I did a podcast or radio program on how I was involved in the Equinox Earthday in 2024 and now translated it to English.

The idea of the podcast series and its title, which is "Welcome to The Global Village", roots back to the nineties when we pursued the ambitious the idea to create a global TV Satellite Channel called WE-TV (I think Hans Janitschek was pretty much involved in that and maybe it even was also his brainchild....).. Every morning the program in each corner of the world would start with a short program "Welcome to the Global Village". One of the people behind that project was Prince Alfred von Liechtenstein, and at the time (1993 - 1998) we collaborated on several projects.

So in one of the meetings fillmaker Godfrey Reggio (born 1940) was present, and in a private talk he gave me the mantra "Let the Global Village become a Globe of Villages" - and thats exactly what was and is the idea behind the show then and now ....of course I "borrowed" the title and made my modest monthly on-hour podcast on the subject of a new type of human habitat which would comprise the best of both worlds, the urban and rural, in a new symbiotic way of living within nature and human community in village-like dimensions, decentralized, supported by technology and global connections.. It is a seemingly endless subject and I threw light on this development from all different angles, and also decided to share memories of people that were influental in my life. And so...

OK, that is the background, so lets read the script without further ado:

Announcement text

Today's broadcast looks back into the past - and at the same time asks the question "what is the global element in the global villages"? Many part of the answer can be seen when you look at the life's work of John McConnell?, the man who invented Earth Day at the beginning of spring in 1969 - and unexpectedly became a short companion of mine starting in 1993. Throughout his life, he was enthusiastic about the vision of a cooperative world society, and he knew that we can only keep our planet alive and fruitful if we pay attention to the inner connection between ecological sustainability, non-violence and social balance - something which is as true as is threatened into total obsolescence not just by current developments, but by the way history has evolved so far...

Intro

"Willkommen" to the 50th. issue of the programme Welcome to the Global Village - premiered via Radio Agora on 25th of March 2024. As I write this show, we approach the beginning of spring and on this occasion I got something special out of my archive, including some digitized sound documents.

Loyal listeners of this show may remember the broadcast 30 entitled "Build Villages, Not War!" that I did exactly 2 years ago, which was about peace and peace villages. At that time, I commented on the beginning of the war on Ukraine, "that the increasing attention to and design of the local, our living spaces is the only long-term perspective of peace that this world has. Because only when we see our neighborhood, our village, our community and our region as the representative or equivalent of a cell or a cellular tissue on the surface of a healthy earth and we work to give an example, only then we do not act selfishly, but help to ensure that models of a good life can be created for everyone everywhere. Never before have we been able to work better as a global brain to solve the most diverse local problems, and it has never been so natural and easy to share all knowledge because it allows all communities and societies to develop better and more intensively inwardly."

Even two years ago, I would not have dreamed of what speed public consciousness can be switched away from these elementary truths- and instead towards the competition of the powers and offensive war affirmation. We have repeatedly echoed these places of escalating public madness in our series, and I would like to continue my archive course, as I said, not chronologically but grouped to extraordinary people in my life, and dedicate today's broadcast to JohnMcConnell and tell the story of the Earth Day - in which I was involved in the same year when we hosted the first Global Village conference at the Technical University Vienna.

Who was JohnMcConnell ?

So who was JohnMcConnell? Let's let him have his say briefly.

(playing sound file John Intro,mp3)

In 1969, at a UNESCO conference in San Francisco, he was the original proponent of Earth Day, the day of the Earth, which since 1970 has become the reservoir of confluence of the environmental movement in the United States. However, his concerns went far beyond the ecological questions.

He had a strong religious background, as the son of a preacher, he never really abandoned this habit. And yet he has not put the dividing separator of beliefs in the foreground, but rather the unifying similarities and fundamentals of religions and cultures.

Early on, he began to see this unifying quality in what was later called the "Creation Responsibility". In his biography, as early as 1939, there was already an awareness of the problems of plastic production, when he was vice-president of a foundation for chemical research - and the effort for materials that are biodegradable in natural cycles.

The experiences of the immensely grown destructive forces during the 2nd World war led to the basic attitude not to separate environmental issues from questions of social and political organisation.

