United Nations Outlaws Nuclear Weapons
[Jan/Feb 2021]
January 22, 2021 was a historic day for the movement to ban nuclear weapons when the United Nations “Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons” entered into force, establishing in international law a categorical ban on nuclear weapons.
On October 24, 2020, Honduras became the 50th country to ratify the Treaty, pushing the agreement over the threshold
required to enter into force. Honduras’ ratification set the stage for the international treaty to take effect on January 22, 2021 despite the refusal of the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and other powerful nuclear-armed nations to sign on to the agreement which requires that signatories “never under any circumstances... develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess, or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.”
Nebraskans for Peace President and Vietnam War veteran Ron Todd-Meyer blended his praise for the milestone Treaty with criticism for his own country. “For half a century, as signatories of the 1970 ‘Non-Proliferation Treaty’, the U.S. and other nuclear states have been legally obliged to abolish their nuclear arsenals in exchange for the rest of the world refusing to develop these Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Todd-Meyer stated. “But not only has the United States. steadfastly failed to honor its legal obligation,” he said, “the U.S. government is actively engaged in a trillion-dollar ‘modernization’ of its stockpile and is one of only a handful nations to oppose the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. In the eyes of the world community, we are shameless outlaws criminally imperiling the entire earth.”
The Treaty’s official entry into force was marked by actions, events, and celebrations around the globe and across the United
States—including Bellevue, Nebraska, where activists from at least four Midwestern states conducted a protest rally at Offutt Air Force Base, headquarters for the United States Strategic Command and the site of anti-nuclear weapons protests for more than 60 years.
“The world has banned chemical and biological weapons as so evil to all the world that they must not exist,” said Father James Murphy, a Catholic pastor who came to Offutt from Highland, Wisconsin.
“Banning nuclear weapons is not a wild-eyed dream but a practical progression for the world community. To honor the sacred nature of all human, animal and plant life is to say no to nuclear weapons!”
For more information, visit the Facebook page Nuclear Ban Treaty EIF and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons {ICAN} events page at http://www.icanw.org/events.
January 22, 2021 was a historic day for the movement to ban nuclear weapons when the United Nations “Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons” entered into force, establishing in international law a categorical ban on nuclear weapons.
On October 24, 2020, Honduras became the 50th country to ratify the Treaty, pushing the agreement over the threshold
required to enter into force. Honduras’ ratification set the stage for the international treaty to take effect on January 22, 2021 despite the refusal of the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and other powerful nuclear-armed nations to sign on to the agreement which requires that signatories “never under any circumstances... develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess, or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.”
Nebraskans for Peace President and Vietnam War veteran Ron Todd-Meyer blended his praise for the milestone Treaty with criticism for his own country. “For half a century, as signatories of the 1970 ‘Non-Proliferation Treaty’, the U.S. and other nuclear states have been legally obliged to abolish their nuclear arsenals in exchange for the rest of the world refusing to develop these Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Todd-Meyer stated. “But not only has the United States. steadfastly failed to honor its legal obligation,” he said, “the U.S. government is actively engaged in a trillion-dollar ‘modernization’ of its stockpile and is one of only a handful nations to oppose the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. In the eyes of the world community, we are shameless outlaws criminally imperiling the entire earth.”
The Treaty’s official entry into force was marked by actions, events, and celebrations around the globe and across the United
States—including Bellevue, Nebraska, where activists from at least four Midwestern states conducted a protest rally at Offutt Air Force Base, headquarters for the United States Strategic Command and the site of anti-nuclear weapons protests for more than 60 years.
“The world has banned chemical and biological weapons as so evil to all the world that they must not exist,” said Father James Murphy, a Catholic pastor who came to Offutt from Highland, Wisconsin.
“Banning nuclear weapons is not a wild-eyed dream but a practical progression for the world community. To honor the sacred nature of all human, animal and plant life is to say no to nuclear weapons!”
For more information, visit the Facebook page Nuclear Ban Treaty EIF and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons {ICAN} events page at http://www.icanw.org/events.
In This Season of Frenzied Overconsumption
Resolve To Live More Simply
( so others can simply live )
[Nov/Dec 2021]
If you’re fortunate enough to be ‘middle class’, you’ve been able to hop in the car whenever you want, eat whatever you’re hungry for, go shopping, spend money on recreation, and maybe even fly somewhere for a holiday.
Consumption has become such an enthroned part of our American way of life we’ve equated it with ‘freedom’. So long as we’ve got the money to pay for it, we’re free to move around at will, eat out, shop till we drop, trade up for a nicer car, a nicer home (in a ‘nicer’ neighborhood), and then ‘throw away’ what’s ‘old’ or out of fashion. This consumer drive is so ingrained in our psyches, it’s now reflex. We don’t give it—or its impact on the ecosystem—a second thought.
