Cloud Climbers

Violence against people and against the wider community of living things has spread across the globe, and this book asks where humanity might find direction in response. It gathers voices from international law, the United Nations system, labour and social movements, academic circles, and religious and ethical traditions, which are moving away from a framework of justified war toward one of justified peace. The book carries that shift further, toward a peace that is both just and ecologically sustainable.

Its central conviction is that art, literature, activism and scholarship can work together to bring about the cultural change needed for a peace that grows out of, and extends into, human relationships with the natural world. Six artworks by the peace artist William Kelly form the book's framework, and five newly commissioned poems respond to them. Between the poems appear creative prose pieces and short thematic essays of 1000 to 1200 words, written by a selected group of Indigenous, ecological, feminist and religious scholars and activists.