He gained his first public profile in 1959 with an unusual editorial from a local newspaper, which was distributed by agencies and reprinted hundreds of times. Instead of being overwhelmed by the nationalistic "Sputnik Schock" which plagued Americans at the time, he demanded peaceful cooperation in space - in view of the fascinating technical possibilities and even spoke of the "Star of Hope".

But the connection between questions of the environment and the question of peace was not enough for him. Early on, he was coming across the writings of the American political economist Henry George, born in 1839, maybe also because of many parallels in their biography. After studying and travelling in 1879, Henry George wrote a book, whose translated title is "Progress and Poverty. An investigation into the cause of the industrial crises and the increase in poverty with increasing wealth".

(Small side note: in this book is very likely to be used for the first time the metaphor of the spaceship Earth “It is a well-provisioned ship, this on which we sail through space space.”) In the whole book, which, among other things, also had a great influence on the American labour movement, Henry George denounces the unequal distribution of wealth as a self-reinforcing mechanism, especially the possession and the yield of land.

JohnMcConnell's mantra "Peace, Justice and Care for the Earth" is understandable on this background. Only in the interplay of these three factors - non-violence, social justice and a respectful coexistence of man and nature can create responsibility for creation.

Consequently, John was involved in social issues, led the "Meals for Millions" campaign in San Francisco in 1962 to supply refugees from Hong Kong, and a year later he invented the "Minute for Peace". Here he succeeded for the first time not only reaching President Kennedy, but also UN Secretary General U Thant.

Tragically, it was precisely the month of mourning about President Kennedy that helped the campaign to break through, as he describes in a radio programme from 1967 - in which the first message of Secretary General U Thant can also be heard.

(excerpt from radio show mp3)

https://archive.org/details/audiotapereel0125? webamp default

3:30 pm Marjorie Staples introduces John McConnell? and talks about how his “Minute for Peace” came about. "Minute for Peace has a goal of encouraging everyone around the world to take a minute to think about peace and to join together in thought." McConnell? talks about the origin of Minute for Peace and what it has accomplished. The period of mourning following President Kennedy’s assassination was ended with a new dedication to peace through Minute for Peace. Secretary General Thant gave the first regular Minute for Peace message about the importance of peace being in the minds of the people before there can be peace in the world.

Many elements of what constituted the original idea of Earth Day, its effect and also the foreseeable obstacles and even resistance, are therefore obvious from McConnell?'s biography.

The lively years of 1968 and 1969 were the decidingive. In January 69, Life Magazine, which had already opened several times with portraits of Mother Earth, was published with the image of the earth of the Apollo 8, which made a really strong impression at the time. And shortly before a similar image had appeared on the front page of the "Whole Earth Catalogue".

While American society was divided by the Vietnam War, the assassination attempt on Martin Luther King and generally as never before by the youth revolt, the image of the earth simply symbolized that we have to overcome our divisions and become aware of the fact that we live on one shared planet.

Again it was John McConnell?, who had the idea to generate the "flag of the earth" from this picture.

Meanwhile, an event had also occurred that raised public awareness of the environmental issues. In January 1969, off the coast of Santa Barbara (California) there was a fatal oil disaster with serious consequences for countless marine animals. It was the largest pollution that the United States had ever seen. All this together caused John Mc Connell's suggestion to celebrate a day of the Earth at the UNESCO conference in San Francisco in October 1969.

A little later he succeeded in convincing the city of San Francisco for the 21st Proclaiming Earth Day on March 1970. On the election of the date he wrote:

"When I first considered Earth Day, a global holiday to celebrate the miracle of life, on our planet, I thought long and intensely about the day it was supposed to fall. The date should have a meaning, one that would have to be universally septable for all of humanity. When I started thinking about the equinox, I immediately felt that it was right. An earthquake that shook our California dwelling at this very moment seemed to me like a message of confirmation.

