I’ve always loved being outdoors. I’ve definitely got a “thing” about wild open spaces. Where I live now is one of the prettiest places on earth, a beautiful rural village, officially the smallest “town” in Britain, with hills all around me. It’s very wet here, but that’s what makes it so green, the air so crisp. You might call this town “sleepy,” but it’s another story when people arrive here from all over the world for the “World Bog Snorkeling Championships!” Contestants put on a snorkel and have to swim underwater through a sixty-meter-long dark, cold, black, smelly peat bog pit, both ways, without surfacing. I’ve watched it many times.
I’m lucky in that where I was born and bred in the Yorkshire Dales, now called Cumbria, is one of Britain’s great natural beauty spots, with an abundance of hills, rivers, and waterfalls. As a lad, I spent every free moment out in the fields, roaming wild and free. I loved to be out, particularly messing about along the riverbanks. Cities only appealed to me, the buzz of them, the bright lights, for a fleeting moment in my youth, but as I grew older I came to really appreciate the quiet and peace of the countryside. As an adult, I still walk a lot. Walking, especially walking up a mountain like Ben Nevis, Britain’s tallest peak, makes me feel alive. I like the effort, I like to feel the wind and the rain hitting me; it touches my very soul. I think, “This is me! This is what I’m about.” Walking in beautiful places is uplifting, mystic in a way, and everything in nature is beautiful really, no matter how different one place is from another.
When you are leading a busy life you can be oblivious to some things, but when you retire, you can slow down and notice things around you. I noticed that even in my beautiful town, people drop their crisp [potato chip] packets on the ground and toss their empty bottles and cans into the hedges. I live about 300 yards up a very rural road from our lovely town center and there’s always litter staring up at me from behind the parked cars on the street. I regularly moaned to my wife about the mess and how irritating it was and how it took away from the impact of our little town, and one day she said “Well, why don’t you stop grumbling and do something about it?”
It took a lot for me to start because I found it embarrassing. Only tramps are seen picking up things off the ground, cigarette butts and the like. So I decided to go out at dawn, when no one was about and pick all the litter up on our street. That day the road looked so much better that I felt very good about it. That’s how it started: I was the Magic Fairy who cleaned everything up on our street before people left the house every day! Gradually I got more ambitious. I’m not obsessive, I’ve never been particularly tidy, but I could see that with just a little effort I could make a big difference, so I expanded my area, eventually cleaning up our main street and around a two-mile radius.
I don’t usually run into people, but it occurred to me that if I did, I should be identified, so I got a yellow gillet, one of those workman’s vests to wear. In our town, people are known by what they do. Our mailman is “Ken the Post,” our milkman is “Hugh the Milk,” our teacher is “Bryn the School,” so my wife suggested I put “Rob the Rubbish” on the back of the vest. People came to know what I was doing after that. A woman who works in the Tourist Information Office told me that she had a litter stick that the council had provided but that was collecting dust out back of the office, so she gave it to me. No more bending down! I could now save my back and be three feet away from the rubbish I snagged. Nowadays, very nice people give me litter sticks, vests, even strong gloves.
I don’t like rubbish, but I don’t get angry when I see it. In fact, I have a curious and very positive relationship with it now. When I see something on the ground, I know that in a moment it’s going to be gone and the natural beauty that’s covered up by it will be revealed, and that makes me smile. When I remove “residual rubbish,” nature starts to breathe again. The more you do, the better the whole place looks. The BBC’s resident poet, Matt Harvey, called me a “topographic groomer” and I love that! Rubbish gets me going in a good way.
I have started going into schools. I’ve found a fun way to make my points about how important it is to clean up your own environment, how kids will inherit their patch of the Earth sooner than they think. I do that by putting ten crisp packets on the stage and asking the assembly if anyone would come and pick one up. Of course, no one wants to stand up in front of their friends and pick up rubbish, which is exactly how I felt when I started. The kids umm and ah and shuffle their feet, and then, eventually, someone does it, then another, and another. They all stand there, feeling a bit foolish, holding the rubbish. That’s when I tell them to look into the packet they’re holding. I put a five-pound note in one of the packets, and you should see their faces. Now everyone wishes they’d gone up! I tell them that you never know what you’ll find, and in fact, I have found quite a bit of money in my years of cleaning up, along with other things, like a fully stocked first aid kit, fancy clothes, and even, to my great amusement and quite a puzzle, three sets of men’s and women’s underwear halfway up a mountain! Of course, the real reward for me is in knowing that I’ve restored beauty to a place.
As for my town, if I stopped cleaning up I can’t say it wouldn’t revert to its former grubby self; I just don’t know. I don’t know that the parts of Everest I cleaned up will or won’t be litter strewn again either. But, I know that seeing someone clean up with enthusiasm is contagious. From my own neighbors to people I’ve met hiking, to the helpful villagers and Sherpas in the Himalayas—including one guest house owner whom I had a word with after seeing her slinging empty bottles over a virtual precipice—I know, because they’ve told me, that most of them are far more rubbish-conscious now. Matt Harvey’s poem about me has lines that sum it up:
. . . by picking up crisp packets, cling film and tin foil
Incongruous empties of Sprite and Drambui
He nurtures the flora and fauna and topsoil
And subtly recharges the Feng of its Shui.
