Last week I went to a meeting of the Victoria Chapter of the Department of Peace initiative. The Department of Peace is basically a group of people who are lobbying the government to create a Canadian Federal Ministry or Department responsible for promoting peaceful conflict resolution domestically and abroad. Some of the goals of the initiative are: (taken directly from their website)

- Reinvigorate Canada’s role as a global peacemaker and peacebuilder;

- Provide leadership on an international level to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons and promote the abolition of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and the reduction of conventional weapons arsenals;

- Fund the creation of a Civilian Peace Service in Canada that would recruit and deploy an effective and well-trained peace force in Canada and abroad in cooperation with existing NGOs, training organizations and universities;

- Provide for the training of Canadian military and civilian government personnel who administer post-conflict demobilization and reconstruction in war-torn societies;

- Fund the development of curriculum materials for use at all educational levels and support university-level peace studies.

I went into the meeting with very little information - I just happened to find it in our Monday Magazine's event listings and decided to check it out. It was actually the Annual General Meeting of the organization but also included a special guest speaker by the name of Mary-Wynne Ashford. Mary-Wynne is involved in groups such as Physicians for Global Survival and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and she was a very intelligent and thought-provoking highlight of the night.

For me, the evening really consisted of two parts: 1) the meeting and organization itself and 2) Mary-Wynne. My overall feel for the meeting was that there are definitely some very intelligent, passionate people involved who seem quite determined to push this idea. One main point I have is that these people are not the first to come up with the idea, they are members of a world-wide movement spanning approximately 24 countries. There are many organizations in the U.S. who are lobbying for an idea like this as well, and many other governments are much closer than we are to implementing it and even some who already have (See the website at the bottom of my entry if interested). There weren't a lot of people at the meeting, maybe 40 at the most after everyone trickled in and even though it seemed like quite a passive crowd, the year-in-review accomplishments still seemed impressive. Some of them were:

- Succeeded in gaining the support (in principle) of the 29-member Federal NDP Caucus and the Federal Green Party (to be stated in their 2007 platform)

- Hosted the Second Summit for Ministries and Departments of Peace, at Royal Roads University, June 21 & 22 (2006), 18 countries were present.

- Coordinated the Working Group for Government Initiatives at the World Peace Forum, held June 23-28 (2006) in Vancouver. On June 24, the working group organized a panel of parliamentarians supporting departments of peace with 8 countries represented and a series of 6 workshops on related topics.

It definitely seems like a group who is just gearing up for brighter things and I enjoyed getting a heads up on this type of movement.

I think that like me, a lot of people came to the meeting to see Mary-Wynne Ashford speak. She is co-author of Enough Blood Shed: 101 Solutions to Violence, Terror And War and provided a much experienced perspective to the group. She is fully behind the idea of creating a Department of Peace and gave the group a lot of questions to consider what such an organization could and should accomplish, if implemented.

- She felt very strongly about addressing the root of violence - in our children and schools as a major responsibility of the DoP.

- She talked about shedding light on the corruption and hidden interests our western governments have in Oil and the wars that have been fought over those interests.

- One interesting point she had was that its very necessary to highlight the success stories of the Peace/Non-Violence movement and especially that of the United Nations so that people realise that progress is being made. She had many statistics to give and said that although News coverage is at an all-time high, the number of violent wars (with 1000 military casualties or more) have steadily declined since the late '80's, much in part to the United Nations. She stressed that the UN is not, in fact, the weak & impotent body that the United States continues to label it.

- As an example of what our world would be like without oil, she compared North Korea to Cuba. In 1991, Russia stopped selling oil to N. Korea and the cities became urban wastelands, filled up with concrete buildings and highways but with no lights or cars to show them as being alive. Whereas Cuba, cut off from US oil as part of the 1962 embargo has comparatively become a model for sustainability as it grows an abundance of food and stands only just below the 'super-powerful' US on many quality of life indexes.

- In closing, Mary-Wynne spoke very seriously about her ideas that we will not ever hit a population of 10 billion people on the earth; that a force greater than us will keep numbers in check and she advocated birthcontrol and even creating laws to have only one child per family as a reasonable method to stabilise population expansion. She said that we should be looking at ways of creating local communities that provide all necessities to their citizens without having so much need for commuting and travel, which is a major contributing factor to resource depletion.

It was very inspiring to see this scholar and visionary and I'm interested in hearing more from her.

Links:
www.departmentofpeace.ca/index.php
Short Bio on Mary-Wynne: www.ucalgary.ca/md/PARHAD/...ashford.htm
Her Book: www.amazon.com/Enough-Blo.../0865715270

Paul Hawken is an entrepreneur, researcher, and writer who has written several books on how to bring an ecological perspective to economics and who just recently has written about the massive sustainability movement. His latest book is called "Blessed Unrest" and details the hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of people across the globe who are actively persuing advancements in social justice, environmentalism, the battles against poverty and homelessness, healthcare issues, natural resource issues etc, etc, etc.

Paul came to speak in Victoria in early June but I did not get a chance to see him. I did however pick up his book "Natural Capitalism" and am really excited about it. It is somewhat of an add-on to his book "The Ecology of Commerce" and its aim is to spread the idea of changing the basic model of capitalism from one that considers the Earth and its Natural Resources as Infinite and OUTSIDE the cycle of 'production' to one that realises that all energy and raw materials harvested from the planet must be put back into it. It emphasises

1) radical resource productivity - getting more from the Earth through more efficient means

2) biomimicry - getting industry to transform production processes into closed cycles that REUSE all material & energy involved in them

3) a service and flow economy - one in which companies offer material goods to consumers as 'services' and retain the owenership and maintenance of such goods instead of handing off all 'end of life' responsibility to the consumers (ie. throwing out in the trash) and

4) Investing in Natural Capital - this one is a simple idea, but the most difficult - recreating all of the environmental habitat that we've destoyed.

I'm extremely inspired by this man, and here are some links for further info:

www.paulhawken.com/paulhawk...eset.html
www.blessedunrest.com/
www.natcap.org/
www.wiserearth.org/