Third Side Forum

Peace in the House

Adapted from Minnesota Public Radio

David Harris has travelled extensively through the Middle East and North Africa studying Sephardic music. He says on his travels he heard stories he never saw in the headline.

"One of the things I find frustrating is that when you read the newspaper or listen to the radio, the same story gets told over and over these days: 'relentless ancient conflict reignited!'" says Harris. "There's actually a much more complicated more interesting story - there's a history of co-existence that isn't just about people getting along but it's about great cultural flowerings!"

Harris is the artistic director of Voices of Sepharad, a group that specializes in the music of Sephardic Jews. Following their expulsion from Spain in 1492, Sephardic Jews migrated throughout the Arab world. Harris says for years they lived side-by-side with Christian Arabs and Muslim Persians. He says in times of peace, rich music, literature and philosophy has come out of those same regions that are now in conflict.

Harris and his company are performing in Minneapolis Peace in the House about dealing with conflict and communicating across assumed cultural barriers.  Peace in the House begins with the creation of the world, threads through medieval Spain and the post-expulsion times when Jews and Arabs lived together in the Middle East and North Africa, and ends with the lives of the performers onstage.

David Harris says for peace to be possible, people need to be able to visualize it, to know that it has existed - and persisted - in the past. The members of his company are a microcosm of the complexity and diversity within Sephardic culture. They encompass, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and while they all now live in the Twin Cities, they hail from Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Jordan and India. They dance and sing on stage to the same music, the same rhythms, each with their own particular cultural stylings.

OSU’s peer mediation center informs students about mediation through comedy

Students at Oregon State University may not be aware of the Peer Mediation Center, so the center showcased their services with their “Mediation Madness” comedy night tonight. Where students can watch and participate in an improv act of peer mediation.  “If you’ve seen Whose Line Is It Anyway?, it’s like that,” said Crystal Livingston, a senior in history and Peer Mediation Center coordinator.  The audience gets to choose names for the actors, the issue, and watch four people acting as two mediators and two participants. The audience will watch the issue through all stages of mediation and participate throughout, and then they can submit two possible solutions to the issue.   Livingston said the idea came up in a promotions committee meeting when they tried to think of a way to make a mock mediation attract students.

Abraham Path Initiative – update

From Global Negotiation Project

The purpose of the Abraham Path Initiative is to inspire the opening of a route in the Middle East retracing the footsteps of the prophet Abraham, an effort to share Abraham's universal messages of oneness, unity, faith, justice, peace, and hospitality toward all.   

Among the many activities undertaken this year, the Abraham Path Initiative has primarily invested money and time in building connections.  While there have been many smaller meetings, this fall a group of individuals from Turkey, Syria, Pakistan, and the United States – clerics and laypeople, gathered in Harran to discuss and plan Abraham’s Path.  The meeting focused on building relationships and practical arrangements for the Path. Host committees and a network of partners were formed for Syria and Turkey.  These committees are comprised of individuals and organizations that will now be working together in those countries, supported by our central office at Harvard University.

This year we launched the Abraham Path Initiative website, www.abrahampath.org, which will continue to expand. We hope to have the website translated into regional languages during this upcoming year.  We have begun research on a guidebook for future travelers of the Path and a white paper that will be used to provide details and information on the project to funders and potential partners. 

The Abraham Path Initiative has established a director’s office at the Global Negotiation Project at Harvard.  The Global Negotiation Project will act as the coordinator for the project.

In 2006, the Abraham Path Initiative plans to hold meetings, similar to the meeting in Harran, in Jordan, Israel, and Palestine to continue to build partnerships and to develop the route.  The Initiative will publish a simple version of a guidebook and a white paper, create a DVD for promotional purposes, map the route with a team on the ground, and as mentioned above, translate and expand the website. 

In the fall of 2006, the Initiative will host an official ten-day Harvard-led delegation.  The Harvard delegation will meet with communities along the Path and develop contacts, enthusiasm, and create political good will towards the project.

