Seeking a Focus Beyond War

This weekend, when several thousand people gather at the Bonaventure Hotel for a symposium called “Our Common Future: Healing the Planet,” it will sound more than an alarm about the environment. The gathering, which will focus on worldwide environmental problems such as deforestation, global warming, toxins and energy problems, was not organized by the Audubon Society, EarthSave, or even the Sierra Club, although those organizations endorse it.

It is being put on instead by the Beyond War Foundation and Physicians for Social Responsibility, two of the most influential groups in the American peace movement, whose stance has traditionally been decidedly more anti-nuclear than anti-pollution.

And in attendance, along with environmentalists, organizers say, will be large numbers of people from such organizations as SANE/Freeze, Educators for Social Responsibility, the Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race, Jobs With Peace, Freeze Voter--people more commonly seen demonstrating at the Nevada test site, listening to forums on the arms race, making the Great Peace March, demonstrating outside weapons factories or driving around town with bumper stickers warning, “One nuclear bomb could spoil your day.”

Worry Over Quality of Life

In fact, many observers say that the symposium, organized by the Los Angeles chapters of the two peace groups and offered in cooperation with UCLA’s Extension Department of Continuing Education and Health Sciences and its School of Medicine, illustrates a fundamental shift--to embrace environmental and other quality-of-life concerns--that is occurring in the American peace movement.

Spurred by the European Ban the Bomb movement of the ‘50s, peace-movement groups were formed in the United States in the early ‘60s primarily to protest atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. But most agree that the most recent phase of the movement sprang up in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s as a reaction to beliefs voiced among government leaders about the winnability and survivability of a limited nuclear war.

More recently, however, many have been saying publicly and privately that the movement is running out of steam. It is time, they acknowledge, for a widening of the agenda, and involvement with the environment is a natural evolution.

As one intellectual journal, New Perspectives Quarterly, put it in a recent issue devoted to ecological concerns: “As the Cold War winds down and the atmosphere heats up, the environment is rising to the top of the global agenda.”

The peace movement, its workers acknowledge with a mixture of pride and dismay, is to a certain extent a victim of its own success. For one thing, the threat of nuclear annihilation is increasingly difficult to use as an organizing tool. “Since the INF treaty, the peace movement has not had the nuclear issue to work with to the extent it had before,” Dr. Richard Saxon, president of the L.A. Chapter of PSR, said recently. “The public feels something has been done, that it will lead to future treaties,” Saxon added, although “it really hasn’t made anyone safer. It’s more a perception than a reality.”

Samuel Roth, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at UCLA who helped found the Los Angeles Chapter of PSR in 1981, recalled recently that PSR had been formed nationally in 1962 over concern about atmospheric testing. “But once (such testing) ceased,” Roth said of the 1963 treaty, “the organization kind of went defunct. The same thing is happening now, I’m afraid. The peace movement is really losing steam.”

Also propelling the peace movement toward the environment is the constant news of current and coming environmental catastrophes. And it’s natural, observers of the scene say, for those with an activist bent to respond, to think they can make a difference and to want to do something about it.

One woman active in both Beyond War and PSR, Eleanor Wasson, explained recently how her priorities were personally jolted. While attending a world disarmament conference at the United Nations in New York last year, Wasson listened in horror to one briefing that contained a report on the environment.

‘Bigger Than Nuclear War’

“All of a sudden I realized we had maybe a bigger war on our hands than the possibility of nuclear war. Nuclear war is a possibility, but the devastation of our planet and skies is a reality.”

Pauline and Richard Saxon came away from a meeting in Montreal last fall with the same conclusion. At the conference sponsored by PSR’s parent organization, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the Saxons heard David Suzuki, a geneticist from the University of British Columbia, urge the group that had done so much for the nuclear issue to do likewise with environmental issues.

Using the same analogy of possibility vs. reality that Wasson uses, Pauline Saxon, PSR’s executive director, said of environmental problems: “You realize immediately that it would cost billions to turn things around. Where would the money come from? There’s only one place. It’s in the defense budget. This just tied in to what we’re doing already.”

Saxon’s comment linking defense spending with a lack of funds available to fight pollution and other environmental catastrophes provides yet another reason, many feel, why environmental concerns are such a natural new rallying point for traditional peace organizations.

It will cost money to save the world, and peace-movement activists say they know where to find it--in the defense budget.

End Military Spending

Throughout the ‘80s, the peace movement has called for an end to military spending on the arms race and nuclear weapons as well as a general reduction in other defense spending. All the while, social activists have been calling attention to an array of problems--homelessness, the educational system, drugs, AIDS, health care, child care and the environment--and decrying the lack of federal funds to combat them.

The monetary connection between the two, observers say, is not one that those in the trenches have always emphasized or, in some cases, realized.

Over the past few years, however, as peace groups have seen a waning of concern, a drifting away of people and the drying up of contributions, they have been increasingly making the connection.

In 1987, for example, a number of Los Angeles groups invited Columbia University professor Seymour Melman, an expert in converting economies from military to a peacetime production, to help them refocus their direction and message. Melman, who credits military spending with having turned America into a debtor nation and second-rate economy, reinforced their sense that the economic message was the one to vocalize.

Since then, various groups have been delivering a message that goes essentially like this: If no bombs ever go off, the nuclear holocaust will still have happened. The bombs are killing people now, thanks to the devastation the defense budget is having on the economy.

Today, almost without exception, that is a central movement message, as is the word “coalition.”

Joe Kresse, a former partner in the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, is on the national board of Beyond War and has been working unpaid and full time for the organization since last August when, at age 50, he took advantage of Andersen’s early retirement program for executives.

