Learning for Peace
Introduction
This page will introduce ideas and contain further information about peace and about how we can make peace stronger.
Section 1 contains additional information about monuments for peace, including the Woodbridge Monument.
Section 2 suggests simple activities that may help visitors to ‘think peace’ while visiting the Trees.
In time, Section 3 will introduce some of what we know about peace as a result of advances in peace research and education.
At present it holds its own introduction in the form of a taster activity.
Section 1
Topics
- Other peace monuments
- Why the Woodbridge monument is made of trees
- The cost of the Woodbridge Monument for Peace
Other peace monuments
Monuments named for Peace are not entirely new. Some of the oldest date from previous millenia.
Many of them are though, modern peacetime creations of individuals or community groups. So most are modest in size
[Photograph taken by the author]
The Hiroshima Tree
Tavistock Square, London
Planted on 6 August 1967 – in memory of the 140,000 victims, 21 years after the first wartime deployment of a nuclear weapon.
Peace Poles
Peace Poles have been inspired by an initiative in Japan in 1955. Each pole is carefully crafted to carry the message of hope “May peace prevail on earth”, usually stated in multiple languages.
They are now manufactured and installed in many countries and places. These are in the garden of their manufacturer[1] in St Louis, USA, Schools have installed peace poles to promote children’s learning about peace. The idea has also been imitated in some large stone-built or sculpted monuments.
Three Peace Poles
Photograph by permission of Jim and Sue Law
Large monuments for peace
Some monuments use the results of war to remind us of its consequences.
A parkland site in Hiroshima, Japan, maintains a distinctive domed structure that was the only local building to survive the first wartime deployment of a nuclear weapon, killing 140,000 in 1946.
The sculptured ‘Monument Against War and Fascism’[2] in Vienna’s Albertinaplatz, and Picasso’s painting of ‘Guernica’[3] in Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia powerfully depict the separation and suffering of wartime.
‘Imagine Peace’ Tower – Reykjavic
Image Source
One very large monument is spectacularly different in character and purpose.
The ‘Imagine Peace’ Tower in Iceland[4] is one of light powered at 75kW by Iceland’s geothermal energy. It is switched on for key dates every year.
On a clear night the tower can be seen from a considerable distance to have a visible height of more than 4 kilometres.
The monument’s website promotes the ideas that “each one of us has the power to change the world”, and that “we don’t have to do much … but start ‘thinking peace’ ”.
Why the Woodbridge Monument is made of trees
Trees as global partners
Reasons for choosing trees for the monument in Woodbridge include their high status in the global ecosystem.
They can remind us of the interdependence of all living things. as low cost. And, like ourselves, peace favours their well-being.
Trees as monuments
Tree monuments have been established in dozens of places round the world. Friendship Trees have been planted by Rotary International. Trees mark various acts of war or the sites of acts of peace-building. Other monuments are trees such as the Oak of Guernica that survived war and another grown from seed that survived the bombing of Hiroshima.
Trees as tokens of friendship
These cherry trees in full bloom near the Washington Monument, Washington DC, USA, are a small part of a gift of thousands made in 1912 to the USA by the Japanese government as a token of friendship.
Washington monument, cherry blossom and Tidal Basin
CREDIT: Horydczak, Theodor, photographer. “Washington Monument. Views of Washington Monument, cherry blossoms and Tidal Basin XLII.,” ca. 1920- ca. 1950. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Reproduction Number LC-H8-CT-M01-038 DLC.
But among the world’s listed[5] peace monuments there is an example of a tree monument that has suggested how little a Monument for Peace might cost. The list describes the tree as an “unintentional monument”. It is an elm tree from a place called Shackamaxon on the Delaware river in Philadelphia, USA. It marks the place where an exemplary treaty of friendship was made between immigrant and indigenous people in 1682.
The tree soon became recognised as a peace monument and was given military protection when endangered by the American War of Independence.
The tree has been revered for more than three centuries in indigenous folk-traditions, in European-style American paintings, in rescuing it from natural disaster in 1810, and in nurturing and transplanting cuttings widely and into the 21st century.