What could be more appropriate than the first moment of spring when day and night are equally long around the world, so that the hearts and minds can come together with thought of harmony and the rejuvenation of the earth. And so it happened that we were the celebration of Earth Day on the 21st. With the idea that Earth Day forever become the solid basis for an annual event to deepen the veneration and care of life on our planet, with the idea that Earth Day initiated the solid basis of an annual event." [1]

There was a big event in Golden Gate Park and everything seemed to come to JohnMcConnell's dream becoming a reality. The prominent anthropologist Margaret Mead became a tireless follower, who was fascinated by the cross-cultural character of the date and mobilized her global networks.

John returned to New York, wrote the Earth Day statement, and again gained support from U Thant and other celebrities.

How Earth Day was hijacked

But suddenly everything turned out different. The Democratic senator of Wisconsin Gaynord Nelson planned for the 22. April, therefore, after the academic spring break, a mass mobilization across America to a "Environment - Teach - In" especially at the universities. The environmental movement was hardly organized at that time, but it "was in the air".

The New York Times wrote at the time:

"The increasing concern about the 'environmental crisis' covers the campuses of the country with an intensity that may dwarf students' dissatisfaction at the war in Vietnam." [2]

Nelson had put together a non-partisan committee of Democrats and Republicans in 1968 and found the ideal man for his plan in Dennis Hayes, who was the exponent of the student protest movement and a gifted organizer at Stanford and Harvard early on. He was advised by a prominent advertising guru named Julian Koenig, who was known for his haunting and crisp messages such as "Think Small", with which VW appeared in the USA. Koenig criticized and dismissed the academic painting of the idea "Environmental Teach In", and instead proposed his "Earth Day".

In fact, JohnMcConnell had never had the idea to protect the name. And so he had to see how the name of his heart project took place with a steamroller of mobilization across all media, from full-page advertisements in the New York Times to broadcasts on many television channels.

Even the support of the powerful automobile workers union had reached Nelson and Hayes. Everyone wanted to be there, even then there were many who polished their image with it, which should later be described as "greenwashing".

The political establsihment was quite satisfied as the anti-war protest and social issues were somewhat surpassed, drowned out and went into the background. And the result was actually impressive: on the first edition immediately after Earth Day had been celebrated in San Francisco, (22. April 1970) participants and celebrants participated in two thousand colleges and universities, about ten thousand primary and secondary schools and hundreds of communities.

It is believed that about 20 million demonstrators participated. Dennis Hayes was encouraged by this success to turn to internationalization; he founded the Earth Day Network with representatives in 180 countries and managed to make Earth Day the biggest non-religious holiday in the world. [3] In the anniversary year 1990, 200 million people worldwide are said to have participated.

In view of these overwhelming competition, even the support of the UN, which was faithful to the spring date for quite a while, did little help.

So JohnMcConnell 's "Equinox Earth Day" became a matter for a rather small community that adorned itself with a great idea but had little chance of mass mobilization.

Moving on

In 1973, the "Earth Society" was born, whose main task was the annual ceremonial ringing of the peace bell at the UN in New York and the allocation of awards. This tradition has been maintained in the Waldheim era, but more and more it was clear that the UN would slowly turn to the 22nd. April date, which was canonized as the official "Mother Earth Day" in 2009.

Meanwhile, JohnMcConnell wrote proclamations, attended one conference after another and worked out more and more clearly the complex connections between the environment, peace and justice, for example in the "Earth Rights" Declaration of 1974, where it is very mentioned in the sense of Henry George: "The property and sovereign rights are based on the fundamental rights of everyone on earth."

Over the years, he has expanded this idea into the formula "We are all the trustees of the earth". An "Earth Charter" and finally an "Earth Magna Charta" followed, the latter was signed by Buckminster Fuller, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the scriptural Isaac Asimov, Yasser Arafat and Mikhail Gorbachev, among others. 4].

In early 1980 McConnell? traveled in agreement with then still Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to Iran, to resolve the hostage affair peacefully, which was as we all know a failure, "Operation Eagle Claw" coming in between. Ironically: Cyrus Vance who was working towards a negotiated solution, and was against the military operation, had to resign after the failure of the eagle claw as the prime pawn victim.[ 5]

In Iran, however, JohnMcConnell has experienced a profound confirmation of his Earth Day idea: for there, Earth Day is already observed as Noruz, as the "New Day", for 2500 years and, despite its Zoroastrian roots, has asserted itself as a culturally unifying element between the 20 religions.