But with the coronavirus and the climate crisis, we have no choice but to start rethinking the way we live.
By limiting our mobility, sheltering at home and social distancing have not only reduced transmission of the COVID-19 pandemic—they’ve simultaneously reduced our ability to go out and consume. The lockdown on the global economy has had a further dampening effect on our consumer spending, with supply shortages and price increases on everything from toiletries to groceries (particularly meat).
Like our “Greatest Generation” great-grandparents during the Depression and World War II, middle-class Americans now find themselves having to make do with a lower level of consumption—concentrating on the bare necessities needed to live, and not a lot more. Instead of being a temporary state of affairs, however, this retrenchment is the wave of the future. The prevailing threat of pandemic and climate disruption ensures that ‘doing with less’ will be the ‘new normal’ from now on… And ‘Living Simply’ our only viable lifestyle option.
And, it turns out, cutting our consumption won’t kill us. Half of the world already lives on less than half of what we do, so we know it can be done. But making these necessary cuts—both for own health and the planet’s—will require a permanent cultural shift in our perspectives and attitudes.
If you’re fortunate enough to be ‘middle class’, you’ve been able to hop in the car whenever you want, eat whatever you’re hungry for, go shopping, spend money on recreation, and maybe even fly somewhere for a holiday.
Consumption has become such an enthroned part of our American way of life we’ve equated it with ‘freedom’. So long as we’ve got the money to pay for it, we’re free to move around at will, eat out, shop till we drop, trade up for a nicer car, a nicer home (in a ‘nicer’ neighborhood), and then ‘throw away’ what’s ‘old’ or out of fashion. This consumer drive is so ingrained in our psyches, it’s now reflex. We don’t give it—or its impact on the ecosystem—a second thought.
But with the coronavirus and the climate crisis, we have no choice but to start rethinking the way we live.
By limiting our mobility, sheltering at home and social distancing have not only reduced transmission of the COVID-19 pandemic—they’ve simultaneously reduced our ability to go out and consume. The lockdown on the global economy has had a further dampening effect on our consumer spending, with supply shortages and price increases on everything from toiletries to groceries (particularly meat).
Like our “Greatest Generation” great-grandparents during the Depression and World War II, middle-class Americans now find themselves having to make do with a lower level of consumption—concentrating on the bare necessities needed to live, and not a lot more. Instead of being a temporary state of affairs, however, this retrenchment is the wave of the future. The prevailing threat of pandemic and climate disruption ensures that ‘doing with less’ will be the ‘new normal’ from now on… And ‘Living Simply’ our only viable lifestyle option.
And, it turns out, cutting our consumption won’t kill us. Half of the world already lives on less than half of what we do, so we know it can be done. But making these necessary cuts—both for own health and the planet’s—will require a permanent cultural shift in our perspectives and attitudes.
At its heart, ‘Simple Living’ is about seeing ourselves as just ‘plain members and citizens’ of the earth’s community of life: coequal with the soils, waters, plants and animals, with no special rights or entitlements. The earth, it turns out, does not ‘belong’ to us humans. We are not the natural world’s ‘conquerors’. In fact, it’s we humans who belong to the earth. And by following Mohandas Gandhi’s prescription for ‘living simply’—taking no more than we need—we make it possible for others in the vast community of life to ‘simply live’.
For all of us who’ve enjoyed a middle-class standard of living, this is going to unquestionably require a top-to-bottom re-tooling of how we go about our daily lives: including the acquirement of discarded skills from great-grandma’s and great-grandpa’s day. Here then are some steps to living a simpler life that are more in keeping with what our sorely overtaxed and overwrought ecosystem can realistically accommodate:
• Reduce your private vehicle transportation (walk or bike wherever you can)… Under the ‘sheltering in place’ guidelines, we’re already supposed to be staying put as much as possible. But to conserve resources as well as reduce our carbon footprint, when you must use a car, try to bundle as many of your errands as you can into one trip. And then come right back home to your neighborhood where you can walk and bike to get around.
• Pledge to eat less meat and dairy… The average American eats a whopping 222 pounds of meat a year (compared to the average Rwandan’s 22 pounds annually). Americans also—vegetarians included—yearly consume 650 pounds of dairy per capita. Eating this ‘high on the food chain’ three times a day is primary driver of global warming and biodiversity loss. To ensure that every person on earth gets at least some pasture-raised protein regularly, the World Resources Institute calculates that developed nations need to reduce their meat-based consumption back to the equivalent of one-and-a-half hamburgers per week. Working for social justice begins with what we choose to put in our mouths.
