The Chimney and the Cloud: Peace Quest Contribution to Public Event on ‘Living in Peace With the Earth’
Remarks by Sean Howard, Campaign Coordinator for Peace Quest Cape Breton, at a public meeting on Living in Peace with the Earth: Compassionate Action in Times of Climate Change, Eltuek Arts Centre, New Dawn, Sydney, August 15, 2023
It’s an honour and a privilege to speak on behalf of Peace Quest Cape Breton, a non-partisan citizens’ group entirely dedicated, since its founding in 2002, to the great goal of ‘living in peace with the Earth’: making peace with – and amends to – a planet brought to the brink of destruction by the two supremely uncompassionate – self-serving, self-destructive – forces of modern times, the very deadly duo of capitalism and militarism.
For while there is one central, overriding, definitively existential threat to Mother Earth – the death of life itself through catastrophic climate breakdown – that ultimate disaster can strike from one of two directions: massive global warming, caused by industrial pollution; massive global cooling, caused by nuclear war. We find ourselves in a terrifyingly absurd situation – a choice of Apocalypse! – menaced by what Peace Quest has taken to calling ‘The Chimney and the Cloud’ (the factory chimney and the Mushroom Cloud), two fronts in the same war against the world, the single, ruinous addiction to domination and control – in pursuit of profit and power – of the basic forces, the sacred energies, of Creation.
From 1945-1990, through the corrosive hatreds, proxy conflicts and close nuclear calls of the Cold War, the Cloud was front of mind, the Chimney belching away in the background. In the post-Cold War era, the Chimney has been front of mind, the Cloud lurking in the radioactive background: at least until the atrocious, illegal attack on Ukraine by its nuclear-armed neighbour. In fact, much of the global peace movement has long sought to address both threats, realizing the futility of banning the Bomb while continuing to melt the planet, or of decarbonizing the economy of a planet that the Bomb could still, ludicrously easily, blow to a cold, dark hell.
Of course, for the sake of both people and planet, we need to build not just a nuclear-free but a war-free world: modern armed conflict is itself powered by the filthy factories and mines of the military-industrial complex – in whose vested interests so many wars are fought – and itself contributes, significantly, to greenhouse gas emissions – in addition to contaminating, and hideously disfiguring, so many lands and waters.
But as a threat, the Mushroom Cloud looms above and beyond even that. We’ve just passed the 78th anniversary of the atomic mass-murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the destruction of two cities with just two bombs, two apple-sized cores of uranium and plutonium (some of it ‘Canadian,’ from stolen Dine land in the ‘Northwest Territories’ of this settler-colonial mega-state). Well, most of today’s 13,000 nuclear weapons are far, far more powerful than that – hundreds, even thousands of times more explosive – developed over decades of atmospheric and underground testing causing hideous harm to mostly indigenous peoples and places in the Americas, Australia, Africa, Central and South Asia, the Arctic, and the South Pacific. If there was ever a large-scale exchange of those Superbombs between, say, NATO and Russia – and both sides stand ‘locked and loaded,’ good to go – then not only would millions die in moments, cities disappear in seconds, but the staggering amount of soot and smoke (known as black carbon) lofted from the firestorms would begin blocking out the source of all life, the Sun, precipitating a plunge of temperatures into the depths – and mass extinctions – of nuclear winter.
But it doesn’t need to come to that for the Bomb to wreck the climate at supersonic speed. As with global warming, the science is certain and the findings are damning: even a so-called ‘limited’ nuclear war of 100-150 Hiroshima-sized weapons – say between India and Pakistan: something they’re locked and loaded for, too – would ‘loft’ enough black carbon to block enough sun to devastate enough agriculture, biodiversity and marine life to trigger years of global famine killing billions.
Peace Quest believes, then, that one form ‘compassionate action’ must take in the nuclear age is nuclear disarmament: banning and abolishing the Bomb. And I want to end by mentioning a recent, electrifyingly positive diplomatic development (one you are unlikely to read about or see in mainstream media): the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the TPNW, or, as it more simply and fondly known, ‘The Ban Treaty,’ adopted by 122 states (two thirds of UN membership) at the General Assembly in 2017 – after negotiations that Canada, on US orders, boycotted.
In the traditionally small, male-dominated, ‘national security’ fixated ‘world’ of nuclear diplomacy, the TPNW isn’t just a new treaty but a new kind of treaty, one morally inspired and profoundly informed by the experience and insights of hitherto marginalized voices, most importantly those of the survivors of the atomic bombings – the hibakusha – and of nuclear testing. Global civil society, with indigenous activists at the fore, played a big part too, as in previous successful pushes to ban landmines and cluster munitions.
Advocating for a Nuclear Ban was the main focus of Peace Quest’s work from 2002 to 2017 – work which included eventually persuading the Cape Breton Reginal Municipality (CBRM) to join the global Mayors for Peace coalition, based in Hiroshima, advocating for nuclear abolition (‘Global Zero’). Publicizing and promoting the Ban, and pushing for Canada to join it, has been the main focus of our work since 2017; as it is the priority of the new Peace Quest Student Society at Cape Breton University; and as it is now an important issue for CBRM, which in its 2023 ‘Hiroshima Memorial Day’ Proclamation called on Canada to sign the Ban, recognizing it as “the best path to a world free of the fear of nuclear annihilation.”
For sure, such a world would not be free of the fear of the annihilating consequences of global warming. But a denuclearized world, which would inevitably also mean a radically demilitarized (and thus a significantly decarbonized) one, would be a world far better able and resourced to concentrate its efforts on winning the only war worth waging: the non-violent fight for Life on our violated, wounded, but still breathing and beautiful Mother Earth.
The Living in Peace with the Earth: Compassionate Action in Times of Climate Change event was co-sponsored by Peace Quest Cape Breton, The Climate Change Task Force (Unama’ki/Cape Breton), the Global Social Justice Project, and New Dawn Enterprises. The other speakers were: Elder Stephen Augustine; Terry Gibbs (Cape Bretin University); Elder Albert Marshall; and Lama Khenpo Karma Tenkyong.