For thousands of years, people in this advanced civilization had been able to determine the equinoxes astronomically with amazing precision. What carries the festival and is in fact a cultural universal of the human family is the transition from the old to the new[6] - "the new beginning"

John in Vienna

I would probably never have come into contact with John Mc Connell if not an Austrian, Hans Janitschek, who, after his time as Secretary General of the Socialist International (where he was, for example, one of Salvador Allende's strongest supporters) went to New York in 1977 and had continued to take up senior and advisory functions in areas such as public information, peaceful use of Space, Palestine, human rights and population development.

One of his many functions after the Waldheim era was the presidency at JohnMcConnell's Earth Society Foundation. [7]. In 1992, after Kurt Waldheim's renunciation of a second term of office, he also considered the candidacy for the office of Austrian president.

It was the same year I founded GIVE, and my dear and faithful friend Hannes Wolf, also known as Teddy The Bear in the Apple Macintosh World, did one of his uncountable pilgrimages to the US and told Hans Janitschek in New York about the idea of the global villages we had coined a year before together.

At that time, the first developments indicated the spread of electronic networks, - I told in an earlier episode that I had travelled around the world with one of the first Power Books in the same year - and we began to brainstorm intensively, how Hans Janitschek could implement his idea of becoming a candidate of the Austrian Diaspora and activate the "global villages" of the Austrian communities around the world. The idea that Viennese cafés around the world could be combined with each other - for example through interactive video channel - was just one of many visions that we rolled out then.

Thus it was that Hans Janetschek contacted me at the beginning of 1993 and asked whether it would be possible to house JohnMcConnell in Vienna for a longer time at our Hotel Karolinenhof - what I could convince my father about, because we were very close to the United Nations and it would probably represent a certain advertising effect - which I though could hardly care for... because the human rights conference (14.-25.6.) was close to the Global Village Conference in the Technical University that we built on a shoestring with a lot of involvement from many sides I had to coordinate. We wanted to show that architecture and city planning would be more affected by telecommunication than in earlier times it had been affected by the car.

Now there was big big resonance when John came. In his luggage he had a state of the art AT&T phone with a tiny screen and a camera - one of the first devices to be produced for a mass market. And John was willing to trust a certain guy back in L.A. that promised him a miracle, called him on a daily base and demanded that we use all of our resources to make this miracle happen.It's a somewhat tragicomic story that I'm telling here because it's a bit of an early myth of video communication - and it went along very well with exaggerated and illusory expectations and hopes for the technology - but ultimately it had a considerable impact.

Story in the Story: Joseph Goldin

So enter this Mr. Joseph Goldin - originally from Russia, one of those dazzling phenomena of the Gorbachev years in the Soviet Union, where you never knew where idealism ends and fortune-telling begins.

It was the mid-1980s when the first signs of a thaw with the election of Gorbachev and the summit meeting with Reagan in Geneva in 1985 gave rise to hopes of an end to the Cold War between East and West.

A visible sign of this was that the Live Aid Synchron concert organized by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure took place not only at London's Wembley Stadium and in Philadelphia and Sydney, but also in Moscow. There were not only live acts at these venues, but probably also one of the largest - if not the largest - public viewings in history, a television program that was probably watched by almost 2 billion people, a huge number at the time.

It was preceded by three years of experimentation, and Joseph Goldin was a leading participant on the Russian side from the very beginning. He was fascinated by the huge color screens from Mitsubishi produced for mass events, extremly expensive, and actually managed to have them reproduced with a lot of improvisation in the Soviet Union.

There were regular events called "Telemost" or "Space Bridge" [1], but Goldin became particularly interested in mass interaction. In April 1986, he persuaded the Moscow city council to let passers-by speak live with two Soviet cosmonauts, to mark the anniversary of Gagarin's first flight into space.