Credit tbc
Credit tbc
For additional details on the Shackamaxon Elm see the “Learning for Peace” pages of this website.
The cost of the Woodbridge Monument for Peace
The trees
Creating the monument from established trees provided immediate and prominent symbols for peace at very low cost[6] and with little of the work entailed in planting and nurturing saplings.
Maintenance of the trees and their surroundings is carried out within the normal work of Woodbridge Town Council and its contractors.
The trails
The trails follow established footpaths, rights-of-way and minor roadways to visit places that are normally open for public access.
They are maintained within the normal operations of the local County, District and Town Councils, and those of some local landowners – householders, the National Trust and the Woodland Trust.
The monument’s visitors
Visitors arrive at no cost to any of the trees, the trails or the website.
They are, on the contrary, a precious asset for the monument.
Everyone moved by the monument to begin any small action to make peace stronger offsets a little of the monument’s costs.
The website
This website is the monument’s most expensive component.
[More to follow ………………… ]
Memorials for the future
The term ‘memorial for the future’ has appeared to contain a contradiction; memorials have usually commemorated things in the present or past.
In 2016 an international competition invited designers to invent memorials to highlight universal concerns – matters that increasingly concern everyone, globally.
From among scores of entries, the declared winner chose to highlight global warming with a memorial called ‘Climate chronograph’.
One of its ideas was to show visitors a landscape destroyed by rising sea and underground water levels.
Illustration from report by the Van Alen Institute
Illustration from report by the Van Alen Institute
The chronograph goes much further than pictures by placing visitors in a landscape that is undergoing slow destruction in that way.
It is / is to be a cherry orchard on a site sloping upwards from a river bank in Washington DC, USA.
Cherry tree roots are destroyed by being in too much water.
As underground and sea water levels rise, the orchard will die, from the end closest to water level, row-by-row, decade-by-decade.
For visitors, the stark bare branches of the trees closest to water level make an immediate reality of the creeping underground effect of climate change.
A report on entries for the competition[7] provides a template for a ‘memorial for the future’ by summarising their special features.
Typically, these memorials:
- highlight a current or ongoing matter of interest or concern affecting everyone
- make it easier for visitors to understand abstract ideas
- allow visitors to shape and become parts of the monument
- show simple things that visitors can do in the best interest of personal and community welfare
Those are what the Woodbridge Monument for Peace is intended to do in the interest of making peace stronger.
Section 2 – Activities
Section 3 – Education for Peace topics
Topics
- What we know about peace: a taster and making a start on learning
What we know about peace: a taster and making a start on learning
What we know about peace
That’s far too much for this website, so the following is just a few hints.
What we know about peace is rooted in a wide range of more ‘conventional’ subject disciplines: anthropology, economics, history, psychology, politics, sociology, and more. So you may have a head start on lome learning about peace.
A ‘topic’ approach might include, for example, ‘conditions necessary for lasting peace’, ‘conflict and conflict resolution’, ‘direct and structural violence’, ‘organisations that promote peace’, ‘peace-making, peace-keeping and peace-building’, ‘personal peace’, ‘positive and negative peace’, ‘roots of human aggression’, ‘skills that underpin peaceful relationships’, ‘the global peace index’.
Making a start
If any of those topics has appeal, a valuable start to learning could be simply gathering information about it – perhaps by following a national or international news story and any well-informed commentary.
Another start might be to explore on the internet for the global peace index (GPI).
Find out :
- who makes the index
- what factors are looked at to place the world’s nations in rank order
- which nations are the most and least peaceful and what places them in those positions
- look to see where your home nation sits in the ranking
- consider whether that matches any ‘common-sense’ views you might already have
Maybe also think through the list of factors in the GPI and think what you might use in their place for a ‘personal peace index’.
If you have read this far down the page, you may have already started to ‘think peace’, and maybe even decided to take that a little further.
So, ‘welcome to the club’.
