Levers of change.

• Author: Rothschild, Mathew
• Position: Political activism more important than just voting - Editorial

At the end of September, I spent a lovely weekend in Denver, Colorado. I went there to speak at a conference on disarmament called "Nuclear Abolition 2000." I accepted the invitation on one condition: that the organizers take me birdwatching for a couple of hours. You see, I rarely travel west of the Mississippi, and I wanted to sneak a peek or two at some birds I don't usually get to look at.

Mag and Ken Seaman met me at Denver's peculiar new airport and drove me all the way through town to a beautiful pond. Mag told me that avocets nest on the pond in the summer, and that she'd once seen a western tanager there. Alas, neither species bothered to show. But white-fronted geese greeted us noisily, black-crowned night herons (which we have in Madison, too) tried unsuccessfully to hide, and even a magpie made me happy, since I hadn't seen one for years.

When I spoke at the conference, I tried to make the point that reverence for nature is an integral part of peace activism. We are not the only inhabitants of this planet, and we need to stop acting like we are.

Fresh in my mind was a conversation I'd recently had with Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist, who came through Madison to promote his latest book, Full House. Gould points out that ours should not be called the Nuclear Age or even the Age of Man so much as the Age of Bacteria, since bacteria still predominate, surviving much longer than homo sapiens and indeed providing the building blocks for all life on this planet. If bacteria had a brain, Gould joked, they'd be laughing at us conceited humans. Of all our conceits, nuclear weapons are the most lavish. Who are we to make a device that can destroy all life on this planet?

I spoke in Denver just three days after Bill Clinton had signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and I outlined the hypocrisy of U.S. nuclear policy (see "Comment"). I noted the willingness of the U.S. government to continue testing these weapons-and to continue using them, especially in the Third World. And I argued that we need to work not only for disarmament, but for an end to the U.S. empire, for those weapons are in service of that empire.

I'm afraid I thoroughly depressed the group of eighty or ninety hard-core activists who attended. One man told me the next morning that he couldn't go to sleep for an hour, thanks to me.

Hope arrived the next day in the person of Karina Wood, who works for Peace Action, the successor to SANE/Freeze. Karina rightly pointed...