In an interview with Robert Gilman from "In Context Magazine", he sayd that an idea for a "Global Townhall Meeting" was born that day. It's a long quote, but I've always found it fascinating and challenging, as I said it was deeply influental on many people and also on me: you can find it in a legendary edition of this truly groundbreaking magazine, still available - https://www.context.org/iclib/ic15/goldin/

"Space bridges over the last four years have been reduced to exchanges between a select few, scripted with provisional scripts, videotaped, edited and shown later, with no chance of spontaneity. This is not my story - it is someone else's story. Misunderstandings between the Soviet Union and the United States can only be resolved through direct and spontaneous contact between large groups of Russians and Americans. As long as communication is not spontaneous and between large groups, this is not my story."

"Gigantic video screens used for bilateral communication between thousands of people could become a traditional element of the environment in every city and village, just like the public squares of the Greek city-states or the forums of the Roman Empire. The new sense of "distant proximity" experienced by millions of people around the world would create a new consciousness and inevitably lead to a radical change in the way we deal with global problems."

"Imagine a small city connected to the network of Spacebridge terminals. This would allow us to create a 'city-as-classroom' model for lifelong learning. The entire population of the city could participate in multilateral communication with other cities around the world. There would be an immediate temptation for truly creative scholars and artists to join forces to help ordinary residents transform themselves into global citizens. If a hundred Americans took on the role of Russians to master the Russian language in three weeks (or vice versa), it would also be an opportunity to evaluate a nation's perceptions and misperceptions about itself and other nations."

"Or if several thousand people were involved in a living theater event staged by advanced directors, designers and actors, it would not just be routine entertainment, but the introduction of ordinary people to the zone of expanded consciousness."

"Hidden human reserves can manifest in almost any field of human endeavor: accelerated learning methods; physical transformation through sports; meditative disciplines; spiritual healing; heightened capacity for intuition and extrasensory perception; general phenomena of "peak experience" as a means of cultivating universal thought, and so on. But the potential of hidden human reserves has never been considered by strategic planners, global modelers or ordinary voters. Something should be done to break the vicious cycle of fear and mistrust so that we can finally reorient technology from weapons to "food" and thus change the entire paradigm of modern culture."

Amazing what the Soviet visionary originally had said in 1987. I have come to the conclusuion that there were many similar visionary outbreaks like the "New Theory of Settlement" in this time, that the world did not notice until today, but thats another story.

Goldin was indeed a key driver of projects and challenged his Western partners to experiment, although their reports already showed that they were dealing with a very difficult person. On the one hand, I see in him an almost naïve idealist, trusting totally in the spontaneity of encounters and, on the other hand, I see desperate efforts by his partners to accompany them with professional moderation.

In the end, the project became detached from its initiator, as is easy to understand from the interview above. The video bridges were continued in television studios by professional presenters such as Phil Donahue and Vladimir Pozner, and actually became an awareness-raising factor that supported the spirit of perestroika.

And indeed, the story of Joseph Goldin has taken a very ironic turn: In an effort to prove his theory of spontaneous communication somewhere and somehow, he ended up with me among many others. As said above, Goldin called John and me tirelessly every day from Los Angeles and wanted me to reallocate all the resources of the Global Village conference to his experiment. Fortunately, I found friends who transformed the whole thing into a small event on the fringes of the human rights conference, called the "Global Tea Party", with the tiny screen of the videophone as a meeting space, and who subsequently shielded me and let me work undisturbed on the first Global Village. We had used the resources of the Telekom companies in the Prechtsaal at the TU to extend professional applications from local networks to long distances. But nevertheless, the ideas of using the tools of visual communication for general dialog and cultural understanding remained in the back of my mind, so to speak.

John in Vienna, continued

Back to our dear John. We have a figure in German literature, Simpicius Simplizissimus by Grimmelshausen. Initially naive and innocent, he represents a pure, almost childlike idealism, untainted by the corruption and brutality of the world around him, particularly during the cruelties of the Thirty Years' War. However, as he experiences the harsh realities of life, his idealism evolves into a more mature, reflective outlook. He seeks meaning and virtue amidst chaos, striving to maintain a sense of moral integrity and spiritual purpose. Ultimately, Simplicius embodies the tension between idealism and disillusionment, reflecting the human struggle to find hope and goodness in a flawed world.I see a similar personality in John.

