As mothers, we have often felt engulfed by the gnawing worry of climate change, the jagged feeling akin to that moment when you, as a mother, drop off your child in the care of someone who hasn’t yet earned your trust. You see your child’s bright, observant gaze. Their nerves express concern to you with quiet messages designed to tug at your unique receptivity – a tight squeeze, a shifted foot, a tear in the corner of the eye. And you ask yourself: What if they are imperiled and unprotected when I am not present?When we read the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports in February and April, which United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described as an “atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” the anxiousness about our children’s well-being was rekindled in all of us.The three of us form the backbone of the Institute for Climate and Peace, a nonprofit organization based out of Hawaii focusing on the intersections between climate change and peace. We know how precarious the situation is. And we know that many of our leaders – well-intentioned as they may be – are ignoring the truest solutions to bring about peace and climate resilience. Central to our climate justice work is helping to frame the conversation about what peace is.’Positive’ peace can help heal planetHistorically, peace has been too often confused with the topic of security and defined simply as an absence of war and violent conflict, otherwise known as “negative peace.” However, there is another type of peace: “positive peace,” which means the presence of active systems and processes that allow human potential to flourish.Many systems that led to positive peace were integral to ancestral communities but dissipated during the industrial revolution. Indeed, technology has provided many boons to civilization, but it has led di …
Could we save Earth if we treated it like a child? We are in crisis and need to heal the planet. – USA TODAY
