NEWS

Students gather for a rally during Michigan’s 1970 Teach-In on the Environment in Ann Arbor. The largest and most visible event organized to celebrate the first Earth Day, the five-day event drew an estimated 50,000 participants and included 125 seminars, speeches, workshops, panels, debates, forums, rallies, demonstrations, films, field trips, and concerts. Photo and facts from the School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan.

By Odile Hugonot Haber

April 2020

The first Earth Day was created by Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and took place on April 22, 1970, not long after 14,000 people came into the Chrisler arena in Ann Arbor for the University of Michigan’s first “Teach-In on the Environment” on March 11, 1970.

The University of Michigan event was organized by six graduate students, and it was so popular that many people could not get in, so organizers set up sound amplification outside. The Governor of Michigan gave a brief introduction, then the biologist Barry Commoner started his keynote speech. At first, he was quite moved because he had never spoken to such a large audience before and called it “the world’s largest seminar on ecology.”

He began: “What a wonderful thing you have done! At a time when the whole country has begun to ask why, in the wealthiest, the most scientifically advanced nation in the history of man, the heavens reek, the waters below are foul, children die in infancy, and we and the world which is our home are threatened with  nuclear annihilation.” He made the point more than once that “We are in a crisis of survival.” Pollution was already quite visible at the time, and Earth Day was indeed started as a matter of survival 50 years ago.

According to Adam Rome’s book, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation, the original environmentalists thought the environmental crisis was a grim challenge but also realized it could present a great opportunity for consciousness raising, and for people to change their habits and practices. Already there was an emerging consciousness about the state of our planet.
 
Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was the first to sound the alarm. Carson had become worried about the effects of pesticide use and wrote a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1962 which were turned into the book. This was called a “watershed moment” for the ecological movement.
 
In 1969, Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson came up with the idea of a national day to focus on the environment after he witnessed the ravages of a massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Nelson was hoping to capture the vibrant youth who had been active in the anti-war movement and redirect their activist energy to an environmental movement.
 
Even before this, intellectuals in the 1950s, such as the historian Arthur Schlesinger and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, had begun to advocate for a new liberalism. They saw that a surge of many new material goods in the US marketplace had a downside. “Earth Day also convinced many Americans that the pollution, sprawls, fall-out,..were not separate issues,” writes Adam Rome, and this called for a new consciousness.
 
Rome explains that the Ann Arbor event had many ripple effects and other teach-ins sprouted up all over the country and internationally.
 
He shows how, after an annual Earth Day was called for, “tens of thousands of people made Earth Day happen on universities, and college campuses, at schools and in cities and towns.” Buttons saying: “Give Earth a chance” proliferated everywhere and “many found the experience to be exhilarating and life-changing.”
 
Vance Packard, a best-selling social critic of the time, saw that the great unmet challenges involved the provision of public goods. He was quoted as saying, “A person can’t go down to the store and order a new park. A park requires a unified effort and gets you into voting, and public spending and maybe soak-the-rich taxes.”

Ann Arbor’s Citizens Mobilize for Community Common

In the late 1990’s, public land in Ann Arbor city center was going to be sold to a private contractor for a convention center. Citizens for many years had expressed the need for a park in the center of the city. The land was valuable, and the city had planned a convention center at first, but then it proved to be not financially sound. The convention center was set aside, but then the city continued to plan with out-of-town contractors to have a huge building constructed there as an “iconic” building. The city secretly put in underground parking, four floors deep, so contractors could be lured to build on the public land.
 
The building that was planned was huge, and its construction spoiled the character of Ann Arbor as a charming “tree town” that was easy to live in. Officials in City Hall had planned the building of some new, very tall buildings around the edge of the city. So not only was the city leadership neglecting to build a central park in the heart of our city, but they were proposing urban skyscrapers. The citizens were alarmed by these sudden developments; they felt overwhelmed, offended, and shocked.
 
In November 2015, a group called “The Ann Arbor Committee for the Community Commons” initiated a petition to amend the city charter and designate this public land as “a community commons” which would include a central park with a small civic center, public building,  and a playground. A hundred people or so started collecting signatures to get a “park in the center of the city.” The petition to amend the city charter was signed by 6,000+ citizens.  Because 200 people had signed twice, the city refused it and the petition had to be redone, but finally the second petition with 8,000+ signatures was accepted in June 2018 by the city clerk. It was listed on the ballot in June and was voted on November 6, 2018—and it won.
 
The resolution became part of the city charter, and the citizens did indeed get a park. By organizing and advocating, the people got their commons, and did the opposite of the Joni Mitchell lyric—they unpaved the parking lot and put up paradise! A city commission was formed, and they hosted a few open public events to entice the citizens to get involved with ideas and suggestions to create “the Park” and “the Commons.”

