live in a social system that worships competition; our leaders are so focused on fighting and winning they are utterly incapable of caring for the weak or solving urgent global problems. We know we are drifting toward social, economic, political and environmental collapse, but we keep driving our cars, air conditioning our buildings, eating beef, and giving most of our money to the military. We do this because we lack a persuasive vision of an effective, enjoyable alternative way of life and how to get there from here.
I, of course, know exactly what needs to be done, but no one believes me. More importantly, peace culture, by its very nature, cannot be forced on anyone in a top-down way. We cannot achieve peace by killing or jailing all unpeaceful people. In fact, the war culture is much better at killing and jailing, so if we play the violence game at all, peace culture will lose. Our only hope is rapid and radical evolution of human consciousness. That is, we (Earthlings) must come to understand peace culture and prefer it to war culture.
Evolution has traditionally been a hopelessly slow process, but fortunately, we live in the Anthropocene era. This means, by definition, that we humans are largely in control of our own evolution. We can evolve quite quickly, if we decide to do so. Also fortunately, we live in the information age. This means we can communicate and make decisions with previously inconceivable speed. So if the powers that be, like Donald Trump, Lady Gaga and the K-pop bands, decided to do so, they could easily lift us all into a peace culture.
Unfortunately, our information and, therefore, our evolution are still controlled by the war culture. The average Japanese person receives ninety percent of his or her information through Dentsu, Japan’s dominant media company. Americans receive 90% of their information through six media conglomerates. I’m sure the situation is similar in all of your countries. The people in most countries make judgments based on information provided to them by the rich, powerful elite, and the rich, powerful elite are overwhelmingly competitive, war-culture people. So we are confronted with two overriding questions. First, what are the essential components of peace culture that must be disseminated; and second, how do we communicate in a way that will move human evolution in that direction?
I could speak for hours on differences between the war and peace cultures, but the essence of peace culture lies in two elements. The first is its goal, which I mentioned before. The goal is universal health and wellbeing. If you are working for any subgroup, from your family to your country, at the expense of any other subgroup, you are participating in the war culture. The goal of any peace culture must be the health of our planet and everyone on it, that is, universal health and wellbeing.
The second element is its decision-making method, that is, the nonviolent resolution of conflict to the satisfaction and benefit of all parties. In the war culture, conflicts are seen as opportunities to win or lose. People take sides and the decision is made through a contest of power. This power can take the form of money, media, votes, or bullets, but one team wins, and the other team loses.
In any peace culture, conflicts are seen as problems to be solved to the satisfaction of all parties. We do not solve problems by winning and losing. We solve them by discussion, negotiation, bargaining, compromise, give-and-take, or doing whatever is necessary to help all stakeholders get what they need, and the stakeholders must always include Mother Earth and our unborn children.
So these are the two essentials of peace culture. If everyone started believing in and working toward universal wellbeing using nonviolent conflict resolution, we could turn this planet into the Garden of Eden it was meant to be. Instead, we are competing selfishly with no thought for each other, no thought for the Earth, and no thought for the future. If we continue on this path, we will dive deeper and deeper into hell until the Earth discards our species altogether.
So how do we get from here to there? How can we graduate from the war culture to a culture of peace? We have two primary, immediate tasks. One is to build small, self-supporting and sustainable communities. We need to abandon industrial agriculture and turn to the agricultural principles outlined in Masanobu Fukuoka’s One Straw Revolution, Bill Mollison’s Introduction to Permaculture, Vandana Shiva’s Soil not Oil, and Masatoshi Funabashi’s synecoculture. We need to radically reduce our reliance on petroleum and return the Earth and our societies to the hunter-gatherer stage. Of course, we need to utilize all the appropriate science, technology and wisdom we have developed during the past ten thousand years of totalitarian agriculture, but we must abandon totalitarian agriculture.
Totalitarian agriculture is the idea that some human being takes a certain piece of land and decides that rice and only rice can grow here. Of course, it could be corn, potatoes, tomatoes or any other crop, but the problem comes from deciding that only a certain kind of plant can be allowed in a certain place at a certain time. This decision immediately creates the need for an enormous amount of work. We have to work hard to make sure that all other plants and animals are kept out. We need to plow, cultivate, fertilize, irrigate, weed and kill insects. Large-scale totalitarian agriculture was originally made possible by slavery. Today, it is made possible by tractors and other machines as well as fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, all of which depend on petroleum. Today, every calorie of food we produce requires ten calories of oil. Considering global warming and the fact that someday we will run out of oil, today’s agriculture is unsustainable. The good news is, if we work more with nature and less against it, we can produce far more food per acre with far less work. The bad news is, this is not a choice. It is an absolute necessity. We will be forced by Mother Nature to radically change our agriculture and every other aspect of our lives as we attempt to wean ourselves from oil, and we don’t have much time.