Of course, it is easy to dismiss him as a childish and naive dreamer. As idealist of the sky-blue UN Sunday speeches, when in reality it is just a kind of diplomatic stock exchange in which sovereign powers only appear to recognize each other as equal, while in reality the use and dependency relationships of states and economic powers, the superior means of force on the one hand and the competition for the debt capacity of national credits on the other rule the world. Where spheres of influence and blackmail always play a greater role than the noble goals from those notorious Sunday speeches. But then again the whole diplomatic circus is by no means superfluous: there is obviously a very necessary difference between what states are concerned with when they conduct foreign policy and the abstruse form in which they conduct it. You have to familiarize yourself with the fact that sometimes major foreign policy projects between states are supposed to depend on the "atmosphere" between them. Whether it is perhaps "tense" because there is a "disgruntlement". Or whether "good relations" prevail, even whether one can speak of a "friendship"; between states that are at best legal entities, but otherwise not persons, even if they are said to be capable of "friendly" acts.8

All this not only conceals the fact that diplomatic relations are in principle about asserting oneself against other nations, making the will of foreign powers submissive to one's own, "coming to an agreement". The will to reach an amicable settlement of all questions raised by the decision to use each other's resources does not in any way invalidate the fact that powers strive to strengthen themselves exclusively in and through their dealings with each other, to expand the access they have to the monetary and material means of their power.

The modern imperialist states use diplomacy and the diplomatic exchange to put this access into effect and keep it going in the long term, to clarify the difference and agreement between power and interest, to find "arguments" for "compromises" and concessions on the other side and to use them to influence their resistant will. Simply due to the fact that their monopoly on the use of force is limited to their territory, so they have to deal with each other. In a world of states whose "members" (basically corporations and enterprises) assert a universal interest, i.e. are active with their money and influence in all fenced-in corners of the earth; in a competitive struggle in which every nation is "affected" by the undertakings of every other nation on every meridian. Diplomatic relations are very important - always and on all sides. In the institutions of this peculiar internationalism, even in the case of resolutions, the attitude of the other sovereigns to one's own plans is ascertained; what reservations and obstacles are to be expected from them, what degree of approval and support one can count on.

For me, however, the UN was also the place where, if anywhere, a different awareness of our global possibilities of cooperation, could develop our dependence on the peculiarities of the spacecraft Earth. John opened this door for me in 1993, we were still met with a certain respect, even if I could see with my own eyes how he was actually only tolerated as a sky-yellow Don Quichotte, as a kind of court release and was obviously instrumentalized by all kinds of people.

While I was busy preparing the Global Village, he made connections. But the idea of making the United Nations from a diplomatic stock exchange of nations to an interface of global communication of local communities, quasi a network centre of the "Mother City" of Vienna, did not seem absurd to me at that time.

John, Hans and several friends such as Alan Lundell, Marian McNamee?, Michael Hierner, Hannes Wolf and my then Persian-American ladyfiend, Minoo Fararooei, took this idea to the human rights conference and made the "Global Tea Party" an ispiring fringe event.

At that time, there also was a semi-finished "intercontinental sculpture" by the Vorarlberg sculptor Gottfried Bechtold opened in 1987, out of 5 many monoliths heavy tone (each one represents, said 60 to 100 tons) which were brought to Vienna in 1987 with huge effort from 5 continents. (Goldin was also involved in one of the stones)

At that time, Bechtold had won the international competition to design the forecourt and presented the monoliths set up in a pentagon as a symbol of communication between the five continents. Actually, green laser beams should have underlined this meaning, but it never came to that. The planned connection was never realized "for cost reasons", although Bechtold was able to win a Californian laser company as a sponsor for the production of the laser system, which also managed to address the technical concerns of the Austrian authorities with a lot of patience.

The realization of the essential, communicative aspect, i.e. the "conference" between the representatives of the continents, finally failed because of the adoption of the annual operating costs." (8a)

These 5 stones were a magical place for me for many years, a symbol of the increasing importance of global communication in Front of the Austria center - the second large structure besinde the VIC, a conference center originally meant to complement the VIC, later privatitized.

Hans Janitschek originally drew my attention to the five stones, he taught me how important symbols and narratives are in politics. Again and again I brought people there, especially when the center was not in operation, it was a beautiful meditative place...

