duty to one’s fellow humans coincided.
11 January
Aldo Leopold
11 January 1887—21 April 1948
Making Peace with the Land
Aldo Leopold expressed his passionate love for his wife, Estella, whom he married in 1912, in carefully copied lines of poetry in one of his many notebooks. He expressed his passion for a “land ethic” through a compilation of essays, A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949 and dedicated “to my Estella.” It was a literary achievement that led future generations to view land not just as a commodity, but as a gift to be shared with and nurtured by all creation—a gift deserving the same tender affection we feel for a spouse or lover.
Leopold argued that “land” wasn’t merely “soil.” Land was the foundation and source of nutrition for the plants and animals that make up the biotic community. That community’s natural integrity deserved careful guardianship because “man-made changes have effects more comprehensive than intended or foreseen.” So far as Leopold was concerned, the pesticide DDT had as much potential destructive power as the atomic bomb.
“All history,” wrote Leopold, “consists of successive excursions from a single starting point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.” He believed that the land was both the means and ultimate end in that scale, the lasting gold standard to which history, both human and animal, must always appeal.
Born in the relative wilds of Burlington, Iowa, Leopold spent his youth roaming his own backyard of prairies and woods and developing astute observational skills. An avid reader, he also began cultivating a vivid literary talent. He attended Yale and received a degree in forestry.
Upon graduation, Leopold was assigned to the Arizona territories by the U.S. Forest Service. In 1924, he was reassigned to the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, and he began teaching at the University of Wisconsin in 1928.
After the 1933 publication of his book Game Management, Leopold was appointed the first chair of the University of Wisconsin’s new Department of Game Management. Two years later, he and his family bought and settled into a worn-out farm that became the laboratory for his “land ethic,” whose main principle was “to stop thinking about decent land use as solely an economic problem. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Leopold died from a heart attack in 1948, two hours after trying to fight a brush fire on a neighbor’s farm. His final moments were spent defending the earth he so loved.
12 January
Benny Giay
12 January 1955—
Creating a Zone of Peace
West Papua, the westernmost province of the large island of New Guinea, has its share of troubles. Part of the Dutch East Indies colony for over a century, it was claimed by Indonesia in 1949 after the Dutch gave up sovereign claims to the island. The Indonesian occupation that succeeded the Dutch one lasted some twenty years, finally ending when a UN-sponsored referendum allowed Papuans to decide whether to stick with Indonesia or to form a separate state. Although they chose to remain with Indonesia, a breakaway movement that favored independence rejected the decision. Since that time, West Papuans have endured years of civil warfare between the guerrilla separatists and the Indonesian armed forces.
To make matters worse, ethnic Indonesians, most of whom are brown-skinned and Muslim, tend to treat dark-skinned Papuans, who are predominantly Christian, as second-class citizens. This racial and economic discrimination continues to fuel the guerrillas’ resistance to the government. It also prompts abuse of Papuans by the Indonesian military’s anti-terrorist strike force, which arbitrarily targets churches, schools, and private Papuan homes. Displaced villagers whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed are forced to flee into the jungles.
Rev. Benny Giay, an indigenous Papuan, has spent years trying to make West Papua a “zone of peace” by working for trust and reconciliation between his people and the native Indonesians. An evangelical minister who earned a doctorate in anthropology from a Dutch university, Giay rejects the violence practiced by the separatists while at the same time refusing to condone Indonesian persecution. But he believes that nonviolent resistance is a more effective response to the oppression than civil war, whose primary victims are innocent men, women, and children. So his efforts have been focused on educating West Papuans to take on leadership roles in their communities and writing and speaking about Muslim persecution of Papuan Christians to let the world know what’s going on.
One of Giay’s most successful campaigns at nonviolent empowerment was the founding of West Papua’s first seminary in 1986. Prior to that time, Christian ministerial candidates were forced to travel far from West Papua to be educated at foreign institutions. Giay’s seminary focuses on offering seminarians educational opportunities that emphasize the principles and methods of liberation theology. He believes that the homegrown training they receive best prepares them for future public leadership in a land that, for all practical purposes, is under military occupation, and whose best chance of liberation is through active nonviolence inspired by gospel principles.
Giay has suffered for his peace work. Many of his books have been banned by the Indonesian government, he has sometimes been arrested, and he regularly receives death threats. But he continues his labors for the “New Papua” he envisions: a land where light-skinned Muslims and dark-skinned Papuans live together without rancor or persecution.
13 January
Thomas Hurndall
27 November 1981—13 January 2004
Defying the Stars for Peace
Jocelyn Hurndall wrote about the death of her son Tom this way: “I am often asked, what is it like to lose a child? It’s like this. Between the instant of receiving the news and the next instant in which you have to comprehend it, you somehow realize that every cell in your body is about to be shaken furiously, and you freeze to delay the moment of impact. Your entire existence becomes concertinaed into the space between the blow and the pain, and nothing will ever, or can ever be the same again.”
Tom’s is a tragically old story: a son who learns the value of the struggle for peace and justice from his mother and then loses his life in the effort; the mother who continues the tradition of peacemaking in memory of her son.
London-born Tom Hurndall was a twenty-one-year-old university student photographing activists acting as human shields to protect ordinary Iraqis in Baghdad when he heard about the death of Rachel Corrie. Rachel was a twenty-three-year-old peace activist crushed under an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to protect a Palestinian family’s home.
In April 2003, Tom travelled to Gaza to investigate Corrie’s story, joining the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) at a refugee camp in the Gaza strip. When shots began hitting the buildings, Tom left his safe position behind a roadblock to lift a small boy out of danger. He was returning for two small girls when an Israeli sniper in a tower shot him in the head. His transport to hospital, which should have taken seven minutes, took thirty minutes because of delays at Israeli checkpoints. Nine months later, never coming out of a coma, Tom was dead.
Jocelyn Hurndall began the frustrating task of making sense of her son’s death within the conflicting context of the refusal of Israeli and
