Peace Is Here with Avis Kalfsbeek

Ep 100 The Great Disarmament - The Great Disfarmament Part 12: Arms & Arguments

The Great Disarmament Part 12: Arms & Arguments – When Peace Learned to Speak Up. In an era dominated by Cold War brinkmanship, something remarkable happened. Peace became public. From the Nuclear Freeze movement to televised debates, this 100th episode of the Peace is Here Podcast tracks how citizens learned to speak up, protest, and challenge the very premise of global militarism.

We explore the 1980s and ’90s not as a triumph of treaties, but as the moment peace gained fluency—in arguments, in law, and in imagination.

We also remind ourselves: disarmament is not a speedy process, and it is never guaranteed. But it happens. And we are still part of it.

Featuring historian Howard Zinn and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.

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🎵 Music by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez

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Ep 99 The Great Disarmament - The Great Disfarmament Part 11: Fallout and Flower Power

The Great Disarmament Part 11: Fallout & Flower Powers. As nuclear fire darkened the sky, a global peace movement took root. This episode explores the cultural birth of The Great Disarmament—from Hiroshima to Haight-Ashbury, from anti-war protests to international arms control treaties, from monks on fire to flowers in rifles.

We mark the year 1963—the year of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty—as the beginning of The Great Disarmament.

Not the beginning of bombs. But the beginning of refusal.

This turning point in Cold War history reminds us that resistance is not the opposite of despair. It is the antidote.

Featuring the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the voice of Kurt Vonnegut through Slaughterhouse-Five, we trace how conscience, courage, and creative protest began to build a counterweight to destruction—and a new peace culture began to rise.

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🎵 Featured Music:

“Dalai Llama Rides a Bike” by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez

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Ep 98 The Great Disarmament - The Great Disfarmament Part 10: Gas & Conscience

The Great Disarmament: Gas & Conscience – When the World Said Never Again

World War I ushered in the age of mechanized killing—from mustard gas to machine guns. But amid the devastation came something new: organized resistance, international treaties, and the first serious conversations about disarmament. In this episode, we mark the moment when the world’s conscience awoke—and disarmament began.

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🎵 Music by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez

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Ep 97 The Great Disarmament - The Great Disfarmament Part 9: Powder & Principles

The Great Disarmament: Powder & Principles – When Conscience First Spoke

As gunpowder redefined the global balance of power, another force quietly emerged—conscience. This episode explores the 1600s to 1800s, when the rise of modern empires was met by the first organized refusals to fight. From the Quaker Peace Testimony and early abolitionist resistance to Enlightenment philosophers imagining peace as policy, we follow the voices who rejected war, empire, and extraction as the price of civilization.

We trace the moral origins of nonviolence through:

• The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and their refusal to bear arms
• The philosophical foundations of Utopia and early social contract theory
• William Penn’s peaceful treaties and anti-militarist governance
• The link between war, slavery, and the moral awakening that would influence Tolstoy, Gandhi, and King

Through these stories, we ask: When did peace stop being passive? And how did disobedience become a sacred act?

This episode is part of The Great Disarmament – The Great Disfarmament, a 14-part podcast series on the deep history of war, agriculture, and the movements to end them.

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🎵 Music by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez

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Ep 96 The Great Disarmament - The Great Disfarmament Part 8: Spears & Surrender

Spears & Surrender – When Peace Was Older Than Progress

Before nations, before bombs, before “progress,” there was another kind of peace—one rooted in ritual, kinship, and restraint. In this episode, we trace the earliest forms of disarmament: warriors who buried weapons before councils, spiritual leaders who practiced nonviolence, and poetic traditions that chose mercy over might. With voices from The Bhagavad Gita, the Rig Veda, and Zulu proverbs, we rediscover surrender as sacred wisdom.

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🎵 Music is by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez: The Red Kite and Dalai Llama Rides a Bike

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Ep 95 The Great Disfarmament - The Great Disarmament Part 7: The Fog Is Lifting

This episode marks the turning point between The Great Disfarmament (Parts 1 - 6) and The Great Disarmament (Parts 8 - 13). We look back across centuries of agricultural violence—fertilizer bombs, chemical dependency, and genetic control—and begin to see a new story taking root.

We recap key voices: the ecological grief of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the defiant poetry of William Blake, the wartime witness of Erich Maria Remarque, the prophetic science of Rachel Carson, the double-edged legacy of Norman Borlaug, and the braided wisdom of Robin Wall Kimmerer.