We will need to move as quickly as possible into small communities that produce their own food, clothing, tools, energy, and as much of what they need as they can. Hopefully, we will produce enough to trade for laptops and cell phones, which means that, collectively, we will need to produce enough surplus to support energy, transport and communication functions. But right now, today, we have no time to think about what we might lose. We absolutely must shift away from industry, especially industrial agriculture, to a way of life that uses little to no petroleum and emits little to no waste. We need to change the way we live dramatically and radically, but we cannot do this as individuals or even as families. We need to live in likeminded communities. So the task is building community and, within those communities, we need to learn how to enjoy life while being sustainable.
This community building is happening. After starting Peace Culture Village, we discovered that many similar communities already exist in Japan, with hundreds, probably thousands of communities developing around the world. However, at the current rate of progress, we will be extinct before the majority of humans are living in sustainable communities. So the other even more urgent task, in fact the first, prerequisite task, is to raise global human consciousness regarding sustainability and nonviolent conflict resolution. Here I have a simple, concrete suggestion. What we need first is a multimillion-dollar campaign to abolish nuclear weapons. I am not saying that nuclear weapons are the most important problem we have to solve. What I am saying is that they are the first problem we have to solve. I am also saying that unless we can solve this problem, we will not be able to solve any of our other problems.
I’m not just saying this because I’m from Hiroshima. The threat from nuclear weapons is obviously the easiest global problem we face. Nine nations could solve this problem in a week or so, if they put their minds to it. And nuclear weapons embody or symbolize the cutthroat competition and deadly rivalry that prevent the solution of any of our other problems. All our global problems will require global cooperation, and we simply cannot achieve that level of cooperation while threatening to annihilate each other. Nuclear weapons radiate animosity. They are absolutely incompatible with long-term human survival. Therefore, our first step toward survival must be their elimination.
In addition, we already have a 100% consensus at the nation-state level that nuclear weapons should be eliminated. Even the US and Russia agree that we are working toward a nuclear-weapon-free world. By agreeing to Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, all the nuclear-weapon states agreed to negotiate in good faith to achieve total nuclear disarmament. At the NPT review conference in the year 2000, they promised an “unequivocal undertaking to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.” In July 2017, because they were so frustrated by the nuclear-weapon states’ refusal to fulfill their disarmament promises, 122 countries adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). In December that year, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) received the Nobel Peace Prize for its contribution to the adoption of that treaty. Even in the nuclear-weapon states, public opinion polls find large majorities want to be rid of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons, nuclear war and human extinction are not at all popular with the general public.
In fact, nuclear weapons are the weakest, most vulnerable pressure point on the body of the military-industrial, war-culture complex. We need to attack that weakness with all our strength, and we can do so by launching a well-funded PR campaign designed to bring the entire human race together in the desire to eliminate this expensive, unnecessary threat to our survival. I consulted an experienced, professional PR consultant, who was involved in the successful Obama campaign. I asked him to estimate what it would cost to gather 100 million signatures on a petition calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. He told me we could develop a high-profile campaign and obtain 100 million signatures by October 2020 for five to ten million dollars.
Five to ten million dollars sounds like a lot of money, but I used to work for an NGO called Mayors for Peace. They now have nearly 8,000 city members, all of which have formally supported the “program to promote the total abolition of nuclear weapons.” If each of those cities gave a mere 1,000 dollars, which is nothing for a city, we would have eight million dollars. With that much, we could run an unbeatable campaign. This level of funding is not an impossible dream.
I am well aware that if we begin a campaign at that level, the war culture, especially the companies that make money from nuclear weapons, would launch a disinformation campaign designed to discredit or rebut our campaign. However, the case against nuclear weapons is extremely easy to make. Estimates vary but just a few, perhaps as few as ten or fifteen large nuclear weapons exploding over ten to fifteen large cities igniting ten to fifteen large firestorms could be enough to put five million tons of soot in the atmosphere, which would cause nuclear darkness. Nuclear darkness is 10% of sunlight blocked. That would be enough to keep us from producing food in most of the areas that now produce most of our staple crops like rice, wheat, corn, and soybeans. In nuclear darkness, billions of us would starve. Civilization would disintegrate, and that from just a few bombs. Today the US and Russia have about 2000 warheads deployed and ready to go at any time. Both countries have doomsday machines that would plunge us into a deep, very cold nuclear winter, which I believe would be the end of the human race. Regardless of food, clothing, shelter and other necessities, I believe nuclear war would kill us all because such deep social and economic collapse would make us unable to properly manage our nuclear power plants. More than four hundred nuclear power plants on this planet need extremely sophisticated management and a constant supply of precision parts. I suspect that three or four hundred totally uncontrolled Chernobyls would make this planet unlivable.
