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This Journal page starts a 2026 republication of 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 2017, and even before that, global Peace has slowly fallen as a result of widespread and increasingly degenerate endeavours by nations and their leaders to resolve conflicting ambitions by force.
However, the architect of the world's largest Peace Monument (the 'Imagine' Light Tower in Reykjavik which on a good night might seems some 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, this Journal's items are mainly short and are intended to provoke thought and talk with Peace at their core, whether as an idea or as a shared experience that we can improve.
So if you can, please share all of this in conversation with your friends.
For convenience and referencing the Journal's items will be numbered by dates in the form yymmdd - making this # 260525
.As a story the items record how that 2017 Tree’s public representation of Peace took hold only slowly, how it re-emerged from the disruptive 2020 Covid pandemic and how the Tree then became the foundation of the present larger 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 possibility that Education about Peace could help us all grow peace from its roots and ease the burden on those organisations.
More knowledge and a fuller understanding of peace might, for example, make us more alert to the emergence of tensions in other communities, and more able to advocate for help there before troubles become intractably embedded.
Those same steps in learning about Peace could 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 grow bigger, to keep coming and to keep coming closer.
But as with our own favourite subjects, there is personal confidence and some comfort to be found in a fuller understanding of Peace and of its disturbance by fast changingand circumstances.
For the avoidance of undue doubt, there is of course always doubt barring the way to improvement.
To be clear, what collects here will be - initially at least - shaped by the Founder's decades of professional experience of education seen through the lenses of classroom teaching and of the inspection of learning in hundreds of schools, and turned now towards the work of those endeavouring today to give learning about Peace an enlightening role for everyone.
A great deal about Peace has been uncovered by professional reflection and research in the wake of the 20th century World Wars. Education about Peace has become established in many universities. Their research and fieldwork have grown considerable expertise is peace-making, peace-keeping and peace-building.
Even so, global peace is fragile. Something more is needed, soon and sufficiently different to engage us together in turning from violence to more peaceful lives.
Meanwhile, to see more of the the facts mentioned above - just 'click' on the 'Trees' Logo above or on this site's other pages and Posts.