Mike Simpson, One Sky

Mike Simpson works on international environmental projects with partners in West Africa and Latin America. He is the executive director of One Sky -- The Canadian Institute of Sustainable Living in the rural, northern town of Smithers, British Columbia.

Tuesday was Remembrance Day. It almost slipped by unnoticed until I caught sight of the date on my watch. Remembrance Day is the most serious holiday of the year for me.

Yesterday at the eco-center I was busy taking pictures when a 17-year-old boy shyly approached me. He's an ex-combatant I first met three years ago. He was proud to tell me that he helped to build the roof on our demonstration building and that he was now in third form at school. I knew this kid well when I first came to Sierra Leone during the war. He was a tiny and ferocious little tyke who had earned his nickname M for carrying out extra-judicial executions on behalf of the rebel movement. By the age of 13, it was rumoured that he had killed 86 people, and nobody, even the most hard-core kids, seemed to doubt the story. This country became infamous for the number of children used in battle. I was moved to see how people now accepted him and integrated him into their activities and lives. In fact, I was moved just to see him smile and talk about normal 17-year-old boy subjects.

Interesting how the small things during formative years can last a long time. Three years ago, I had taken a group of about 20 young boys on a jungle foray to search for monkeys and jungle wonders. Each boy was an ex-soldier ranging in age from 9 to 15 years, and a walk in the jungle was a unique break to show off how they could carry sticks and push and shove each other into bushes the way small boys seem to do. Yesterday M asked me if I remembered the jungle walk, and then went on to recall in minute detail everything we did. Do you remember so and so and do you remember stopping for water and do you remember this and do you remember that? In truth, I could not remember much. I did remember so and so, who M told me has now gone mad and is living in the hospital. I could vaguely remember where the water was. In the end, I chose to listen to him recount all the details of looking for monkeys. I was just glad to hear him talk, to see how genuinely pleased he was about this long-ago experience in nature.

One Sky is working to promote sustainable living globally. We have a pretty weird way of going about doing this, but it all makes sense to me. War is the antithesis to living sustainably. One Sky has been trying to draw the links between war and environmental degradation. The war in Sierra Leone was driven by conflict over natural resources, specifically diamonds. Apparently almost 20 percent of armed conflicts in the world are now over the control of resources.

Although we are here working on the ground, trying to help a local NGO promote alternative technology, we have also been working on a "conflict diamonds" campaign to stop the underlying driver of similar resource wars. It is not easy work, but there have been some successes. Recently an agreement was signed that will push countries to monitor their diamonds and control the use of "blood diamonds" in the jewelry industry through something called the Kimberley Process. It is a good thing this has been signed since One Sky has spent the better part of one year running a "Blood Diamonds Are for Never" campaign and we have been worried that there would be no agreement about "independent and regular monitoring," which lies at the heart of the negotiations.

It seems like we are involved in rather divergent activities, yet it does make sense to me. We cannot solve the world's problems with solutions that only address the apparent issues. It is good to plant trees and to develop appropriate technologies, but we need to address why those trees were cut in the first place and why people are so poor that they make decisions that degrade the environment.

The international trade in diamonds is a classic case of what was driving the war in Sierra Leone and what led to such desperate conditions that 13-year-old boys were shooting people. It might seem weird that in order to protect the tropical rainforest, we end up working with ex-combatants on strange projects all the while ranting about the international trade in diamonds. Remembrance Day reminds me that we have a lot more work to do to explain ourselves and that the struggle to promote peace remains inextricably linked to sustainable development.

Hopefully this email won't be as hard to send as the last one. More later.