The Great Disarmament didn’t begin with a summit or a ceasefire. It began when people said no. When they composted control. When they made peace in the soil.

Next episode, we follow that thread—into Spears & Surrender.

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🎵 Music is by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez: The Red Kite

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Ep 94 The Great Disfarmament - The Great Disarmament Part 6: Regeneration & Resistance

In this episode, Avis Kalfsbeek marks the final chapter of The Great Disfarmament—and the quiet rise of a different kind of power.

As war tactics evolved from Cold War standoffs to post-9/11 surveillance and global contracting, the logic of control continued to infiltrate the land. Seeds were genetically modified, patented, and, in some cases, designed never to reproduce. Farmers were no longer growers but users—dependent on licensing, chemicals, and contracts. The soil was stripped. Sovereignty was sold. And the disfarmament, it seemed, was complete.

Yet even as these systems tightened their grip, something ancient stirred beneath the surface.

This episode honors the seed savers, the land listeners, and the quiet movements that began to push back. We meet Indigenous leader Winona LaDuke, whose work on food sovereignty and cultural memory reminds us that “food is medicine—not only for the body, but for the soul.”

We also reflect through the lens of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who teaches that reciprocity, not ownership, defines our relationship with the earth. In a time of mechanized control, these voices call us to remember the seed not as a product, but as a promise.

This is the story of regeneration and resistance—

Of choosing ceremony over commodity, memory over monopoly, and kinship over control.

Next, we begin Part II: The Great Disarmament.

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🎵 Music is by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez: The Red Kite

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Ep 93 The Great Disfarmament - The Great Disarmament Part 5: Cold Crops

In this episode, host Avis Kalfsbeek examines the Cold War’s eerie balance between restraint and escalation. While world powers held their fire through Mutually Assured Destruction, another kind of battle intensified in the fields.

The Green Revolution promised to end hunger, but often delivered dependency. With hybrid seeds, fossil-fuel fertilizers, and pesticides drawn from wartime chemistry, agriculture became a new theater of control. Countries in the Global South were offered technological salvation—at the cost of local knowledge, biodiversity, and sovereignty.

Our featured voice is Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring revealed the hidden cost of domination disguised as innovation. Her quiet courage helped spark a global movement for environmental awareness and restraint.

We also reflect on Norman Borlaug’s legacy through The Man Who Fed the World—a reminder that even well-intentioned interventions can carry unintended consequences.

Control, scale, and speed defined the era.

But memory, humility, and care may yet define the future.

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🎵 Music is by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez: The Red Kite

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Ep 92 The Great Disfarmament - The Great Disarmament Part 4: Trenches & Toxins

What happens when chemical warfare doesn’t end at the battlefield—but follows us home?

In this episode of The Great Disfarmament – The Great Disarmament, we travel from the trenches of World War I to the poisoned fields of mid-century agriculture. We explore how the same compounds used for mustard gas and explosives were rebranded as fertilizers and pesticides—and how the Green Revolution masked a deeper ecological unraveling.

We meet Sir Albert Howard, a botanist who saw soil not as a battleground but as a living system, and we revisit the literary trauma of All Quiet on the Western Front, where war clings to lungs and lingers in the land.

If disfarmament began with conquest, this is the moment it became chemical.

Listen in as we unearth the roots of modern agriculture—and how healing may begin by remembering what we’ve tried to forget.

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🎵 Music is by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez: The Red Kite

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Ep 91 The Great Disfarmament - The Great Disarmament Part 3: Gunpowder and Guano

What happens when the hunger for yield becomes an imperial mission?

In this episode, we travel to the 18th and 19th centuries to explore two seemingly unrelated substances—gunpowder and guano. One shaped the battlefield. The other reshaped the farm. But both emerged from a growing belief that nature could be extracted, measured, and conquered.

We trace the rise of nitrogen obsession, colonial fertilizer wars, and the passing of the Guano Islands Act—all moments that reveal how food systems were drafted into the logic of empire. Poet William Blake reminds us that even rivers and soil were being claimed, chartered, and commodified. His words—drawn from The Chimney Sweeper and London—anchor this episode in the moral undercurrent of ecological-industrial harm.

This isn’t just a history of weapons or fertilizer. It’s a warning about what we begin to forget when we turn living systems into engines—and when we trade birdshit for blood.

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🎵 Music is by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez: The Red Kite

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Javier on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3QuyqfXEKzrpUl6b12I3KW?si=iFFXM2gYR2CuuGjmsfNViQ