The Roots of Peace Series
a survivor speaks of his experience surviving the atomic bomb
A talk by Takaaki Morikawa at Greenfield Community College, 4/29/2011
Takaaki Morikawa, a survivor of the Atomic Bomb dropped on Hiroshima, shared his personal history of the event using a power point presentation and a film dramatically illustrating the devastating effects of the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mr. Morikawa’s presentation described Hiroshima in the past and as it is now. He discussed the nature of the atomic bomb and its tragic effects, as well as black rain and the effects of radiation. He laid out his impressions of the threat of nuclear weaponry on our planet and discussed what he sees as the path toward world peace.
You are invited to visit the Roots of Peace: Community Voices blog to enter a comment or a post.
The Roots of Peace Series
Why peace is possible and how we can achieve it
A talk by Paul Chappell at Greenfield Community College, 4/8/2011
Paul K. Chappell, writer, peace leader and veteran: April 8 from 12-2 in Sloan Theater: “Why Peace is Possible and How We Can Achieve it.” Paul K. Chappell graduated from West Point in 2002. He served in the army for seven years, was deployed to Baghdad, and left active duty in November 2009 as a Captain. He is the author of Will War Ever End?: A Soldier’s Vision of Peace for the 21st Century and The End of War: How Waging Peace Can Save Humanity, Our Planet, and Our Future (May 2010). He lives in Santa Barbara, California, where he is serving as the Peace Leadership Director for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is working on his third book, Peaceful Revolution: How to Create the Future that Humanity Needs to Survive, and he speaks throughout the country to colleges, high schools, veterans groups, churches, and activist organizations.
Paul's talk was recorded at GCC. Thanks to the GCC video archive his talk is available for viewing here.
You are invited to visit the Roots of Peace: Community Voices blog to enter a comment or a post.
The Roots of Peace Series
Building Community Resilience to
Increase the Peace
A talk by Tina Clarke at Greenfield Community College, 2/18/2011
Tina Clarke, Regional Coordinator of Transition Towns, spoke about the Transition Town movement to transition from a carbon to a post carbon world by creating resilient communities. Given the role of oil in recent U.S. wars in the Iraq, the transition town movement is vital for ending conflict driven by scarce natural resources and for achieving peace through
community-building for sustainable living.
Tina Clarke has been an advocate, educator, consultant, and director of nonprofit programs since 1985. She was recently a consultant with Bill McKibben's global 350.org initiative and the Sustainability Institute . She has been providing professional training and support for community leaders and campaigns for over 20 years. In Washington, D.C. she directed national citizen advocacy training programs for faith communities, and directed Greenpeace USA's citizen activist network. She has consulted with over 400 NGOs on organizational development, public outreach, coalition-building, and energy and environmental issues. In Massachusetts she directed a regional nonprofit assistance center, training leaders in strategic planning, fundraising, and organizational development. As a Campaign Director for Clean Water Action, she initiated and helped lead coalitions on environmental justice, toxins and energy. Tina has an M.A. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago, a B.A. in urban studies from Macalester College, and is certified for consensus process facilitation and mediation. She is popular speaker on energy and environmental issues, creative frugality, and social change. She has trained and advised over three dozen Transition Initiatives.
Tina's 2/18/2011 talk was not recorded at GCC, but a similar earlier talk was recorded there. Thanks to the GCC video archive the earlier talk is available for viewing here.
You are invited to visit the Roots of Peace: Community Voices blog to enter a comment or a post.
The Roots of Peace Series
Poetry & Resistance: A Celebration
A talk by Michael True at Greenfield Community College,11/5/2010
Michael True, an activist peace educator, has documented the nonviolent tradition in American literature. He introduced his presentation on poetry and peacemaking in our Roots of Peace series, by saying the "most important thing we can do as peacemakers is teach peacemaking skills." Under themes of "Battlefield," "Homefront," Resistance," and Peacemaking," he read and discussed more than a dozen poems including that of World War I soldier, Wilfred Owen on the futility of war to those of Denise Levertov, among them "Making Peace" and "Political Action in Which Each Person Acts from the Heart."
Michael True is the author and editor of eleven books, essays, reviews, and poems in scholarly and general periodicals, including Commonweal, America, New Republic, The Progressive, Boston Globe, Friends Journal, Harvard Divinity Bulletin. A native of Oklahoma, he is emeritus professor, Assumption College, and former president, International Peace Research Association Foundation.
A National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and twice a Fulbright Scholar in India, Michael True has taught at twenty colleges and universities in this country and abroad, including Duke University, Columbia University, University of Hawaii, Nanjing University (China), Utkal University, Bubaheshwar, and University of Rajasthan, Jaipur (India).
Thanks to the GCC video archive this talk is available for viewing here.
You are invited to visit the Roots of Peace: Community Voices blog to enter a comment or a post.
