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Silphiums tickling the bellies of the buffalo silkscreen by Michael Iltis

Peaceful alternatives to war : According to Vietnamese legend[1] a war was once fought using only poetry and honey. In the year 1076 when the Chinese Sung dynasty army was invading Vietnam, general Ly Thuong Kiet composed a short poem that read :

The southern mountains and rivers belong to the Viet people. So it is written in the Book of Heaven, those who invade this land will surely meet with defeat.

Having written this poem he commanded his troops to gather the broad leaves of the forest and to inscribe his poem with honey on each leaf. Insects were then placed on the leaves to eat the honey, which getting trapped in the honey left the poem in character script. The leaf messages were then floated down the river towards the invading army who believing this to be a mystical message from the heavens, fled in terror.

By today's standards many might regard this story as wishful thinking. Yet if one regards poetry as embodying the history and culture of a region, had the United States bothered to pay attention to Vietnamese history and culture in 1945 when Ho Chi Minh appealed to the US for help as outlined in the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, how many millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian lives might have been spared along with the over 50,000 American lives that were lost ?

Books not Bullets : Today it is education along with poetry and honey that deserve more funding. Instead the combined economic costs since January 2003 of the last episode of the Gulf War which likely exceed several trillion dollars, have bankrupted education and human services. This money could have been used to fund pure research of inestimable value or applied research into a million alternative peaceful ways to take out Saddam. Our society is paying the price referred to by the bumper sticker "You think education is expensive, try ignorance." If the US had really wanted to get rid of Saddam we could have followed the Spanish model. In Spain an educated middle class was not willing to put up with a dictator indefinitely. In 1990 Iraq was one of the more educated regions in the middle east. In 1990 the pentagon did a study then calculating what the effects on Iraq's civilian population would be upon destroying 90% of the country's infrastructure and potable water. They went ahead and did the unspeakable.

Former US Senator Mark Hatfield, who as a young soldier walked around in the aftermath of Hiroshima, saw atomic blast survivors with skin peeling off and never forgot the stench of it, who for many years headed the US Senate Arms Appropriations Committee, a sole dissenting voice, summarizes our national vulnerability in his speech (one of the most powerful statements against the nuclear arms race ever spoken) from the Congressional Record August 2, 1989 Peace through Strength is a Fallacy :

We are kidding ourselves, Mr. President. Today we are vulnerable. The national defense of this Nation, has left us vulnerable, but not because we lack an arsenal. The vulnerability of this Nation today is that we rank at the bottom of the list in math and science, and that at least 20 million Americans cannot read or write. The vulnerability of our Nation is the deterioration and erosion of our infrastructure, our highways, bridges, airports, our ports. Our vulnerability today is a nonproductive economy, a non-competitive economy. Our vulnerability is the people who are without homes, nutrition, education, health care.

Ultimately the security of the Nation is not found in its materialism. It is found in a spirit. It is found in a strength of heart and mind. It is found in its people- we the people.

To Pol Pot whose soldiers produced the killing fields of Cambodia anyone who wore eyeglasses was killed since they were considered a potential intellectual and as such a threat. In the USA where we note that the US funded Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge for many years, academics are merely starved for funding. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/US_PolPot.html
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Support_PolPot_RS.html

When one out of a hundred PhDs gets any serious research funding opportunities and those that do need not have any qualms about the money's frequent military industrial affiliations, the atmosphere is sufficiently cutthroat competitive that to be distracted by one's conscience and bothered enough to become an activist is to risk any chance of having a research career. Few academics have made the seminal contributions of a Noam Chomsky in a way that allows them to speak out the way he has. If the larger academic discussion on issues of global concern is lost, if the Socratic tradition is forgotten, or abandoned, if the opportunities to research the human condition severely restricted, it is not unlike witnessing a language of discourse that has been driven to the brink of extinction.

Half the world's languages today are in danger of extinction. The book On Biocultural Diversity attempts to trace the linkages between linguistic, cultural and biodiversity. When a language is lost, so is the culture that went with it, and for many indigenous cultures that depend on a healthy environment for their sustenance, the loss of culture goes hand in hand with a loss of biodiversity.

Case Study : The University of Wisconsin Madison :
Wisconsin does not have as much of a war industry as some other states and as such its economy is particularly vulnerable to national war time spending. With tuition up and enrollment down as an indirect corollary of the war in Iraq, it is minorities and the poor that get hit the hardest. The university speaks of the Wisconsin Idea that education should influence and improve people's lives beyond the university classroom. Talk of diversity figures prominently in the university's long range plans, yet the numbers of African American, Native American and other minority groups represented at UW tells a different reality. It is not the university's fault alone that for a hundred years the state of Wisconsin systematically suppressed the teaching of native American language and culture in the schools.

Atop Bascom hill on the University of Wisconsin Madison campus sits a plaque that has come to symbolize the lofty ideals of the university. It reads :

Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.

Somewhat ironically this plaque represents the historic culmination of a thirty year struggle for basic human dignities, was presented by the class of 1910 and was buried by the university that fought it strenuously for 5 years until public outcry demanded its installation.

Here in Wisconsin Menominee language is endangered. One could ask why there are no scholarships for native Americans to study Wisconsin's vanishing prairie flora. Once this education was part of the lost knowledge of the traditional medicine man.

On a summer day beside a twenty acre remnant of deep soil prairie 50 miles south of Madison near Janesville that the nature conservancy bought from a farmer there, one can still see an artist's inspiration in the form of prairie white fringed orchids and 400 other species, colors and textures from a vanishing ecosystem that used to cover half the state of Illinois and southern Wisconsin.

Software/research cooperative : We aim in the long term to provide users with the computational tools and online forums to build caring communities,  to assess and model at the personal and the global levels the existing universe and to imagine, envision, simulate and model alternatives to war, to environmental and ecological destruction, alternatives to behaviors and institutions that enslave the human mind and body, to understand both personally at the level of mind and heart as well as abstractly at the level of a computational and mathematical  ecological dynamics,  the mental, physical and spiritual universe of humanity, the meta-physical and the physical, the real and the imagined.

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mgi@ecodreamer.com

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[1] (as translated by Don Luce and Jacqui Chagnon in Of Quiet Courage, Poems from Vietnam)