When I was a child, my parents would bring me to meetings of the Creative Initiative Foundation, of which they were members. It was a group originally founded in Palo Alto, California as a sort of church seeking to unite religion and science, and to promote inner peace and spiritual enlightenment. In 1982, it had been secularly reformed with the goal of averting nuclear conflict and bringing about a world “beyond war.” Largely composed of California Bay Area intellectuals and ex-hippies, Creative Initiative was in many ways emblematic of peace movements of the 1980s: it shared with similar movements of its time a dread of nuclear holocaust and an idealistic focus on building “peace on Earth.”

In the years since, as we have seen, global rates of violent death steadily declined up until around 2010, bottoming out at around 0.5 per cent. Despite persistent threats of nuclear war and international conflict—threats that may grow as prospects for “Great Power” military confrontations mount—we are likely living during the most peaceful period in all of human history. Yet, as noted in Chapter 1, levels of violence against the planet's non-human populations are catastrophic. It would seem that our conception of peace was too limited, describing a state (or a dynamic process!) that existed only between humans. As we seek to define a larger “We,”1one that embraces some portion of the environment we depend on and with which we are entwined, a simple switch of preposition hints at a fundamental shift: from “peace on Earth” to “peace with Earth.”