• Cook at home, eating a mostly plant-based diet… We’re so programmed to build a meal around meat and/or dairy that cooking vegetarian or vegan can take some getting used to. But it’s worth it (especially when you’re cooking with ingredients you grew yourself). Dry beans and peas; potatoes; sweet potatoes; grains like wheat, corn, millet, sorghum and oats; milled whole grain flours and meals for baking; mushrooms; seeds and nuts; and the utter cornucopia of vegetables and fruits out there all make for the possibility of eating well, eating local and eating low on the food chain. What better time to get into the kitchen and start exploring than when we’re stuck at home sheltering in place? The internet has tons of vegetarian and vegan recipes you can try out.
• Convert inedible lawn into garden and grow some of your own food (and if you don’t have garden space, plant in containers or windowsills)… In the built urban environment, we don’t have much land available for food-growing, but what do have, we invariably squander on lawn—even though we as humans can’t eat grass and in the city we can’t keep the animals (cows, sheep, goats) that do. This dangerously wrong-headed mindset is part and parcel of the city dweller attitude that our sole role in the food system is to consume, to be ‘eaters’… and somebody else, somewhere, somehow will grow it for us. If nothing else, the COVID-19 crisis is showing us who those nameless, faceless food workers are, how risky their work is, and how vulnerable our global food system is to shortages and scarcity. To keep stuffing our mouths, urban eaters are going to need to start pulling their weight in the food system—growing the perishable food crops (the lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini) that the city can grow better than anyone else, because what we’ll harvest will be fresher and therefore more nutritious.
• Buy locally grown food whenever you can… If we want a more secure local food supply, then, with our dollars, we’re going to have to support local producers who are out there this very minute in the sun and heat trying to grow it. Making ‘low price’ the ONLY criterion for what we buy is going to torpedo any effort to create a vibrant local food system. Farmers grow for markets, and without markets they don’t farm. “Buy Fresh, Buy Local” whenever you can. It’s a down payment on always having something for dinner.
• Buy only what you need and stop using ‘shopping’ as recreation… With our fixation on consumerism, shopping has been turned into a recreational pastime. “Wanna go shopping? We can just browse and window shop and see if we see anything we like.” But with the inevitable contraction in the economy, that frivolous behavior will be abating in favor of satisfying material needs. Fashion, new car models, the latest smart phone devices will be the first to go, as they are inessential, are ethically unjustifiable given the damage their production inflicts on the ecosystem, and, in any event, will be beyond most people’s financial reach. If we don’t need it to live, it’s superfluous consumption and just making our environmental situation worse.
• Take the ‘No Fly Pledge’ and scrap your vacation travel… Hardly anybody’s flying right now, but rest assured there will be a big push to revive the airline industry. As flying is the single worst thing you can do for your carbon footprint and fewer than 1 out of 5 people on earth has ever even been on a plane, we need to give up the notion once and for all that air travel fits anywhere in the practice of Simple Living.
• Change your recreational habits… So we shouldn’t travel, shouldn’t shop for recreation, shouldn’t eat (much) meat and dairy, shouldn’t waste energy, water or food? Is there anything we can do to make life worth living? Sure there is. We can garden, cook tasty food, read books, write, make music, make art, take walks, exercise and play games, socialize with friends, fall in love, raise children, take care of aging loved ones… We honestly don’t need superfluous consumption to be happy, when, after all, the best things in life are free.
• AND FINALLY, Start seeing your neighborhood as your ‘world’ — as YOUR “Beloved Community”. In an age of pandemics and growing climate disruption, creating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of the ‘Beloved Community’ right in our own neighborhoods (where people can live with mutual respect and cooperate with one another) will be a material necessity. Unable to get out and about like we used to, obliged to stay put where we are, we’re going to have start seeing our neighborhoods as our world and a place we hold dear. Our immediate neighbors will be our social network and lifeline—and we, in turn, will be theirs… Living simply together so others can simply live.
For all of us who’ve enjoyed a middle-class standard of living, this is going to unquestionably require a top-to-bottom re-tooling of how we go about our daily lives: including the acquirement of discarded skills from great-grandma’s and great-grandpa’s day. Here then are some steps to living a simpler life that are more in keeping with what our sorely overtaxed and overwrought ecosystem can realistically accommodate:
• Reduce your private vehicle transportation (walk or bike wherever you can)… Under the ‘sheltering in place’ guidelines, we’re already supposed to be staying put as much as possible. But to conserve resources as well as reduce our carbon footprint, when you must use a car, try to bundle as many of your errands as you can into one trip. And then come right back home to your neighborhood where you can walk and bike to get around.