John's constant reminder that the peace bell in New York, which was rung at the moment of the Equinox, was an important symbol, as well as Hans Janitschek's tireless networking, certainly led to the addition of a second symbol - a Japanese peace bell on the forecourt of the Vienna International Center next door, donated by Japanese NGOs.

In 1996, the bell was installed and John was once again my guest in Vienna on Equinox, ringing the peace bell together with the Japanese ambassador. I had taken the opportunity to register as an NGO representative of Robert Pollard's "Information Habitat" with consultative status at the Economic and Social Council.

Johns and Hans asked me if I could also represent the organization "Earth Society Foundation". In fact, in 1997 I started working continuously on Equinox Earth Day in Vienna, in the course of which a small community of likeminded people was formed. Before I touch on the highlights of this story, I would like to mention that John was invited to Budapest in 1997, but this led to even more confusion, because instead of supporting the original Earth Day idea and mediating with the successful environmental day on April 22, as some had tried to do [9], a "Day of Planetary Consciousness" was attempted years later, but it did not have a long life. John's formulations were often adopted verbatim or in spirit, such as his famous sentence "We spend billions for military and bombs and pennies for peace, the care for people and earth" [10] - but without mentioning him or paying tribute to him in any way. Heiner Benking, another faithful friend, then had close connections to the Club of Budapest - he made this trip possible and shares my utter disppointment and even anger.

How we maintained the tradition

The following Earth Day celebrations had completely different characters. 1997 and 1998 were still embedded in a diplomatic context (with Japanese sponsorship), whereby in 1998 a short cooperation with the United Nations League and Kurt Waldheim resulted, which even earned the evening celebration a lead story on the title page of Kronen Zeitung. Austria has by far the highest media concentration on the print sector, and Kronen Zeitung is by far the most read medium.

In 1999 we had a large event in the Austria Center together with the help of Christiana Weidel of World of NGOs. For the first time in Austria, we created the opportunity in a kind of "trade show" with workshops for NGOs to get a clear overview of the diverse range of "others", to make their own concerns the focal point of discussions and contacts, to discover the diversity that already existed and to bundle it with the help of the Internet. Never before (and, so I do strongly believe, again) has the topic of the Internet as a challenge for civil society been dealt with in such a comprehensive and diverse way.

And on the big stage - where the Planet Earth art lab was also running, along with many other things - we finally showed a video that I had produced together with Christian Haderer: the philosopher Arnold Kayserling - another personality about whom it would be worth making a separe program - explained the profound characteristics and significance of Earth Day as the "moment of the East". Space and time are the inherent patterns that make up human cultures and religions. This is the key to a true world culture, because both identities and differences can be understood through this model and transformed into productive and creative energies. It is not about a relapse into ritual, but about a conscious use of "wholeness-making" tools. The knowledge of primitive peoples and indigenous cultures, once despised as irrational, is surprisingly congruent with the latest scientific findings on the principles of self-organization.

From 1999 to the beginning of 2000, I had gone through a severe depressive phase due to the approaching death of my father, a serious illness and not least the escalation of the Kosovo war three days after our beautiful NGO Earth Day 1999. The big solar eclipse was a fitting symbol of that year....

Earth Day 2000 was almost like a new start in my life after the year of the solar eclipse. I was now a hotel manager, but I didn't want to miss Earth Day. Hans Janitschek sent me Lama Ganchen, a high-ranking Tibetan lama who lived in the West for many years, especially in Italy, and who worked tirelessly for a positive exchange of knowledge and humanitarian aid between East and West, and who incidentally died of Covid at the same time as my dear friend Kim Veltman, who was mentioned in the last program, namely in April 2020. In the meantime, I had gotten to know Chaplain August Paterno, who was practically Austria's "TV priest" at the time, and I had the idea of inviting children from the new Kinzerplatz secondary school to ring out anti-war messages to ring the bell under the umbrella of the two clergymen from East and West.

What happened next? Well: there were smaller and larger events. In 2001, we had a big event in the Erzherzog-Carl-Kaserne next to the Donauzentrum. In 2002, we managed to organize a big celebration with hundreds of children in the gymnasium of the grammar school in Franklinstraße, which was also attended - thanks to my "at the time" ladyfriend Annerose Mühlmann - by the famous film actress and green activist Barbara Rütting from Bavaria.

