Environmental peacemaking

"One reason we're seeing a lot more interest in this idea now is that the optimism of the early 1990s around the Rio Earth Summit has really waned," says Ken Conca, director of the Harrison Program on the Future Global Agenda at the University of Maryland in College Park. "It's increasingly clear that broadly global and formally institutional intergovernment cooperation will not be forthcoming anytime soon. So people at the grass roots are looking for more practical approaches on a more regional rather than global scale."

That includes "peace parks," often created in transboundary areas with ecological significance. The number of transboundary protected areas, including peace parks, more than doubled from 59 in 1988 to 169 in 2001 in 113 countries, according to the World Commission on Protected Areas.

While many such parks are, like laurel wreaths, bestowed only after hostilities cease - in a growing number of instances the parks are themselves the catalyst for peace. In 1998, for example, Peru and Ecuador established Cordillera del Condor Peace Transborder Reserve in a section of rain forest. Where for decades the two nations had fired periodic artillery barrages at each another along this disputed section of border land, the two now comanage a park.

That success encourages activist academics like Saleem Hassan Ali, a political scientist at the University of Vermont at Burlington. As this year marks the 50th anniversary of the first scaling of the fearsome mountain K2, by an Italian team, Professor Ali and other researchers along with activist groups are pushing India, Pakistan, and China to establish a peace park in the Karakoram area around it. The plan would involve a comanaged park that would draw ecotourists, but still protect the snow leopard, Marco Polo sheep, and Tibetan gazelle.

That might seem a long shot to some, except that transboundary parks are popping up like mushrooms in Africa among nations [see related story left] that not long ago were shooting at one another.

Not all parks are on a glide path, however. Since the war ended in 1953, the narrow 115-mile-long demilitarized zone between the two Koreas has undergone a radical transformation. Although it's the most heavily mined area in the world, the DMZ has become a tranquil Eden.

Untrammeled by man for more than 50 years, the zone between the razor wire has seen idle rice paddies morph into wetlands, now home to rare birds and small animals like the red-crowned crane and yellow-necked marten. Anything not large enough to trigger a land mine can call it home.

Just a few years ago, warming relations between North and South Korea brought calls for the DMZ to be turned into a UNESCO world biosphere preserve. Now, with tensions rising over North Korea's nuclear problem, the idea has ground to a halt.

"This is something that groups in South Korea would very much like to see - and they're pushing for it," says Esook Yoon, a political scientist at Kent State University in Ohio. "Ideally they want to do that, expand it to a peacemaking process. But because of the standoff over nuclear materials this process is stuck right now."

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