Already active with Beyond War, he had planned for several years a full-time move to the organization whose philosophy is that nuclear weapons have made war obsolete, that all life is interconnected and that by working together people can build a world beyond war.

Kresse’s retirement came, however, just at the point Beyond War was facing some changes.

Earlier, Beyond War “had a tight focus. We were responding to what we saw as a five-alarm fire--the idea that we could use and survive nuclear weapons,” Kresse said. But by the time Kresse was ready to go full time to Beyond War, the belief that war is obsolete had become widely enough accepted, he said, that “the oomph” had gone out of the message.

“We concluded that a phase had ended for Beyond War and, I think, a phase for the whole peace movement in the United States. It’s my personal view that there are people who are activists who like to be on the bucket brigade. ‘Where’s the fire? What can I do?’ The peace movement had all those people when the alarm went off. But then they left. There were new fires. AIDS, homelessness, drugs, the environment. In terms of numbers, the ‘give me something to do’ people left the peace movement.”

Now, Kresse said, Beyond War is joining up with those people again, reaching out to them and their concerns as, at the direction of its national board, it goes into “an R and D (research and development) phase,” figuring out at the local level where the organization should be heading.

Indeed, most peace groups seem to arriving at that same conclusion independently.

“We’ve got to extend our reach into the social areas, rather than keep on one dimension, even though it’s an important dimension,” Orpha Goldberg of Women Strike for Peace said recently of the organization she coordinates locally with Mary Clarke. “It will require coalition building, and that is something we have not been good at. What’s happened to our society is because of the military budget. It’s the same thing we’ve been saying for years: “End the arms race, not the human race,” and that’s where we still are, but we’ve got to join with the groups that are doing something about it.”

Grass-Roots Action

At the Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race, an organization founded in 1979 that seeks to activate people through their congregations and spiritual centers, executive director Judith Glass said, “We’re looking at the (federal) budget as an ethical statement” and says she is planning a fall series of neighborhood dialogues around it.

“We’ll focus on the impact of militarism on the local community,” she said, meaning “drugs, the ecology, homelessness, education . . . We live in an interconnected web of moral issues. It’s hard work.”

There’s more action around economic linkages at Jobs With Peace, where member Larry Frank said the organization is focusing on the amount of military spending in Southern California and beginning to warn that the Los Anglees area is becoming “a militarily dependent society, sort of like pre-steel-crisis Ohio, pre-oil-crisis Houston.”

Voters to End the Arms Race, which supports candidates for federal office who work to stop the arms race and reduce military spending, has regularly been holding forums on a wide range of issues, chairperson Suzy Marks said recently: “Interventionism, economic conversion, weapons systems, the interconnectedness of the arms race and its impact on the economy.”

Cut Defense Spending

For all their hard work and tangible results, Marks said of VEAR and the peace movement in general, “we’ve seen the military budget double in the past 10 years” and cuts made in the budgets of just about everything else. At the state level, she said, VEAR has been giving serious consideration to an initiative that would demand a shift in federal budget priorities.

Calling Beyond War and PSR’s move to include environmental issues “really significant,” Andrew Tonkovich, a coordinator, with Maggie Murphy, of Westside SANE/Freeze, said his group has been coordinating with environmental groups over the past few months in lobbying efforts to take advantage of the fact that “all the DOE (Department of Energy) (nuclear) reactors are shut down.”

They are also campaigning for economic conversion, Tonkovich said, without abandoning their commitment to a comprehensive test ban treaty and disarmament. Their Westside chapter recently had 500 people “at the big action in Nevada” at the test site.

“The test ban fits into both goals, economic conversion and the reactor shutdown,” he said. “It’s a more holistic, comprehensive program now. It’s about time, isn’t it?”

Another March Upcoming

And for some, about time for another walk. Coming up next is the Global Walk for a Livable World--not just a peace march--organized by peace activist Joan Bokaer, currently setting up shop in Newport Beach.

“What needs changing is everything,” Bokaer said of the walk’s purpose. “Our whole way of relating to the Earth, to each other, to systems. This will be both for our own personal transformation and to raise awareness in the communities we walk through.”

Inspired by the 1986 Great Peace March for global nuclear disarmament, Bokaer said this trip will take about three years, ending up in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1993.

While peace movement leaders admit to a few voices raised within their organizations objecting to these widening concerns, no one sees the organizations as abandoning the peace movement.

“Medically speaking, I’d say we’re right on track,” Richard Saxon said of PSR.

“I do not see Beyond War becoming an environmental organization,” Kresse said. “But this sure is an opportunity to educate people that we are one and that there is only one place the money can come from. Our lives are at stake. Taking all that into account, we said, ‘It’s a natural.’ ”

THE TREND: ANTIWAR TO PRO ENVIRONMENT

Physicians for Social Responsibility Physicians for Social Responsibility was formed in 1962 out of concern about atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, and became inactive after the 1963 test ban treaty. It was revived nationally in the late 1970s by pediatrician Helen Caldicott. Survival of the planet has been the goal and the hazards of nuclear weapons, nuclear waster and nuclear energy the focus. Recent wider involvement in environmental issues by the Los Angeles chapter represents a new direction that local organizers say the national organization is watching closely.

BEYOND WAR FOUNDATION Beyond War, formed in 1982, believes that war is obsolete, that we are all interconnected, that we must learn to resolve conflict and that we must build a liveable world beyond war. The danger of a nuclear disaster has been the group’s organizing tool, but Beyond War officials have concluded that a different focus is needed. In Los Angeles, members are moving toward environmental issues, maintaining the link with the peace movement. They are also working with a group of Soviet citizens on a joint human rights project.