New Book Offers Ideas about ‘Commoning’
 
What can cities do to respond to the new demands of citizens as commoners? What institutional adaptations would facilitate such a role? Those of us who are looking for answers can find some in a new book by David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons.
 
They write: “Commons are living social systems through which people address their shared problems”; and “It is about sharing, and bringing into being the durable social systems for producing shareable things and activities.” They affirm: “The very act of commoning as it expands and registers on a larger culture, catalyzes new political and economic possibilities.” (Free, Fair and Alive, 14-15). Because any idea of the commons is about people, relations, and social structures, the commons is indeed a transformative perspective.

In short, the common includes our lands, our planet, and the fact that we have finite resources and land use. As Silvia Federici defines it in Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons: “The commons means shared property, in the form of a shared natural or social wealth-lands, waters, forests, system of knowledge, capacity for care-to be used by all commoners, without any distinctions, but which are not for sale.”

The commons is the principle on which life brought us to this planet, it represents nature and natural evolution. It’s our shared inheritance. The deterioration of the environment is visible, and we will all suffer with the drastic changes that are now accelerating. As the environment is in crisis due to climate change, many millions of people will be affected and we are realizing that what affects one person somewhere, affects all of us everywhere. Our land is our inheritance and we need to care for it, and support all the beings on it, as we are all part of the bio-concentric web of life.
 
These thoughts move us forward to a new level of collective consciousness, in which we will need to develop the values of caring, helping each other, and facilitating collective actions for survival. This movement is now developing all over the earth, leading to visions of new economies, and new infrastructures that will facilitate these multifaceted collective developments.
 
The most advanced proponents have called for Earth Regeneration, and a network called "Regenerative Communities Network" operates as a living laboratory for the design of bioregional economies. They are joined by a multitude of small non-governmental organizations working to offer solutions.
 
The center of the city, the community commons, is one dot in a line of forward advancements that are needed for our cities and towns to advance life on earth and support visionary developments to protect and safeguard citizens as well as all nonhuman life on earth. We must have the resilience and the courage to move forward into uncharted territories.

Further Reading:

The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, by Peter Linebaugh

Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard, by Peter Linebaugh

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, by Kate Raworth

Graphic provided by Cherrill Spencer.

By Robin Lloyd and Cherrill Spencer
DISARM/End Wars Issue Committee

April 2020

Dear DISARM activists (and all WILPF members):

We hope you are well and staying home. We are all seeking to understand the challenges and opportunities that the coronavirus plague imposes on our global health and civic society.

What can WE do?

Will the virus so decimate our health and capacity that the war machine will be seen as a cruel extravagance which will totter and fall…or….will the crisis accelerate hostility and walls and defensiveness leading to accidental or intentional military exchanges?

The world is on the cusp of momentous decisions.   

In an appeal issued on March 23, 2020, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged warring parties across the globe to lay down their weapons in support of the bigger battle against COVID-19: the common enemy that is now threatening all of humankind.   

“The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war”, he said. “That is why today, I am calling for an immediate global ceasefire in all corners of the world. It is time to put armed conflict on lockdown and focus together on the true fight of our lives.”

The ceasefire would allow humanitarians to reach populations that are most vulnerable to the spread of COVID-19, which first emerged in Wuhan, China, last December, and has now been reported in more than 180 countries. It is the most vulnerable - women and children, people with disabilities, the marginalized, displaced and refugees - who pay the highest price during conflict and who are most at risk of suffering “devastating losses” from the disease. Furthermore, health systems in war-ravaged countries have often reached the point of total collapse, while the few health workers who remain are also seen as targets. The UN chief called on warring parties to pull back from hostilities, put aside mistrust and animosity, and “silence the guns; stop the artillery; end the airstrikes”. This is crucial, he said, “to help create corridors for life-saving aid. To open precious windows for diplomacy. To bring hope to places among the most vulnerable to COVID-19.” (UN News)

What can WE do to support this appeal?

We suggest talking with our circles of concern locally and nationally. It is crucial that our focus on peace and disarmament be heard far and wide. Use the arguments in Guterres’ appeal to help you write to your congressional representatives.

This is a time when more Americans will be open to cutting military spending. Let us take advantage of the moment.

Some Ideas for Homebound Activism

Fortunately, we can still work on issues from home while the coronavirus is circulating. For example:

1. Explore US military, nuclear weapons and space force budgets and demand that those funds be diverted to Trump’s  coronavirus response funding  (as of late March those budgets are sitting at 2 trillion dollars!). Be sure to listen to Marylia Kelley’s excellent speech about nuclear weapons costs on the March 2020 ONE WILPF Call reached here.

