Hope is a garden
Of seeds sown with tears,
Planted with love
Amidst present fears.
--Mattie J.T. Stepanek
Mattie, a young poet and peacemaker, wrote passionately about hope, peace, and justice. Mattie said, "if we simply, but profoundly, choose to make peace an attitude and a habit and a reality, peace is possible."
Mattie had a close friendship with former President Jimmy Carter who said, "Mattie convinced me his quest for peace was achievable." Inspired by Mattie's thirst for peace, Carter committed to a partnership while Mattie fought a neurological disease. Together they wrote Just Peace: A Message of Hope. Mattie passed away in 2004 when he was 13 years old. President Carter keeps spreading peace by building homes and bridges all over the world.
Today, Mattie's call to be peacemakers and messengers of peace shines a light of hope on a dangerous hot planet. Climate scientists are alarmed with Europe's heatwaves, warming faster than anticipated. Greenhouse-gas emissions from wildfires in the Arctic, Siberia, and Indonesia, destroying irreplaceable forests and releasing carbon stored in the forest soil, are rapidly heating the planet.
Peace and justice
Just peace, as Mattie explains, is an urgent plea to build a world where people treat each other with respect and compassion.
You know from personal experience people who give and share, listen and ask for your fears and concerns. They are always ready to be by your side. Peacemaking provides a compass for the choices we make, as individuals, communities, and as a nation.
Make peace our natural state
The Sept. 15-22 Arkansas Peace Week celebrates peacemaking as a means to instill justice, build stronger communities, alleviate poverty, promote ecological stewardship, and end wars. Information is available online at arkansaspeaceweek.com. Please join and learn how to thrive and survive.
Peacemaking in a hot world
When you look at a pot of boiling water, you can see the hot steam, the bubbles rising and spilling from the pot, and feel the energy from the scalding water. In a similar way, conflicts, distress, disagreements, and fear get in the way of peace when the world burns.
We live on a small planet, interconnected and interdependent, bombarded by breaking news of violence and suffering.
During his 2018 presidential campaign, Jair Bolsonaro promised to make Brazil great again. Bolsonaro rose to power backed by the wealthy, with plans to develop the Amazon tropical rainforest for mining, cattle ranching, and agriculture.
On Jan. 1, 2019, in his first day in office, Bolsonaro rolled back years of environmental regulations, and asserted that not an inch of the Amazon would be granted to indigenous people. Over 900,000 people have been living in the rainforest for millennia. The rainforest has been under siege for many years, but never like this. Bolsonaro, blaming other countries of trying to take Brazil's sovereignty, angrily rejected $22 million in international aid offered by the G-7.
The climate emergency is real. Based on annual emissions rates, the Amazon rainforest stores a decade's worth of carbon in the forest soil. If the wildfires continue emitting carbon dioxide, the rainforest will not only stop sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but the deforestation would release all the carbon stored in the soil. Ten years' worth of carbon would be released all at once!
Harmony, calm, and serentiy
Knowing the rainforest is on fire and indigenous people are losing their ancestral homes and way of life, we feel the heat and their pain. Anger is a natural response, but it is also a trap. There are other Bolsonaros in the world; Jair is only an element of a larger threat.
Charles Eisenstein, a brilliant philosopher and activist, shares his deep concerns and thoughts on the Amazon wildfires, available on YouTube. Eisenstein believes we live in a web connecting everyone with a living planet, Gaia. He says we can contribute to a shift of consciousness, performing acts of care and ecological or social healing.
Reach out and help people in need. Hate and division reign in America, a different nation seen as weak and abusive by our allies, no longer the moral leader of the free world. We need to change, and we are running out of time.
American indigenous tribes, like our brothers and sisters in the Amazon, deserve our respect and appreciation. They know how to love and care for Mother Earth. We can learn to survive from our elders.
The climate is getting worse; scarce water, food, and shelter demand a new behavior. Peace and compassion are better alternatives to war and destruction.
We have too many weapons and little time to change.
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Dr. Luis Contreras lives in Eureka Springs.
Editorial on 09/14/2019