I agree. Gorbichov for ending the cold war (but not Reagan) in 1991. Go figure.

 

Yea how about Yasir Arafat what a peace maker

 

I was really excited about Gore winning the Peace Prize, and I think a few of you skeptics probably don't know much about the history of the prize. This isn't the first time the award has gone to an environmentalist, and even though the name of the prize implies that it should only go to people involved in disarmament, the post about Arafat highlights the fact that in some cases it isn't enough to just put down weapons that you may pick up again later.

So who should get a Nobel Peace Prize? In recent years, the Nobel committee has addressed some of the root causes of war, by being very clear about the fact that poverty and inequity of opportunity is one of the leading reasons that people fight wars. Last year the Grameen Bank and its founder won the Peace Prize for a very unconventional approach to the promotion of peace: providing microcredit loans to people, especially women, in poor countries and communities. That spurs economic development and promotes democracy and stability, not to mention human rights.

In this day and age, the work for sustainability is inextricably linked to poverty, and climate change is going to have such vast economic impacts, particularly on the poorest people in the world, that it would be nothing short of blind to believe that changing weather and rising oceans won't cause territorial wars. Displaced people whose villages are underwater, farmers whose ancestral lands dry up... think of Katrina and the evacuees fleeing from Louisiana to Texas, only add in an armed border crossing to a neighboring country, differences in religion and ethnicity, and a language barrier, and who really thinks that military consequences would be far away?

I refer you to this interesting article at Slate: Did Al Gore deserve a Nobel Prize for his work on global warming?
By Stephan Faris
http://www.slate.com/id/2175937/, which reads in part:

 

Wars are in fact mainly started for reasons of greed and preventing opportunity. The idea you stated is commonly held but sadly very misguided.

The peace prize shold be for peacemaking not for part science and mostly electoral politics making.

 

These are also my thoughts.

A Peace prize- as opposed to war.
Shouldn't a peace prize go to someone who does extrordinary things to create or sustain peace where otherwise would be war?

Suppose a specific person created a peace situation in a province of Rwanda which saved thousands of lives. He (or she) would remain the unknown, unappreciated peacemaker except to those they helped.

There's lots of little wars around the globe we seldom hear about, and some very public ones. There are people among these conflicts (And certainly those who managed to avoid them altogether) who ... in my opinion... would be many times more qualified to recieve a peace prize.

-Steve

 

You can throw around insults like that if you want, but it doesn't change anything. If you're going to call names when you disagree with someone here, try at least to give a few reasons for your sweeping proclamations- it makes you sound a bit more thoughtful in your replies.

Clearly, the people who actually study this and know what they're talking about (for instance, the Nobel Peace Prize committee, i.e.: Not You) disagree with you. I refer you to Gore's citation from the official Nobel website:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/p...007/press.html
If you want to know why he got the award, try listening to the people who gave it to him. You may give *your* awards to anyone you like, but just don't expect anyone to care; people care about the Nobel Prize because of its long tradition of recognizing people, like Al Gore, who deserve recognition. Simply because you never bothered to learn enough about the subject to discover that poverty is one of the (many) root causes of wars doesn't mean that it isn't true, and you should try not to sound pompous or uneducated by simply declaring you think it isn't.

For context, take a glance at the Nobel press release of last year about Mr. Yunus- and did all of you object to his winning the Nobel Peace Prize? No, because you didn't have a political axe to grind against him. I quote a bit from his citation:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/p...006/press.html
Then there was Wangari Maathai, the 2004 recipient. Most of her reputation came from a program of tree planting to prevent erosion in Africa. Her citation for the Nobel Peace Prize reads in part:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/p...004/press.html
I'm not going to argue with the assertion that many smaller wars are deserving of attention and that people who fit the general description Hot Georgia lists might not be worthy recipients. I notice he doesn't name anyone, though. It isn't as easy as you think to put a finger on a world leader who is involved in an ongoing, bloody conflict and say - this person is worthy of international recognition for peace. Many of them would be much more likely to wind up in war crimes trials, perhaps, than to get any prizes for peacemaking.