2. Study the work of our anti-war allies to raise consciousness about the environmental and economic impacts of militarism: Abolition 2000, Black Alliance for Peace, Code Pink, Extinction Rebellion, Mayors for Peace, Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, Peace Action, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Poor People's Campaign,  Raging Grannies,  Veterans for Peace, World Beyond War, … and let us know if there are others who should be included on this list, currently posted on the WILPF US Disarm page.

3. Preparefor Hiroshima-Nagasaki Days during August Nuclear-Free Future Month. This year we have many hundreds of paper cranes which were donated to WILPF US by atomic bomb survivors in Japan last year and are sitting in our national office. Contact Chris Wilbeck at the WILPF US office and ask her to ship some paper cranes to your branch (your branch will pay for the shipping), to use in your 75th Anniversary of the Bomb events.

Several members of Disarm took part in a stimulating planning meeting via the web sponsored by ReThink Media, which is coordinating a collaborative publicity effort for the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here is a description of ReThink Media taken from their website, rethinkmedia.org:  it is a unique, non-profit organization focused on building the communications capacity of nonprofit think tanks, experts, and advocacy groups working toward a more constructive US foreign and national security policy, the protection of human and civil rights, and strengthening our democracy. In collaboration with 65 other groups working towards peace and nuclear disarmament they have written a position statement, it is an internal document that can be used for creating public facing materials - like talking points, graphics (we are using one of their graphic designs in this eNEWS article), and eventually things like model Letters To the Editor and Op-eds.  We will be urging our president to sign on to their Position Statement on behalf of WILPF US.   

4.  Call and write/fax your Representatives and ask them to support HR-2419, which says take the money from nuclear weapons and put it into human needs!  

5.  Call and write/fax your Senators and ask them to support the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons!  

6.  Share these links and this information with your friends on Facebook, Twitter and by email!

Update on Spring Events

Due to the crisis, many activist events that WILPFers were going to, have been cancelled or postponed.

•  Alliance for Nuclear Accountability DC Days, April 19-22, is canceled but may be rescheduled to the fall.
•  The World Conference in New York City won’t be happening April 24-26 - but the organizers are planning to hold an online conference, and you can keep track of their plans at World Conference 2020.
• The UN’s review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is 50 years old this year, is about to be postponed. We had an accredited WILPF-US delegation ready to attend this review at the UN in New York City; we hope we can attend the postponed conference when it occurs.
• The Stop the Nuclear Arms Race conference in Tennessee (May 22-25) has not been canceled yet, but keep an eye on nukewatchinfo.org.
• The World Beyond War conference in Ottawa (May 26-31) has not yet been canceled. But WBW is urging us to call for the cancellation of CANSEC, Canada’s biggest annual weapons expo, which is due to take place at the same time as the Conference. What an obscenity if the weapons bazaar takes place and millions of dollars are exchanged to bomb and destroy people in the midst of this health crisis!  

As Ray Acheson, Director of Reaching Critical Will, says in an International WILPF response to the coronavirus crisis: “Compassion, care, and collective action will see us through this crisis, and will be the bedrock upon which we can build a world beyond capitalist exploitation, militarised security, and environmental destruction. The time to start imagining and structuring that world is now.”

Inset graphics credits:
1. Drop the MIC Campaign.   
2. rethinkmedia.org   

For many years Robin Lloyd has opened her Rochester, VT, family farm yearly to a gathering of WILPF members where we relax, hear informed talks, and discuss issues of the year. In support of Hibakusha and the 75th anniversary (2020) of the nuclear bombings in Japan, we made a banner and took a picture we sent to Japan. Photo by Eileen Kurkoski.

By Eileen Kurkoski
WILPF US Secretary

April 2020

Hear the drum roll? WILPF’s exciting California speaking tour on military contamination of water partly took place, despite coronavirus concerns. And WILPF expects to connect with a different segment of women by collaborating with a new feminist economics organization.

The highlights from the WILPF US January Board Meeting give details on these plans and more, as well as providing updates and changes necessitated by the pandemic which have occurred since the January meeting

We look forward to doing more, if we can raise more money.

January Board Meeting Highlights

1. “The Pentagon: Exposing the Hidden Polluter of Water” Tour. Board member and organizer, Nancy Price, has updated the Earth Democracy page of our WILPF website, including information about the 20 planned stops of the Tour and more, on the special Military Poisons website. [Due to the health emergency, the March tour took place in the first three cities and with media interviews.]  

Pat Elder was the tour’s key speaker. He has researched the health effects on local communities of chemicals used on military basses. WILPF contracted a publicist to film the tour, and World Beyond War and Veterans for Peace posted announcements about the tour. Many thanks go to the Patagonia Foundation for their grant, funding most of the tour.

2. WILPF is collaborating with An Economy of Our Own. The impressive advisors for this new group are women dedicated to seeking generative change in the economic status of women, particularly women of color. AEOO is gathering educational tools and resources for Econo-Consciousness-Raising groups and preparing local public events on women’s economic concerns. WILPF hopes to participate with AEOO in two conferences; the first conference will be in June in Washington D.C. and the second in November in California.

