Mike Fay For Peace

I started off this small assignment with digging deep into the definition of Peace itself. Not surprisingly most of us grow up with news of wars, let it be in the history (WWI & II, etc.) or present (gulf war, genocide, North Korea, terrorism). In this context PEACE may simply defined as the absence of war/violence/conflict.

Some peacemaker, like Marthin Luther King Jr. believes that peace requires not only the absence of war/violence, but also the presence of justice. For him peace is not possible while some people were still starving/ jobless/ humiliated due to injustice. Even without guns and bullets, it’s still war.

In some other contexts, though, peace may simply define as the absence of disturbance, quiet or tranquility. It may apply to the smallest of our own self, our state of mind, body and soul. Something like SNah and John had when Sue or Rosalind stop nagging them around, maybe?

The definition that really caught my attention is the idea of Plural Peaces, a harmonious balance between human beings, the rest of the natural world and cosmos. Cosmos? Don’t be surprise when someone tells you the rubbish/waste rocketed to outer space by human were slowly, but definitely becomes a huge “environmental” issue.

Since I am more concern on the human-nature kind of peace, therefore my role model - - Dr. J. Michael Fay.

Michael Fay who?

In short, Mike Fay is a biologist, ecologist, explorer, and naturalist. As I read more about him I thought he can be a linguistic as well, as he speaks English, French, native African languages. But most of all, he is a conservationist.

Graduated from University of Arizona in 1978, Mike Fay spent 6 years in the Peace Corps as a botanist in national park in Tunisia and savanna’s of central Africa.

He then went on to work at Missouri Botanical Garden, doing a floristic study on a mountain range on Sudan’s western border, before ending up doing his PhD on the western lowland gorilla, ever since.

Some twenty over years and still counting…

This man is notable for, among other things, the Megatransect and Megaflyover.

In Megatransect, Mike Fay and his team spent 15 months walking more than 2000 miles across Congo Basin in Africa, to survey the ecological and environmental status of the region - - most probably last virgin forest on earth. “naive” animals virtually unaffected by human activity. In fact, Mike Fay is the first person who walked through it. Forest so dense, so deep that even native African like Pygmy won’t border to venture. But not those machines, logging is move closer and closer to this virgin soil.

Mike Fay’s effort was enough to convince Gabonese government to set aside what amounts to 10 percent of the country’s total land (26 000 km square) to form a national park system protecting 13 separate parks. In fact, President Bongo didn’t realize the abundance wild life and unique virgin tropical rain forest that he had, before seeing pictures from Mike Fay’s expedition.

Comes year 2004, Mike Fay go on with Megaflyover expedition, a 100 000 mile aerial survey of Africa’s wildest places, snapping a digital image every 20 seconds and recording human impact on Africa’s ecosystem. This is a starting point for them to develop a new kind of map that assigns to every km square of the planets a value for the ability of the land to sustain human life.

Finally, it’s important that we recognize that there are “conflict” between MAN and NATURE. That PEACE among MAN and NATURE is as vital as peace among human themselves. Man had co-exist with nature for thousands of years before us. There should be an urgent search for answers why the nature would collapse in mere couples of hundred years after we regard ourselves civilized and modernize.

Eventually, i would like to tag Mike Fay as Peacemaker, and as many other identities that we see fit.

Source:

Peace : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace
Megatransect : http://www.nationalgeographic.com/congotrek/
Megaflyover: http://www.fratpack.com/index.php?p=1249