Michigan researcher helps resolve the conflict between exotic birds and eco-tourists

From Josh Weiss
Boston, MA USA
excerpts from the University of Michigan’s Newswire

Shannon Bouton, a Ph.D. student in the School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE) at the University of Michigan published the results of her unique study of a wading bird colony in the Pantanal in an article co-authored with Peter C. Frederick (University of Florida) in Conservation Biology, the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology.  Unlike other research projects that consider only the biological effects of tourism, Bouton has combined her biological research with a study of how the colony serves as a resource for the local community. Her practical suggestions for meeting the twin goals of managing and developing tourism and conserving the colony attracted the attention of top government officials and diplomats in Brazil and have made her study site at Porto da Fazenda a model for similar efforts in the region.

The first part of the study documented the potential effects of human activities on nesting and found that viewing from boats caused significant nest desertion and breeding failure. "Would you want to live in a place where people drove right up under your nest with noisy motor boats, talking and laughing all the while?" Bouton says. In addition, she points out, when the parents leave the nests there are many predators waiting to attack the eggs and the chicks.

Next, she and her team interviewed stakeholders in the community, including licensed guides, hotel owners and managers, boat drivers and local landowners. Tourists were given questionnaires to complete and return on site. Bouton developed a model of the interactions among the various groups, identified the areas of potential conflict, and developed some creative strategies for satisfying tourists while not unduly disturbing the birds.

Today, as a result of those suggestions, the forestry police have posted a guard in front of the colony to control the behavior of tourists and fishermen. A local conservation group, Associação Ecológica Melgassense (AMEC) has established a staffed observation post that is occupied year-round to protect the birds and the forest. AMEC trains young people from the community as guides to take tourists along newly constructed trails at a safe distance from the colony and runs workshops for local children and adults so that everyone is aware of the biology of the birds, their importance to the community and how to behave so as not to disturb them.

"The tourists really appreciate the new amenities," Bouton says. "Now there's a little shop to buy cool drinks, an orientation talk that tells them what to look for and well-informed guides to accompany them on the trail. Those who prefer not to walk can take advantage of spotting scopes on top of an observation tower. Tourism has increased ten-fold since our study, and at the same time the birds are happier and many more are staying in the colony."

For the complete story click here to link to: http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/Releases/2003/Feb03/r020403.html

Commuting in Washington State

From Kurt O'Brien - Poulsbo WA

I commute to my job at the University of Washington in Seattle by ferry, as I live on the other side of Puget Sound on the Kitsap Peninsula.  When the ferry pulls in to the pier, commuters begin to queue up and prepare to off load.  People are generally very polite, and form an orderly line as they wait for the brow to be lowered so they can disembark.  One evening, a young man went to the front of the line and pushed his way into the queue.  A passenger became angry and began yelling at the young man, telling him that he needed to move to the back of the line.  The young man refused.  Sensing that tensions were rising, a third man attempted to intervene and restore some order.  He calmly asked the young man to move to the back of the line, explaining the normal order of things and that it wasn't worth making a scene.  Still, the young man refused.  At this point the second man became irate, yelling even louder at the young man, telling him that if he wanted a fight he'd get one.  As the two of them moved off to the side, making ready to come to blows, the third man rushed forward, inserting himself between the two would-be combatants, telling each of them to calm down.  At this point, a few other passengers also came forward, prepared to help prevent the situation from escalating further.  These actions proved successful, as the two men separated.  The efforts of the third man to invoke the Third Side (role of Peacekeeper) prevented a potentially dangerous situation from erupting into a physical altercation.

Poldering in the Netherlands

From Mark Sommers - Oregon, USA

For a program on sea level rise, I recently interviewed a wetlands expert in the Netherlands. He told me a fascinating story/The Dutch have been settling on lands well below sea level for a thousand years. Their primary defense against inundation has been for each village to create and maintain its own coordinated program to maintain dikes and other measures. Everyone in the village is expected to take part in this maintenance effort, and regardless of their other differences all are expected to come to agreement on this crucial defense effort. The lands between the dikes just happen to be known as polders and the consensus-building process that organizes these  efforts is known as poldering.  My informant told me that poldering is probably the single most important factor in creating an almost uniquely Dutch penchant for social cohesion and reaching consensus in a society of stubbornly individual citizens. Ironically, the very term poldering is actually the essence of de-polarizing decisionmaking. In this cases,not only have the Dutch been able to establish the world's most effective defenses against sea level rise but in the process they have created one of our best models for getting along with one another in a modern industrial nation on one of the most densely populated landscapes on earth.