3. Plans for the WILPF US Congress 2021 have started. A pre-Congress committee has been formed, consisting of board members Eileen Kurkoski, Nancy Price, Mary Hanson Harrison, and Darien DeLu; as well as Detroit (2014) Congress Coordinator, Laura Dewey, and Jane Doyle. They are discussing and researching options. Mini-virtual congress gatherings this year in July are being discussed. [Additional volunteers are needed for the virtual congress! Contact President@WILPFUS.org.]

4. Consistent with WILPF's goals of challenging oppression and building peace and justice, and mindful of Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez’s statement that peace results from respect for other people’s rights – the Board took a strong stand in opposition to the unilateral and crippling US sanctions against Cuba. The Board voted to endorse the “Call to Action for International Days of Action Against sanctions and Economic War – March 13-14, 2020.” The Board also approved a second item from the Cuba and the Bolivarian Alliance Issue Committee, endorsing the Second National Conference for the Normalization of US-Cuba relations, March 21-22 in NYC [which subsequently was postponed to November 2020].

Both items oppose unilateral sanctions against countries that have not violated international law, and these are especially in regard to US sanctions against Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea.

5.  The annual UN Commission on the Status of Women had planned to address the Beijing Declaration (the goals set by the UN Women’s Conference there), now 25 years later. WILPF’s CSW Programs – with five Practicum students, two Local to Global WILPF members, and two faculty – and other WILPF US leadership were preparing for the busy and interesting March 8-14 week.  [Unfortunately, due to the coronavirus, the March 2020 CSW was cancelled, along with the two WILPF programs.]

6. 2020 Budget: Where do we want to spend our money?
After numerous meetings, the Finance Committee could not set up a balanced budget; the projection is a deficit of $25,969.

Our 2020 WILPF Budget includes these foundational components, and we want to build from them.

a. Programs, Initiatives & Branch & Member Support:
Coalition Dues & Memberships,
Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) Practicum & Local to Global, CSW Parallel Presentation(s),
Leadership Institute,
One WILPF & Solidarity Events,
WILPF for Poor Peoples’ Campaign (PPC),
Program Chair(s), Disarm, Middle East, Cuba/Bolivarian, Earth Democracy, Advancing Human Rights, Women Money & Democracy, Membership Development, WILPF Women In Network Growing  Stronger (WWINGS), 2021 WILPF US Congress.
Grants, Mini-grants
b. Communications – e-newsletter, Peace & Freedom magazine, website, functioning office
c. Basic structures – board, office, part-time contracted employees, branches, International Congress
(We pay yearly membership dues of about $20,000 to support International WILPF).
The Board discussed the substantial organizational benefits of having an executive director. However, we realize we would need much more money to hire one.

7. Program 2.0 progress: Branches got a survey, asking which topics they have covered in the last 2-3 years and their likely interests for the next 12-18 months. Their responses will inform the long-term plans the Issue Committees leaders make.                         

8. Should we evaluate the make-up of our board? To explore this proposal an ad hoc committee will form, including two board members and two to three non-board members. Board Members Volunteers: Jan Corderman, Shilpa Pandey

9. The Board formed an ad hoc committee on how to make our board service more enjoyable. Mary Hanson Harrison agreed to head it up and is looking for more help. Some ideas brought up included having an in-person board meeting at the 2021 Congress, singing briefly at meetings, bloopers and successes in activism, and light political jokes.

10. Should we change how we reach out to non-WILPF members? The board began a discussion regarding who should get the e-News and e-Alerts and if non-members should be allowed on One WILPF calls. Right now e-Alerts and One WILPF calls are only for members. Should the e-News offer a link to One WILPF calls, for non-members? Darien plans to talk with our technology specialist regarding the feasibility of making some changes. Also, we’re reprinting more copies of our WILPF US brochure.

You can find a list of board minutes on our National Board webpage. Do you want to listen in to a board meeting? On that same page you’ll find how to pre-register to receive call-in information and the agenda for the next board meeting.

For further information on volunteer opportunities regarding any of the committees mentioned, please contact secretary@wilpfus.org.

The June 20 Mass Poor People's Assembly and National Moral March on Washington is going digital!

WILPF US is an Organizing Partner, and we are all in!  

Take a look at the above video and click on this WILPF-specific link to RSVP and for updates.

Click here to listen to our latest One WILPF call, in which WILPF members Mary Bricker-Jenkins and Jan Corderman provide additional information about the Poor People’s Campaign, the June 20 action, and other aspects of the united work of the PPC and WILPF.

Join the largest digital and social media gathering in this nation’s history of poor and low-wealth people, moral and religious leaders, advocates, and people of conscience!