the establishment and preservation of peace between Jamestown settlers and the Native American inhabitants of the New World.
Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan, chief of a union of Algonquin-speaking tribes in present-day tidewater Virginia. She was probably in her early teens when the English founders of Jamestown arrived in 1607. One of their leaders, Captain John Smith, was captured by Powhatan’s hunters a year later. As Smith related the story to Britain’s Queen Anne, he was forced down on two flat stones and ringed by warriors prepared to beat him to death with clubs when Pocohantas broke through them and threw herself on Smith. She “hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine; and not only that, but so prevailed with her father, that I was safely conducted to Jamestown.”
Whether or not the story is true, it’s clear that Pocahontas was an important pacifying link between Jamestown settlers and Powhatan’s people. She grew quite close to Smith, calling him her “father,” played with settler children, and prevailed on her father and his hunters to supply the starving colony with stored grain and meat. As Smith put it, “once in every four or five days, Pocahontas with her attendants brought so much provision that saved many of their lives that else for all this had starved with hunger.”
There was a third way in which Pocahontas ensured some degree of peace between settlers and Indians, but the telling of it speaks ill of the settlers. Despite Pocahontas’s efforts, hostilities erupted in 1609, and at one point in the conflict she was taken hostage by the settlers. Held a prisoner for the next five years, she learned English, converted to Christianity, and married an Englishman named John Rolfe. At least on Rolfe’s side, the marriage seems to have been motivated more by a desire to forge a peaceful alliance between the settlers and Powhatan than anything else. He was, he wrote, “motivated not by the unbridled desire of carnal affection, but for the good of this plantation, for the honor of our country, for the Glory of God, for my own salvation.”
We don’t know what Pocahontas felt about the marriage. All we do know is that she and Rolfe had a son, and that she died shortly after the child’s birth of an unspecified illness. But the marriage with Rolfe did in fact ease the tension between the English and the Indians. It’s sobering to think that Pocahontas, who did so much on her own to make peace between the two peoples, continued her peace-building even after she was kidnapped and held captive by the men who sailed to her shores on strange boats. In one manner of speaking, Pocahontas may be the New World’s first peace martyr.
22 March
John McConnell
22 March 1915—
Father of Earth Day
When John McConnell saw the first color photos of planet earth taken from outer space on the cover of Life magazine, he was speechless. The beauty of the planet’s blues and greens swathed in white clouds convinced him that the same concern for peace among people that he’d championed his entire adult life needed to be extended to the planet itself. So he pitched an idea to the 1969 National UNESCO Conference: that the United Nations proclaim that a day be set aside each year to celebrate the earth and encourage responsible stewardship of it. He proposed the vernal equinox, the twenty-four-hour period in the spring evenly divided between night and day, as an appropriate date for the celebration. The vernal equinox is a period of equilibrium that McConnell hoped would serve as a symbolic reminder of the importance of harmony between humans and the environment.
The city of San Francisco, host to the UNESCO conference, enthusiastically endorsed the idea, as did U Thant, Secretary-General of the UN, and the first Earth Day was observed in 1970. In the United States, it’s now generally celebrated on 22 April rather than the vernal equinox. But the spirit of harmony with the earth remains the same.
McConnell’s concern for the environment was sparked in 1939, long before ecological sensibilities were on the map. While working in a plastics factory, he grew worried about the threat of pollution posed by nonbiodegradable plastics. World War II and the Cold War that followed it pushed McConnell’s environmentalism to the background. During those years, his primary focus was on doing something to ameliorate world hunger and militaristic buildup. But the 1969 Life cover reawakened his awe for the planet and reminded him that the welfare of “earthlings” was necessarily bound up with the health of the planet itself.
In June 1970, McConnell wrote and published the “Earth Day Proclamation,” a document that outlined the importance and purpose of the annual observation. In it, true to his conviction that human welfare is bound up with planetary welfare, he argued that the same economic and political institutions that create poverty and oppression also harm the environment. He laid out three goals, which he intended Earth Day celebrations to remind people of each year: to “peacefully end the scourge of war”; to “provide an opportunity for the children of the disinherited poor to obtain their rightful inheritance in the Earth”; and to “redirect the energies of industry and society from progress through products to progress through harmony with Earth’s natural systems for improving the quality of life.” McConnell’s inspiration for Earth Day, celebrated internationally each year, has awakened millions of people to the need to cherish and protect both earthlings and the “beautiful Spaceship Earth,” as U Thant put it when the United Nations endorsed Earth Day, that we earthlings call home.
23 March
David Suzuki
24 March 1936—
Maintaining the Sacred Balance
The Canadian-born geneticist David Suzuki knows something about disruption. During World War II, he and his family, despite having lived in British Columbia for three generations, were interned and then forcibly relocated east of the Rockies. The memory of this break in equilibrium, as well as the beauty of the Canadian Rockies through which he and his family were transported, inspired Suzuki’s later dedication to preserving environmental stability.
Although he spent close to forty years as a university professor, Suzuki is at heart a public intellectual. He’s a pioneer in popularizing science who began hosting a string of television shows as early as 1970. Since then he has written and hosted several immensely popular series that focus on issues of environmental sustainability and climate change. In recent years, he has become one of the world’s most eloquent and informed defenders of the claim that human activity is dangerously accelerating the temperature of the planet. In lectures, books, and articles—and through the work of the David Suzuki Foundation, whose mission is to “protect the diversity of nature and our quality of life, now and for the future”—he advocates for an interdependent perspective on the planet and encourages humans to reduce their carbon footprints. The recipient of dozens of honorary degrees honoring his environmentalism, Suzuki was presented with a Right Livelihood Award in 2009 for his “advocacy of the socially responsible use of science, and for his massive contribution to raising awareness about the perils of climate change and building public support for policies to address it.”
Perhaps Suzuki’s trademark claim is that the earth’s ecosystem is a “sacred balance” that humans are both morally and prudentially obliged to honor. The “sacredness” of nature is revealed whenever we’re “spiritually uplifted by the beauty of a forested valley or an ice-coated Arctic mountain, overwhelmed with awe at the sight of the star-filled heavens, and filled with reverence when we enter a sacred place. In the beauty, mystery and wonder that our brain perceives and expresses, we add a special gift to the planet.” But our flexing of “technological muscle power” has seriously jeopardized the balance that creates such beauty. It is no mark of shame, says Suzuki, to “acknowledge our dependence on the same biophysical factors that support all other life-forms” and resolve to change our individual and social behaviors in order to live in harmony with those factors. But in our drive to control the environment, we “seem to have forgotten the