No one. Not even President Trump, not even the US super-hawk National Security Advisor John Bolton, wants a nuclear war. No matter how much money they spend, the warriors will not be able to persuade the global public that human extinction is an acceptable outcome. Nuclear abolition is a case we can win in the court of public opinion. If we do win, we will have brought the human race together in cooperative effort to survive. That, in turn, would bring cooperation for survival in other arenas into the realm of possibility. We might cooperate to reduce CO2 emissions, wean ourselves from petroleum, clean plastic out of our environment, help refugees fleeing violence and climate catastrophe, and restore our mountains, seas, forests, jungles, and arable land to health.
I say all this to you because you are the YMCA. You are one of the largest NGOs in the world. You have 124 federations and 45 million members around the world, and you are a peace culture organization. The Y was born in 1844 from the desire to help young men being exploited or left behind by the industrial revolution. It grew worldwide because it had a mission that millions of people believed in and loved. The Y was spreading the good news of Jesus Christ by helping people become healthier in body, mind and spirit. It did this through Bible study, education, fitness, and by teaching children about nature in summer camps.
As you know, YMCA stands for Young Men’s Christian Association, but today, we are not young, we are not Christian, and we are women as well as men. As a result, we have no easily understandable identity that distinguishes us from the many other organizations offering similar information and experiences. There are many schools tutoring and training young people. There are many companies offering services to the elderly. There are many companies offering camps and tours involving nature. There are many spas, salons and gyms offering physical fitness. There are also many churches and other types of organizations promoting Christianity. What is special or different about the YMCA? What is our mission? What unites us? What is it that fills our staff and members with excitement and passion? What are we working for that is larger than the YMCA itself?
I have been talking about peace culture to YMCA leaders for at least ten years, but I have not had much influence because I’m not able to help with the real problem. The real problem is that most YMCAs are focused intently on money. I don’t blame anyone for this. We are struggling to help the YMCA survive in our money-based society. However, by focusing on money and survival, we are thinking only of the YMCA. In many cases, we are thinking only of our own Y federation or office or program. We are not connecting the Y to a larger mission.
In Japan, the Y is afraid to be “too Christian” because Christians in Japan are too few to support the organization. In the US, the Y is afraid to associate itself with peace culture or even the elimination of nuclear weapons because peace is not popular. Many Americans are war-culture people who believe the military and war are necessary. I’m sure that most of us are afraid for the Y to say or do anything too political, that is, we don’t want to take any public stand that might make it difficult to recruit members and gather donations. We are afraid of being seen as left wing or peace-oriented or opposed to the military or out of the mainstream.
A few years ago, my wife and I translated into English a book that tells the 100-year history of the YMCA in Japan. Reading that book, we saw clearly that the YMCA of today greatly regrets its role during World War II. In its effort to survive, many Japanese YMCAs made a show of supporting the war effort. They sent packages of food and clothing to Japanese soldiers fighting in China. Despite Jesus’ new commandment to love others, including enemies, as he loved us, the YMCA in Japan supported the mass murder that is war.
I am not picking on Japan here. The Y in the US, including my own father, was completely supportive of America’s war effort. Not everyone, of course, but in general, YMCA members in the US and Japan were praying to the same God, the Father of Jesus Christ, but they were asking God to help their side destroy the other side. And of course, this is not just a problem for the Y. Most German Christians, American Christians, French Christians, Italian Christians, Japanese Christians, Korean Christians and Chinese Christians were praying against each other and going out on the battlefield to kill each other.
Jesus was born in a manger. He never lived in a castle or palace. He never wielded political power. To me, this means he was telling us not to compete for dominance. Jesus was innocent, and yet he was tortured and killed. In response, he forgave his killers, and his Father, the Omnipotent God who could have punished the killers or could even have destroyed the entire Roman Empire, did no such thing. To me, this means that Jesus and God were telling us that peace and love are more important than justice and punishment for wrongdoing. Jesus came to tell us that the way to defeat evil and death is through nonviolent love of friends and enemies.
For nearly three hundred years after Jesus was crucified and resurrected, Christians were expected to be pacifists. They were not allowed to serve in the Roman army, and many died as martyrs to avoid doing so. Then, Emperor Constantine, with help later from St Augustine, turned Christianity into a fighting religion. Within a few decades, all Roman soldiers were Christians. I’m sure you all know this story. I tell it to you again today because I so strongly believe that the time has come for Christianity to return decisively to the teachings of Jesus. The world we live in today is so dominated by radical evil that our species is literally on the verge of extinction. Jesus made it clear that the only way to fight this radical evil is with radical good, which, for Christians, means nonviolent love of friend and enemy.
