J 000
This Journal is a collection of items drafted, written or gathered since 2017 when a tree in Woodbridge UK was named as the Suffolk town’s 'Tree for Peace'.
Since then Peace has continued to fall globally as a result of widespread and increasingly degenerate endeavours by nations and individuals to resolve conflicting ambitions by force.
However, the architect of the world's largest Peace Monument ( on a good day in Reykjavik it's many kilometers in height ) has suggested that improving Peace may be as simple as more of us thinking and talking about peace more often.
With that in mind, the Journal's items are mainly short and are intended to provoke thought and talk with, at their core, Peace as an idea and as a shared experience.
So if you can, please share all of this in conversation with a friend.
For convenience and referencing the Journal's items are numbered as J 000, J 001, J 002, etc. The early numbers set out a logical approach to the nature of Peace and to our personal parts in making Peace stronger.
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As a story the items record how that 2017 Tree’s public representation of Peace took hold, how it re-emerged from the disruptive 2020 Covid pandemic and how the Tree became the foundation of the present Woodbridge Monument for Peace.
Journal items also lay out the main facts, ideas and considerations that led to naming the Tree as a symbol and that have steered the Monument’s development towards its local and globally resonant social and educational purposes.
Facts on this site’s opening page point to a need for more action to promote peace – more action than is possible for the inspiring but sorely-stretched United Nations Organisation (UNO or UN ) and other major international institutions.
Ideas from a century of research are bringing relief and the seeds of peace to some of the world's most sorely afflicted places. Where the UN and others have the resources to intervene they bring unbiased mediation, negotiation, and other skills to make, keep and build peace. As onlookers though we can see, as they do, that a lot of dire need is unmet.
Considerations that inspired this Monument included the real possibility that Education about Peace could help us all to do things to grow peace from its roots to ease the burden on those organisations.
More knowledge and a fuller understanding of peace will, for example, make us more alert to the emergence of tensions in our own or other communities, and more able to advocate for help there before troubles become intractably embedded.
Those same steps in learning about Peace would make us more penetrating in our attention to the highly-condensed media reporting on violent conflict, and more powerful in our scrutiny of governments’ and leaders' responses to historic, latent, emergent or escalating conflicts.
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As history has shown, and where theory can now predict, simply turning our back on troubles invites them to keep coming and to keep coming closer.
But as with our own favourite subjects, there is personal confidence and pleasurable comfort to be found in a fuller understanding of Peace and its disturbance by fast changing circumstances.
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World Peace may be beyond our own easy reach.
Even our own every-day personal Peace is not always secure.
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But Together it's different.
Together we’ll invoke greater serenity.
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Read more about that here soon.
Meanwhile, to see the facts mentioned above - just 'click' on the 'Trees' Logo above or below.