By Peacock Kaweesa
The Jane Goodall Institute Executive Director, Dr Panta Kasoma and Staff joined the rest of the World on Monday to celebrate the United Nations International peace day In Entebbe. The function was organized with a peaceful match from the JGI head offices through the town to St. Thereza primary school with hundred of school pupils flying high with a model of a ‘white dove’. Every year thousands of people across the world celebrate this special day with the Jane Goodall Institute founder and UN peace messenger, Dr. Jane Goodall because of her peaceful campaign for world peace. Her global speech reads “ Our hearts go out to all the hundreds of thousands who have been killed, wounded or forced to flee from their homes. With the ever widening gap between the “haves” and the “have nots,” there is a huge number of people whose basic needs are not being met, whose voices are not being heard. When they become desperate and sometimes violent, unscrupulous leaders can then exploit them for their own political gains. Perhaps we cannot influence soldiers to lay down their weapons or governments to ground their missiles; but we can take the opportunity of the International Day of Peace to think about it, talk and make our views known. And what about our right to live in peace with the natural world? We can think about how we live our own lives. Are we doing our best to live in harmony with nature? Do we care about the size of our ecological footprint? This matters, because lasting peace between people will never come about unless we learn to respect and live in harmony with nature. Natural resources such as timber, wildlife and plants are not infinite, and our wasteful and thoughtless abuse of these resources is causing horrendous damage to the environment and endangering the lives of the future generation. As Gandhi said, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.” If people are starving with no way out of poverty, they will hardly join our fight to protect the natural world for the benefit of humans’ ― and other animals’ ― for generations to come. At the Jane Goodall Institute, we believe that every one of us can make a difference. Our programs help people to struggle out of poverty on the one hand, work to curb the excesses of the wealthy on the other, and try to find ways to slow down human population growth. Together, let us help humanity move to a future when “The Right of People to Peace” becomes more than a slogan, but rather the foundation of a culture of peace for all.