2003 was a tragic year, because we had to wait in the foyer of the Vienna International Center in the middle of the night and watch the "Shock and Awe" bombing of Baghdad on the television screens. When we rang the bell, the chain broke. Again very symbolic!

In the following years we were still reasonably welcome at the UN, but in 2007 it was no longer possible to enter the Austria Center in the evening or at night. We ended up discussing and celebrating at the Hotel karolinenhof.

In the three following years, the time was right again, in 2011 there was another discussion evening, and from 2012 to 2014 it worked again for three years.

In the meantime, however, the UN had canonized 22 April and proclaimed 20 March the International Day of Happyness.

When a weekend date once again blocked the celebration in 2015, we took a break for two years. While we were allowed back into the UN in 2017, again with a Kronen Zeitung report, the Earth Society in New York had already been denied the official celebration. In the following years, I no longer organized the UN event, the community still met sometimes, but the many headwinds and the fact that nobody cared anymore wore me down quite a bit. Shortly before the end of the Hotel Karolinenhof in 2018, I organized the last meeting there, a week later everything was over and the beautiful Art deco hotel which had hosted literally hundreds of friends was demolished.I changed location and bought a tiny ex-hotel in Styria.

Back to the present

We would never have dreamed of the extent to which the most diverse approaches to creating a culture of peace have been eradicated from the world.

At the moment, this is happening at an unprecedented pace, but don't kid yourself: it's been going on for a very long time. We have been moving on a slippery slope for a long time...

I would simply like to conclude with two highlights: ˧

1. destruction of the Five Stones

In January 2010, the international sculpture in front of the Austria Center was dismantled without the knowledge of the artist Gottfried Bechtold and was severely and probably irrevocably damaged and drilled into. The operating corporation that had rented the Austria Center considered the artwork to be its property and ignored its fundamental connection to the idea of the conference center and the United Nations in Vienna.

When the artist found out from a passer-by, because he was in Vienna at the time, he rushed to the Austria Center to prevent this act and was expelled from the premises. [11]. The rubble of the sculpture has now been lying next to the Russenkirche on Wagramerstraße for 13 years [12]

Again a very telling symbol.

2. Instead of a closing statement,

I would like to quote Antje Volmer, who died in 2023 and was the first representative of the Greens as Vice-President of the Bundestag for 11 years:"My very personal defeat will accompany me in my last days. The Greens, my party, once held all the keys to a truly new order for a fairer world. Due to fortunate circumstances, it was much closer to this message than any other party. Anyone who wanted to save the world had to strive for a firm alliance between the peace and environmental movements; this was a clear historical necessity that we lived. We had this future alliance within our grasp. What tempted today's Greens to abandon all that for the mere goal of playing along in the great geopolitical power poker, and in the process to disparage their most valuable roots as vociferous anti-pacifists?"

For this and a thousand other reasons, I will not give up on the idea of JohnMcConnell's Earth Day and continue to promote it.

Footnotes

[1] https://www.mercyworld.org/_uploads/fckbl/files/Annoucement_Mar08_02.pdf

[2] https://www.kqed.org/lowdown/21839/when-rivers-caught-fire-a-brief-history-of-earth-day

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Hayes

[4] https://earthsocietyfoundation.org/2023/03/07/earth-day-proclamation/

[5] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Claw

[6] https://www.planet-wissen.de/natur/klima/fruehling_das_grosse_erwachen/pwienoruzpersischesfruehlingsfest100.html

[7] https://worldpeacecongress.net/en/2006/speakers/janitschek_hans.htm

[8] thoughts of diplomacy taken from https://de.gegenstandpunkt.com/artikel/diplomatie

 8a  https://augustin.or.at/cold-case-old-stones/]

http://www.wowzone.com/equinox.htm

[10] Siehe das wiederaufgelegte Manifest von Erwin Lazlo: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02604027.2022.2150044

[11] https://www.derstandard.at/story/1276413395331/bechtold-beklagt-zerstoerung-seiner-licht-steine

[12] https://augustin.or.at/cold-case-old-stones/