Blessed Peacemakers. Robin Jarrell
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in the chemistry department at Caltech studiously avoided congratulating him.
But Pauling, who’d already won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into chemical bonding, was immune to Cold War–era paranoia. As he said in his 1962 Nobel lecture, he was convinced of two things: “The only sane policy for the world is that of abolishing war,” and it was the responsibility of the very scientific community that helped develop “terrible weapons” like those that destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima to take a lead in eliminating them. Pauling spoke from conviction but also from an uneasy conscience. Although he had declined to participate in the Manhattan Project during World War II, he did work on projects that had direct military application.
Due partly to the horrors of the world war and partly to the influence of his pacifist wife, Pauling became an outspoken advocate of nonviolence immediately after Germany and Japan surrendered. In 1946 he joined the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, an organization chaired by Albert Einstein devoted to the elimination of nuclear weapons. He was one of the distinguished signatories of the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto, a declaration cowritten by Einstein and British philosopher Bertrand Russell calling on the leaders of the world to seek nonviolent alternatives to international conflicts. In the late fifties he began agitating for a ban on above-ground nuclear testing, arguing that the radiation fallout was much more damaging to public health than government experts admitted.
The culmination of Pauling’s anti-nuclear work was his cooperation with a Missouri-based organization called Committee for Nuclear Information. Pauling collaborated with other scientists in what has come to be called the “Baby Tooth Study,” a long-term project that established indisputable links between nuclear testing and radiation poisoning by measuring levels of strontium-90, an element dispersed in above-ground testing, in the baby teeth of American children. The study frighteningly demonstrated that above-ground testing contaminated grasslands with strontium-90, which was then passed on to children through cow milk. It was a chilling conclusion and quickly led to a moratorium on open-atmosphere nuclear testing.
1 March
Loung Ung
1970—
Worth My Being Alive
By the time she was eight years old, Loung Ung’s parents and two of her siblings were among the two million Cambodians killed by Pol Pot’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime. Prior to the Khmer takeover in 1975, Ung and her family lived a comfortable life in the capital city of Phnom Penh, where her father was a senior police officer. Because of their wealth and her father’s rank, Ung’s family was targeted by Pol Pot’s thugs. They were forced to evacuate Phnom Penh, her father was taken away by soldiers and never seen again, and Ung was put in a training camp for child soldiers. She finally escaped to a refugee camp in Thailand with the aid of her older brother Meng.
Ung was one of the lucky refugees who managed to get out of war-torn Southeast Asia. Through the auspices of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, she eventually wound up with a foster family in Vermont when she was ten years old. During the next few years she attended high school, living more or less like a typical American teen except for recurring nightmares about her ordeal in Cambodia.
After graduating from college, Ung returned to Cambodia to be reunited with the members of her family who survived the Pol Pot years. The devastation she encountered there, even fifteen years after the Khmer Rouge had been defeated, horrified her. She was especially struck by the number of adults and children she met who were maimed from stepping on undetonated landmines left over from the war years. An estimated four to six million of them are still scattered just beneath the ground throughout Cambodia.
Shortly after her visit to her homeland, Ung, determined to do something about what she witnessed there, got involved with the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World. For several years she toured the United States, speaking at colleges and universities, churches, and other venues to tell her own story and to raise support for a multilateral agreement to impose a ban on the use of landmines. (Several nations throughout the world have since signed onto an anti-landmine pledge. The United States isn’t one of them.) In 2000, she published a best-selling memoir, First They Killed My Father, which described the Pol Pot years; raised awareness about Cambodian genocide, child soldiers, poverty, AIDS, and child prostitution; and served as a vehicle for her anti-landmine activism.
For Ung, her participation in the campaign to ban landmines is “the chance to do something that’s worth my being alive”: helping to heal Cambodia’s wounds and to rid other countries of explosive remnants from past war that continue to maim innocent men, women, and children. But her activism does something else as well. “The more I tell people,” she says, “the less the nightmares haunt me. The more people listen to me, the less I hate.”
2 March
Judi Bari
7 November 1949—2 March 1997
Redwood Friend
They called it Redwood Summer. Sponsored by the radical environmentalist group Earth First!, the plan was to launch an entire summer’s campaign against northern California timber companies seeking to log the state’s old-growth redwood forests. Hundreds of environmental activists, veterans as well as newcomers, were expected to participate in the protests.
One of the leaders was Judi Bari, longtime environmental activist and Earth First! organizer and spokesperson. She had become an environmentalist a few years earlier when, working as a carpenter, her boss indifferently informed her that some siding she was nailing on a house came from a 1,000-year-old redwood. “A light bulb went on,” she later remembered. “We are cutting down old-growth forests to make yuppie houses.”
Like the other activists who participated in Redwood Summer, Bari frequently chained herself to at-risk trees to prevent their cutting and blocked the paths of bulldozers with her own body. But unlike other Earth First! members, many of whom were ready to use violence against the loggers, Bari insisted on a nonviolent approach. She condemned some environmentalists’ practice of tree-spiking, in which metal nails are driven into tree trunks in order to ruin chainsaws and potentially injure loggers. Her inspiration was the nonviolent approach adopted by Martin Luther King Jr. during the struggle for civil rights. Because she was one of the most visible organizers of Redwood Summer, she became the target of an avalanche of hate mail and death threats. Although she reported the threats to local police, she couldn’t persuade authorities to take her seriously.
In May 1990, an explosion ripped through Bari’s car as she drove through Oakland, California. Caused by a nail-stuffed pipe bomb with a motion-sensitive trigger, the explosion nearly killed Bari, leaving her permanently disabled. She and the companion riding with her (his injuries were minor) gave police at the scene the names of several individuals and organizations who might have been responsible, but Oakland officials and the FBI instead chose to arrest Bari, claiming that she had made the bomb for the purposes of harming loggers but had accidentally set it off in her car. Given Bari’s reputation as an advocate of nonviolence, it was an outrageous indictment. The charge was dropped for lack of evidence a couple of months later. But Bari and her companion sued the FBI and Oakland Police for false arrest and violation of their civil liberties. The courts eventually decided in their favor and awarded them over $4 million in damages. By that time, however, Bari had died of breast cancer.
The tragedy of Bari’s attempted murder, although it brought immense personal suffering to her, led to something that the bomber, whose identity is still unknown, neither anticipated nor intended. The publicity surrounding the attempt on her life drew national attention to the destruction of old-growth redwoods, leading to the creation of Headwaters Forest Reserve in northern California, the nation’s largest area of protected redwoods.
3 March
Miriam Makeba
4 March 1932—10 November 2008
Mama Africa, Singer of Truth
So long as she stuck to singing African standards like “Pata Pata” and the “Click Song,” Miriam Makeba was a hit in America. Born into