peace

I have a few quiet minutes in my house and a few loud thoughts in my head.

I have nothing to say that hasn't been said about today's date, so I'm going to reflect on peace instead.

When I asked my Presbytery for support for YAV, a friend recommended I apply for the Peacemaking Grant. At first, I wasn't sure how that was relevant since I'm working with wetlands and natural resource conservation. But as I stared at the application and thought on it for a while, I thought about Wangari Maathai. I read her memoir Unbowed as I began grad school, and learned how her love of trees earned her a Nobel Peace Prize, the first awarded to an environmentalist (she also did work seeking gender equality, but founding the Green Belt Movement in Kenya was her better known work). My love of trees hasn't quite gotten me that far, but I think there's something to be said for the connection between peacemaking efforts and environmental conservation.

If we are not at peace with our natural environments, it will be difficult to be at peace with each other in the future when we are struggling over the availability of natural resources.

In southern Louisiana, people are already at odds with the environment, which may or may not even be considered natural anymore. Today I started reading John McPhee's The Control of Nature, which I snagged off the geography department's free book table probably six years ago, and forgot about until I was debating what books to bring to New Orleans. It's about the Army Corps of Engineers (who the people down bayou HATE) and how they changed the hydrology and fluvial geomorphology* of southern Louisiana by building locks and levees in the middle part of the last century. So there's that ongoing battle to keep the Mississippi River flowing exactly where and how the powers that be want it to.

Then, of course, there's the wetlands. I may or may not have mentioned how broken the people's relationship is with that space.

So, as I'm thinking about peace today, I'm thinking my role in the world as a peacemaker and how that relates to the people and places I meet.





*You KNOW I just like throwing around the word "geomorphology".