• Pledge to eat less meat and dairy… The average American eats a whopping 222 pounds of meat a year (compared to the average Rwandan’s 22 pounds annually). Americans also—vegetarians included—yearly consume 650 pounds of dairy per capita. Eating this ‘high on the food chain’ three times a day is primary driver of global warming and biodiversity loss. To ensure that every person on earth gets at least some pasture-raised protein regularly, the World Resources Institute calculates that developed nations need to reduce their meat-based consumption back to the equivalent of one-and-a-half hamburgers per week. Working for social justice begins with what we choose to put in our mouths.
• Cook at home, eating a mostly plant-based diet… We’re so programmed to build a meal around meat and/or dairy that cooking vegetarian or vegan can take some getting used to. But it’s worth it (especially when you’re cooking with ingredients you grew yourself). Dry beans and peas; potatoes; sweet potatoes; grains like wheat, corn, millet, sorghum and oats; milled whole grain flours and meals for baking; mushrooms; seeds and nuts; and the utter cornucopia of vegetables and fruits out there all make for the possibility of eating well, eating local and eating low on the food chain. What better time to get into the kitchen and start exploring than when we’re stuck at home sheltering in place? The internet has tons of vegetarian and vegan recipes you can try out.
• Convert inedible lawn into garden and grow some of your own food (and if you don’t have garden space, plant in containers or windowsills)… In the built urban environment, we don’t have much land available for food-growing, but what do have, we invariably squander on lawn—even though we as humans can’t eat grass and in the city we can’t keep the animals (cows, sheep, goats) that do. This dangerously wrong-headed mindset is part and parcel of the city dweller attitude that our sole role in the food system is to consume, to be ‘eaters’… and somebody else, somewhere, somehow will grow it for us. If nothing else, the COVID-19 crisis is showing us who those nameless, faceless food workers are, how risky their work is, and how vulnerable our global food system is to shortages and scarcity. To keep stuffing our mouths, urban eaters are going to need to start pulling their weight in the food system—growing the perishable food crops (the lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini) that the city can grow better than anyone else, because what we’ll harvest will be fresher and therefore more nutritious.
• Buy locally grown food whenever you can… If we want a more secure local food supply, then, with our dollars, we’re going to have to support local producers who are out there this very minute in the sun and heat trying to grow it. Making ‘low price’ the ONLY criterion for what we buy is going to torpedo any effort to create a vibrant local food system. Farmers grow for markets, and without markets they don’t farm. “Buy Fresh, Buy Local” whenever you can. It’s a down payment on always having something for dinner.
• Buy only what you need and stop using ‘shopping’ as recreation… With our fixation on consumerism, shopping has been turned into a recreational pastime. “Wanna go shopping? We can just browse and window shop and see if we see anything we like.” But with the inevitable contraction in the economy, that frivolous behavior will be abating in favor of satisfying material needs. Fashion, new car models, the latest smart phone devices will be the first to go, as they are inessential, are ethically unjustifiable given the damage their production inflicts on the ecosystem, and, in any event, will be beyond most people’s financial reach. If we don’t need it to live, it’s superfluous consumption and just making our environmental situation worse.
• Take the ‘No Fly Pledge’ and scrap your vacation travel… Hardly anybody’s flying right now, but rest assured there will be a big push to revive the airline industry. As flying is the single worst thing you can do for your carbon footprint and fewer than 1 out of 5 people on earth has ever even been on a plane, we need to give up the notion once and for all that air travel fits anywhere in the practice of Simple Living.
• Change your recreational habits… So we shouldn’t travel, shouldn’t shop for recreation, shouldn’t eat (much) meat and dairy, shouldn’t waste energy, water or food? Is there anything we can do to make life worth living? Sure there is. We can garden, cook tasty food, read books, write, make music, make art, take walks, exercise and play games, socialize with friends, fall in love, raise children, take care of aging loved ones… We honestly don’t need superfluous consumption to be happy, when, after all, the best things in life are free.
• AND FINALLY, Start seeing your neighborhood as your ‘world’ — as YOUR “Beloved Community”. In an age of pandemics and growing climate disruption, creating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of the ‘Beloved Community’ right in our own neighborhoods (where people can live with mutual respect and cooperate with one another) will be a material necessity. Unable to get out and about like we used to, obliged to stay put where we are, we’re going to have start seeing our neighborhoods as our world and a place we hold dear. Our immediate neighbors will be our social network and lifeline—and we, in turn, will be theirs… Living simply together so others can simply live.
