Note to readers.

• Author: Ayres, Ed

Pragmatic people often dismiss the idea of "world peace" as little more than a naive or sentimental dream, and it's not hard to see why. This has been the least peaceful century in history. According to William Eckhardt of the Lentz Peace Research Laboratory in St. Louis, Missouri, more people have been killed by wars in this century than in all previous human history combined. Some 23 million of those deaths have been inflicted since World War II.

One reason we've made so little progress toward becoming a less violent species is that we persist in thinking of peace as simply an absence of war, so we continue to assure ourselves that the main thing we need, to achieve peace, is enough military "defense" to deter everyone else's aggression. Thus, in the past half century, five countries alone have built enough destructive capability to fight World War II over again more than 4,000 times. Yet, rather than deter aggression, that has apparently only enflamed it. It's no wonder so many people have become cynical about the long-term prospects for such seemingly improbable developments as the U.S.-Russian or Arab-Israeli reconciliations. But peace requires more than an absence of war; it requires the presence of something--of adequate food, shelter, education, employment, health, assurance of fundamental rights, and connectedness to the physical environment. Activists who recognize this can cogently argue that it is not they, but the politicians who still think guns are "peacemakers," who are naive.

In Boise, Idaho, a small group of such activists got together in the mid-1980s. At a time when the United States and Soviet Union were aiming enough nuclear warheads at each other to obliterate all life on Earth several times over, the Idahoans believed that a reconciliation was possible. They decided to make their point in a small way--by sewing a quilt symbolizing the common humanity of the Soviet and American people. When it was finished, they took the quilt to startled Soviet officials and asked that it be presented as a gift to the people of a Russian town.

History vindicated that group; their idealism proved surprisingly prescient, whereas the calculated preparations of the Cold War turned out to have produced a monumental squandering of human resources. The Boise Peace Quilt Project has since made some...