Peace Is Here with Avis Kalfsbeek

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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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

Javier on Bandcamp: javierpekerodriguez.bandcamp.com

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

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

Javier on Bandcamp: javierpekerodriguez.bandcamp.com

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

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.

📘 Download the Peace Resource Guide: aviskalfsbeek.com/peaceguide

📢 Share this episode using #TheGreatDisarmament

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

Javier on Bandcamp: javierpekerodriguez.bandcamp.com

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

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.

📘 Download the Peace Resource Guide: aviskalfsbeek.com/peaceguide

📢 Share this episode using #TheGreatDisarmament

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

Javier on Bandcamp: javierpekerodriguez.bandcamp.com

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

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.

📘 Download the Peace Resource Guide: aviskalfsbeek.com/peaceguide

📢 Share this episode using #TheGreatDisarmament

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

Javier on Bandcamp: javierpekerodriguez.bandcamp.com

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

What if we remembered the wisdom buried in the soil?

In this second episode of The Great Disfarmament – The Great Disarmament, we go back—before fertilizers, before bullets, before the conquest of land and people. We trace the quiet origins of farming and war, when both were bound by ritual, proximity, and care. We explore ancient practices of composting, communal stewardship, and restraint—methods rooted in renewal, not extraction.

We meet a voice from the Sumerian world—Shuruppak—whose 4,000-year-old instructions remind us that farming was once a moral act. And we revisit The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest ecological warnings in literature. Together, these ancient texts ask: What if agriculture had never become a tool of conquest?

This is a story of what we knew before we knew what we’d lose. A mirror held up to the beginnings of disarmament—not in politics, but in the ground itself.

📘 Download the Peace Resource Guide: aviskalfsbeek.com/peaceguide

📢 Share this episode using #TheGreatDisarmament

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

Javier on Bandcamp: javierpekerodriguez.bandcamp.com

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

What if I told you The Great Disarmament has already begun?

Not as a headline, or a treaty, or a dream—but as something quiet. Ongoing. Something you might not have noticed.

In this opening episode, we trace the overlapping histories of agriculture and war—and ask what it means to disarm a system built to dominate.

We start with a simple truth: for most of human history, farming and war were opposites. One fed. One destroyed. But in the last century, their paths began to merge—military chemicals were recast as fertilizers and pesticides, and the language of conquest entered our relationship with land.

We end with the voice of Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring challenged the chemical mindset reshaping our world, and offered, instead, a way of seeing nature as something we belong to, not something we conquer.

This is not a series about easy answers. It’s a listening project.

A way of seeing what was built—and what is being unbuilt.

—

📘 Download the Peace Resource Guide: aviskalfsbeek.com/peaceguide

📢 Share this episode using #TheGreatDisarmament

📚 Get Mono Mutante: aviskalfsbeek.com/mono-mutante

💛 Follow my Kickstarter: aviskalfsbeek.com/kickstarter

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

Javier on Bandcamp: javierpekerodriguez.bandcamp.com

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

Welcome to The Great Disarmament – The Great Disfarmament. Host Avis Kalfsbeek, peace storyteller, ecofiction author, leads us in this 14-part nonfiction podcast tracing how violence became embedded in agriculture, policy, and culture—and how people across history have resisted it. From soil to soul, this series blends history, science, activism, and hope.

🔹 First: The Great Disfarmament explores how agriculture became a war zone—through guano, pesticides, and genetic control—and how farmers, scientists, and elders fought back.

🔹 Next: The Great Disarmament tells how humans unlearn war. We follow voices of resistance—Gandhi, Rachel Carson, MLK Jr., Winona LaDuke, Greta Thunberg—and everyday peacebuilders shaping a new future.

This episode also grounds us with⏳ The Doomsday Clock. In 1947, atomic scientists created the Doomsday Clock—a symbol of our proximity to global catastrophe. That year, it was set at 7 minutes to midnight.

Today: 89 seconds.

But this podcast isn’t about panic. It’s about possibility.

It’s about the scientists, poets, and peace warriors who believe in a different future—and are building it now.

🎧 There will be 14 episodes. Start with Part 1: Spears & Surrender.

📘 Download the Peace Resource Guide: aviskalfsbeek.com/peaceguide

📢 Share this episode using #TheGreatDisarmament

📚 Get Mono Mutante: aviskalfsbeek.com/mono-mutante

💛 Follow my Kickstarter: aviskalfsbeek.com/kickstarter

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

Javier on Bandcamp: javierpekerodriguez.bandcamp.com

Javier on Spotify: Listen here

On her 63rd birthday, author and peace storyteller Avis Kalfsbeek takes a break between creative seasons to reflect on what peace really means—on Earth, in words, and in action. In this intimate episode, she reads Mark Twain’s The War Prayer, a searing and ironic satire written during America’s imperial turn but withheld during Twain’s lifetime for fear it would be “not publishable.” Twain was Vice President of the Anti-Imperialist League (1901), opposing U.S. intervention in the Philippines. His peace work was fierce, critical, and clear-eyed.

“O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells… help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire… We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him who is the source of Love…” Excerpt from Mark Twain's The War Prayer

Alongside the reading, Avis shares a personal “knowing” about peace, a birthday poem, and a call to stop the killing of just about everything for profit. If you’ve ever wrestled with whether peace is possible—or wondered how satire can hold a spiritual truth—this is a quiet, powerful episode to return to.

Musical credits: “Una Mañana” by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez (full track featured at the end)

Links to Peke’s music are in the show notes.

The Great Disarmament is coming soon. Until then—peace is already here.

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Get Mark Twain’s A War Prayer in the book “Europe and Other Things” available for free on Gutenberg Press: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68604

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🎵 Music: Dalai Lama Riding a Bike by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez

🎧 Bandcamp → javierpekerodriguez.bandcamp.com

🎧 Spotify → Listen here