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During the Cold War, when Zuza Bohley was growing up in East Germany, being a pacifist was a crime. It was considered treason.
Treason, as in: Her entire family, made up of politically active pacifists, was subject to surveillance. Their home was watched by the Stasi, the East German secret police. Her father was imprisoned. At age 13, Bohley was taken captive at a friend's birthday party and interrogated for four hours.
"I was terrified to tell anyone," she recounts now. "I was so, so worried that I had said something that would incriminate my family."
A year later, her family was deported from their home at gunpoint and traded to West Germany as political prisoners for cash. (The East German government received 50,000 marks.) "We never asked to leave," she remembers. "We wanted to change things from within."
In West Germany, Bohley was bullied and spit on in school, this time being called "communist," and eventually made her way to the U.S. Now she works for multiple NGOs striving to create peace and sustainability -- focusing on youth, especially from marginalized groups. As regional representative to the United Nations Association for the Rocky Mountain Region, she says that climate change and peace are intertwined.
"Most of the world's wars are fought over resources," Bohley said. "The U.S. involvement in the Middle East is because of oil. The Ukranian crisis ... because of dependence on Russian oil."
This year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warned about the probability of climate change-fueled civil wars and inter-group conflict. In the case of Syria, this has already happened.
The 2006-2010 drought in Syria turned 60 percent of Syria's fertile land into desert, displacing more than 1 million farmers, herders and their families. What has happened with the rise of ISIS is "fallout from climate change-produced drought," according to Mario Molina of the Climate Reality Project.
Bohley remembers what her family lived through: her grandparents surviving the horrors of war, hiding Jewish students in their attic; and her grandfather dying after the war ended, shot in the post-war chaos by an American soldier. Her grandmother taught her to forgive.
"People become inhumane at a time of crisis," says Bohley. And this is why climate change is one of the most important (and difficult) of the United Nations' current efforts.
When Bohley presented to the first Colorado Climate Summit last Saturday in Boulder, she told a success story (an unusual event at climate change get-togethers). It was the story of her hometown, Halle-Saale.
“The river that flowed through Halle when I was a child was very toxic and smelled very bad,” she said. “A lot of kids who grew up with me had acne from pollution. The town was black with the smokestacks of the coal industry."
She's been able to go back after the end of the Cold War, and the transformation has been remarkable: There are fish in the river again, and people can bathe here. “It is like going from black-and-white to color,” she described.
The United Nations Association is a national, grassroots group that works with educational institutions and NGOs in the U.S. to support the work of the U.N., including UNESCO and the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP).
Bohley also acts as a bridge internationally, and in Colorado for the many Latino and other international communities, including co-directing the annual Americas Latin Eco-Festival in Boulder.
"The natural world does not stop at national boundaries," Bohley says. "Rivers cross regional and political borders. We all share the same atmosphere."
Image credits: 1) Lee Buchsbaum 2) Flickr/Charles Roffey
Hannah Miller is a writer, ecologist, and adventurer living in Colorado. She is interested in everything, but particularly in creative sustainability practices, the Internet, arts and culture, the human-machine interaction, and democracy. She's lived in Shanghai, New York, L.A., Philadelphia, and D.C., and taught English, run political campaigns, waited tables, and written puppet shows. She definitely wants to hear what you're up to. You can reach her at @hannahmiller215, email at golden.notebook at gmail.com or at her site: www.hannahmiller.net.