REPRESENTATIVE DENNIS KUCINICH
Planning the U.S.
Department of Peace
Representative Dennis Kucinich is not your run-of-the-mill congressman.The first thing you notice when you step through the huge oak-paneled doors into his office is what’s on the walls. Like the man himself, there is no pomp, no pretension. In 1977, at age thirty-one, Kucinich was elected Mayor of Cleveland, the youngest person ever to lead a major American city. He was the 2003 recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award. And among other passions (and planks in his presidential bids), he advocates for a Department of Peace so as to make nonviolence an organizing principle in our society.
I asked Representative Kucinich to contribute an essay because he is so straightforward and unafraid to be open about his real agenda and beliefs. I find this refreshing when many politicians seem so fearful of deviating from a script carefully crafted to offend no one that they might as well be created from a single mold.
As far back as I can remember I knew I wanted to be in public service of one type or another. In the tenth grade, I envisioned myself running for national office. It was more intuition than anything. I just knew that’s what I wanted to do. I ran for a seat for the first time when I was twenty-one and was on the City Council by the time I was twenty-three.Then I went on to become the youngest mayor ever. I never had any doubts.
Public service always meant a lot to me. I read lots of biographies, and that opened up a whole world of experiences. I was very impressed that people dedicated their lives to a certain purpose, whether sports, religion, science, literature, or government, and had the ability to change things. That seemed worthwhile. My family believed in tolerance, in understanding, that no one was better than anyone else. They taught me compassion for anyone who is considered different than the rest. They instilled in me the belief that I could be one of those people who bring about change.
I was the first of seven children, and my parents never owned a home. By the time I was seventeen, we’d lived in twenty-one different places, j
ust trying to find a place to stay, and on a couple of occasions we lived in our car. But that never made me feel separate from anyone else. Being the eldest, I had to be resourceful, self-reliant, strong. But there were times when I could have fallen through the cracks. Fortunately, there was always someone there to catch me. For example, when I was sixteen I felt school could offer me nothing more and that the real world was where I needed to be. One of my teachers was there to catch me and to insist, outright insist, that I stay in school. And I did.
Racism has always upset me very much, and I have always felt I could do something about it. When I was four, one of my friends was an African-American child named Dwight. One day we were playing outside and a passerby said something very crude to me about why I was playing with Dwight. When I went home, I asked my mother about it and she assured me that the person who made the remarks was wrong and that I had a lot in common with Dwight. Dwight became one of my best friends. This was my first real brush with racism.
Then, in Cleveland, in the mid-fifties, African Americans started moving into “white neighborhoods.” People in those neighborhoods came out and protested. It was so unfair. I think people should be able to live where they want to live. I saw this personally and was very upset by it. After that, I paid greater attention to such discrimination. These were the early days of civil rights, and it never seemed fair that people should have to struggle this hard for equality. Seeing this, knowing people who were caught up in the struggle, made me realize that I needed to defend the principle of equality, that I could use the advantages I was lucky enough to have to stand up against bigotry, not only when it was directed against my friends like Dwight, but on a far larger scale. I realized that in public office I could actually make policy and set an example of fairness to all. Since I have been a congressman, I have had the opportunity to cosponsor numerous bills that would help protect or enhance the well-being and livelihood of people who sometimes get the short end of the stick. I’ve seized those opportunities with great joy by supporting, for example, school-based music education, Medicaid, a tax-cut repeal for the wealthy, assistance to those living in poverty, further research into an HIV vaccine, and religious tolerance. I’ve supported bills that focus directly on the needs and rights of minorities, such as condemning the existence of racially restrictive covenants in housing documents and recognizing the low presence of minorities in the financial services industry and in upper-level positions of management, and working to change that. And I’ve supported the goals and ideals of National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day and Anti-Slavery Day. I’ve also supported legislation that would honor several minority figures properly such as a posthumous pardon to Jack Johnson who went to jail, basically, for having a white girlfriend, Lena Horne for her outspoken opposition to racial and social injustice, Judge Constance Baker Motley for her courage, as both a woman and an African American in arguing key cases in front of the Supreme Court, and for Wangari Maathai for winning the Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless work promoting sustainable development, democracy, peace, and women’s rights in Africa. Weighing in on these matters has meant the world to me.
If I have any advice for someone feeling unsure about what they can do in life, I would offer this: Each person who has the courage to follow his or her own dream and do it with joy, without compromise, will soon come in touch with great creative powers that may seem divinely inspired and that are in fact profoundly human.