I’ve known the YMCA all my life. I’ve gone to camps. I’ve learned to swim and sail and ride horses at the Y. I’ve been a camp counselor and have taught English for the Y. I’ve known the Y in New Haven, Connecticut, Madison, Wisconsin, New York, Atlanta, Hokkaido, Kyoto, Nagoya, and for the past few years, I’ve been on the board of the Hiroshima Y. Based on this experience, I have come to believe that the YMCA desperately needs a new mission, one that is worthy of us, one that is worthy of Jesus. If Jesus were with us today, he would not be working for money or even for the survival of the Y. He would not be working for the US against China or vice versa. He would not even be working for Christianity against Islam. He would be doing his best to teach us all to defeat evil and death, and he would be telling us, all of us, that we can only do that by loving each other.
I am especially happy to be speaking to this group because you are Asians. You are the people with the greatest ability and the greatest immediate need to move the world toward peace. We have all been hearing since the 1980s about the rise of Asia and the decline of the West. Now it is happening before our eyes. China is surpassing the US in many important social and economic parameters. Asia is becoming stronger and stronger, while the US and Europe are weakening rapidly.
You may think this is a good thing, but it frightens me. I am not frightened because I’m a Westerner. I’ve lived more than half my life in Japan. I’m quite happy about the rise of Asia. My fear is because I know the violently competitive nature of the US and Europe. The elite in the West have been dominating the world for more than three centuries, and they will not easily pass the baton to the East. I am very much afraid that they will do in Asia what they have been doing in the Middle East and Africa. They have literally destroyed Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, the Congo, and they are doing their best to destroy Iran. In Central and South America, they have destroyed Honduras, Guatemala, Columbia, and they are in the process of destroying Ecuador, Brazil and Venezuela. I have no doubt that John Bolton and other neocon warmongers will be pushing hard for war in North Korea as soon as they destroy Iran.
It is essential that you Asians absolutely reject violence. If you accept more leaders like Duterte in the Philippines or the military in Myanmar, or if you support a US invasion or bombing of North Korea, or if you start fighting among yourselves in any way, the US will send in money and weapons that will plunge Asia into chaos just like the Middle East. Asian chaos will make the power elite in the US and Europe very happy. Your violence will further delay the rise of Asia. Make no mistake, US corporations want to exploit the resources, the labor and the markets of North Korea, and they will be happy to destroy much of that country to do so. President Moon and Kim Jong Un seem to be preventing that, for now, but they are still dependent on the US and strongly influenced by the war culture in their own countries. To truly protect North Korea and Asia, you need a powerful movement against all nuclear weapons (not just North Korean weapons), and you must stand strong against all violence. You must not let the West lure you into fighting each other. You must also become self-sustaining economically.
If Asia continues to focus on obtaining US or Chinese money, you will end up being colonized by the US and/or China. Your only hope is to reject the current global economic system, reject all violence, and promote self-supporting, sustainable communities. You must promote peace culture. And this is where the YMCA comes in, first for Asia, then for the world. The Y is known and trusted everywhere. We are a peace-culture organization filled with peace-culture people. We know how to build community. We know how to resolve conflict without violence. We have camps all around the world that could be turned into models of sustainable peace-culture living. And we know Jesus. We know how he taught us to live and love. The YMCA is capable of demonstrating and promoting the radical good that is our only hope against radical evil.
But the Y cannot save anyone if we continue to prioritize money and survival. We have to prioritize Jesus, the Prince of Peace, who taught us to love our friends, our families, and even our enemies. God did not send Jesus to make us rich. God sent Jesus to let us know that we were not living according to God’s will. We were not bringing the Kingdom of God to Earth. We were competing, building and destroying empires, fighting, killing, slaughtering even women and children. Jesus’ message was, “Stop all this killing. You don’t have to compete. You don’t have to worry about death. You don’t have to worry about justice. All you have to do is love each other as God and I love you. If you focus on love, we will use you to defeat evil and establish the Kingdom of God on Earth.”
Christians followed Jesus faithfully for about three centuries, then they forgot. They returned to violence because it is so terribly difficult to choose love over power. It is especially difficult to return good for evil and love our enemies. But now, we will either learn Jesus’ lessons or we will die. I hope you as Christian members of the largest, most trusted Christian NGO in the world will lead Asia and then the world into a new peace culture era. If you make this your priority, you could help Jesus save humanity. Thank you.