The Roots of Peace Series
Building Peace in a Stormy World: Exploring the Causes and Conditions of War and Peace
A talk by Paula Green at Greenfield Community College,9/24/2010
Dr. Green’s talk and photos explored her work as an international peacebuilder and highlighted her understanding of the root causes of conflict and the obstacles to peace. She also talked about how insights from her professional training in psychology aid her efforts to create learning environments that become models of the cultures of peace longed for by all of us.
Paula Green is the founder, former Executive Director, and now Senior Fellow of Karuna Center for Peacebuilding, a US-based NGO focused on international conflict transformation, inter-communal dialogue, and reconciliation. She also serves as Professor of Conflict Transformation at the School for International Training, where she founded and directs CONTACT (Conflict Transformation Across Cultures), an annual Peacebuilding Institute and Graduate Certificate Program for peacemakers from around the world. Dr. Green has decades of experience as a psychologist, educator, activist, and consultant in peacebuilding in many regions of Africa, Asia, the Mid East, and Europe, as well as within the US. She has been selected as a winner of the Unsung Heroes of Compassion, an award that was given to her by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in April 2009.
The Roots of War Series
How Federal Spending Priorities Make Us Less Secure
A talk by Jo Comerford at Greenfield Community College, 4/23/2010
Jo provides evidence that our growing military spending is starving “Main Street” services,including schools, libraries, police and fire departments, and health and human services. She addresses, specifically, how the costs of the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq contribute to our recession-ridden economy and describes what citizens can do to move the government toward a peace economy.
Jo Comerford is Executive Director of the National Priorities Project, a project which provides real-time data on war and national defense spending and the trade offs in local social welfare, education and renewable energy which result. She is former Director of the Food Bank of western Massachusetts and a board member of the War Resisters League.
The Roots of War Series
The Global Struggle for Resources
A talk by Michael Klare at Greenfield Community College, 2/18/2010
Geopolitics scholar and teacher Michael Klare addresses how 21st century wars will be driven by competition over access to scarce and valuable natural resources due, on the one hand, to rising world affluence, population growth and the rise of China as a major industrial economy and, on the other hand, to the depletion of the world’s resources. Because we lack effective mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of disputes over contested resources, he forecasts that conflict is a likely outcome of such disputes.
The Roots of War Series
A talk by Norman Solomon at Greenfield Community College, 10/27/2009
The Roots of War Speaker Series was launched on October 27, 2009 with a talk by Norman Solomon, an incisive critic of mainstream media’s support for war (from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan) even when the majority of the American public have turned against it.
ACTIVE NONVIOLENCE: What Is It? And Why Does It Matter?
A talk by Randy Kehler at Traprock, 9/30/2009
Longtime peace activist, community organizer, Traprock co-founder and inspiration for Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers, our own Randy Kehler talked about his personal understanding of, and life-long commitment to, ‘active nonviolence’ as a means of resolving conflicts at all levels and creating a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world. He also spoke to the relevance of ‘active nonviolence’ in relation to the social, environmental, and economic crises we are currently facing.
Click here for the mp3 file. 58 minutes.
Radio interview of Pat Hynes on her Primer on the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
Traprock board member Pat Hynes was interviewed for an hour on KHSU about her Primer, which is available here on our Traprock website and here on OpEdNews.com. Listen to the interview here.
Allied organizations
Traprock works with other area peace and justice organizations including:
- ARISE for Social Justice in Springfield:
- the Campus Anti-War Network at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst);
- Iraq Veterans against the War in Iraq and Afghanistan (IVAW);
- American Friends Service Committee of Western Massachusetts;
- Veterans for Peace;
- Clamshell Alliance;
- the Greenfield Community College Peace and Justice Student Club;
- SAGE;
- the Franklin County Interfaith Council, with whom we collaborate to award Peace Maker awards to worthy high school students in the greater Greenfield area; and
- WMMREN, the Western Massachusetts Military Recruitment Education Network, an existing ad hoc group dedicated to counter-recruitment in local high schools.
Traprock Center Film Library
The Traprock Center has a lending library of more than 300 films on a broad range of topics which include historical, recent and current armed conflicts, liberation struggles, Cuba, the politics of US foreign policy and US militarism, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, depleted uranium, civil disobedience and conscientious objection, the environment, the media, social justice, future of food, issues of oil and water and more. These films can be viewed on our TV at Traprock or borrowed for up to two weeks. We encourage activists, educators and everyone wanting to better understand the world we live in to use this great resource. The library is open most weekday afternoons and some evenings. Other times can be arranged by calling the Traprock office at 413-773-7427.
You can view the holdings as Adobe .pdf files or as Word .doc files. The Adobe files are far smaller. Both can be searched.
Films sorted by Title - Adobe pdf file or Word file.
Films sorted by Subject - Adobe pdf file or Word file.
Former Traprock website
The earlier Traprock website has been archived and is available here.
Charlie Jenks, creator of the earlier website, now runs PeaceJournal.org,
a "Multimedia blog and resource center for a better world."
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