HEIDI KUHN
From Mines to Vines
Heidi Kuhn founded Roots of Peace in 1997. The organization not only carries on, but expands upon, the work of the late Princess Diana, removing landmines from fields in places as far flung as Afghanistan and Croatia, helping plant crops like grapes and pineapples where once the fields were too dangerous to plow, and advocating a ban on landmines. Her work with the soil, her own roots (she was born in California just in time to absorb the peace and love message of the sixties), the fact that she has four children of her own and likes to be barefoot, in her kitchen, make Heidi Kuhn a true “Earth Mother.” But the photographs of her show a different side: a professional with a purpose, standing with farmers at the grape harvest, discussing war and peace with Kofi Annan at the United Nations, and presenting a pomegranate to President Hamid Karzai.She fascinates me! Heidi didn’t plan this path, but, as a young mother, Heidi acted on her “women’s intuition” and started filing news reports. She started in Juneau and ended up in Moscow, where she captured some of the world’s most interesting and important news stories coming out of the Soviet Union. As she tells the story, it was a matter of one thing simply leading to another.
I am a fifth-generation Marin County resident, born in San Raphael. I am also a Roman Catholic, although I think religious ideals cross denominational barriers. Raphael is the patron saint of healing. San Francisco, which is where I got the idea to start the foundation, is named after St. Francis, whose words
“Dear God, make me an instrument of your peace” mean a great deal to me. I found myself saying similar words in 1988, when I was diagnosed with cervical cancer. There I was, in the incredible cold of the Alaskan tundra. I felt very alone. My husband was away on an extended business trip; I had babes-in-arms to care for, no friends in this out-of-the-way place, and my life was at risk from this insidious disease. I looked out at a fourth-of-July celebration and wondered if I would ever see another. Just before I went under anesthesia for the surgery, I prayed quietly, “Dear God, please grant me the gift of life. If you do, I promise I will do something special with it.” I never forgot that pledge, and I still see every day as a gift, a chance to do something that represents the values I grew up with: love, peace, caring.
When the Exxon Valdez ran aground, I used contacts I had made with mainland news bureaus to file reports from the scene. Reporting seemed to suit me, and I enjoyed knowing that I was helping people in, say, New York, connect to people thousands of miles away. Soon I had an idea: why not go to the Soviet Union and try to cover the melting of the “ice curtain” between the U.S. and the Soviet government? At that time, no U.S. reporters were permitted access, and it was a bit of a scary prospect, entering the belly of the beast, knowing this was the superpower that had us all hiding under our desks in school, practicing how to survive a nuclear attack.
Everyone around me said, “No, don’t go” and “It’s impossible.” Just getting a visa took six months. But you have to be partially deaf to work for social change, so I didn’t listen. I wanted to tell the human story behind the thaw, and I was going to do my best to get in and get it. And things started to fall into place. My husband decided to take a leave to act as my cameraman, and a wonderful pediatric nurse we knew volunteered to look after the kids. Suddenly everyone was empowering me! In December 1989, I found myself looking out of the plane window at the full moon, headed for Moscow, wondering what I was doing. I didn’t even have a contract with a news agency; I just had an idea.
My grandmother used to say, “Coincidence is a miracle in which God prefers to remain anonymous.” As it turned out, the Soviets denied U.S. reporters any access but had a special relationship with Alaska. Because of that, I was the very first reporter given the story of Andrei Sakharov’s death, a worldwide exclusive that I raced across town to satellite feed to ABC studios in New York. I proved that I could get the story and that I could deliver it! One thing led to another. I found myself not only able to report on peace, the warm and fuzzy “Yalta to Malta” stories, but leading the first news crew into Vladivostok and meeting every dignitary in the land. That stood me in good stead for the charity work ahead of me when my life changed again in 1997.
It was January and I was back in San Francisco. I had decided to stop reporting, stop traveling, and be a stay-at-home mom following the miraculous birth (my cervix had been removed because of the cancer) of my son, Christian. People would often ask if I could host events at my home, and I always said yes. This time, the gathering was for a United Nations Association touring the U.S. Lots
of my neighbors are vintners. I thought “why not?” so I called up Francis Ford Coppola and asked if he would supply the wine. He agreed right off the bat. Then I asked my childhood friend, Mike, who is a concert pianist, if he’d play, and he said he would.
All this was just weeks after Princess Diana’s death, and her work to get landmines banned was on my mind; it was so smart, so right. On the night of the event, Jerry White, the man who had escorted Princess Diana through Bosnia, was in my living room. He is an Irishman, a Catholic like me, and very inspiring. At some point, he simply bent down and pulled off his artificial leg. He told me that he had stepped on a landmine while walking in the Golan Heights. He remembers lying there, yelling, “My leg. My leg. My god, where’s my leg?!”
It was a very moving evening. There was Jerry, there was my friend Mike playing “Candle in the Wind,” and I felt as if I were part of a wonderful watercolor painting. I wondered how I could not have known about the devastation wrought by landmines, all the work that was needed to get rid of them. Listening to the speakers, talking to the guests who had come from all over the world, I felt as if generational wisdom, the calls for compassion and peace, were echoing back from my childhood in the sixties. I wanted the earth and her people to be thought of as sacred, for all hatred to be replaced with love.
One Can Make a Difference Page 11