제주평화연구원

The Pacific Rim Park

  [caption id="" align="alignright" width="150"] Marianne Gerdes
Executive Director, Ilan-Lael Foundation[/caption] The Pacific Rim Park is an endeavor of friendship centered around the transformative power of art to foster friendships and understanding among nations.  It brings diverse people together to build spaces of beauty that become bridges of understanding.  The Pacific Rim Park creates opportunities for people from different cultures to work together toward a common good, and in so doing discover their commonalities.  The shared experience of building a park bonds them in a uniquely compelling way. Marianne Gerdes has served as Executive Director of the Ilan-Lael Foundation for 10 years, helping to introduce thousands to the art and creativity of artist James Hubbell and encouraging people to use their hands and heart to affect positive change in the world.  Gerdes is also an award-winning filmmaker whose documentary about James Hubbell titled “Eye of the Beholder” was awarded an Emmy.  Her work with the Pacific Rim Park project helps keep the connections and dialogue among our Pacific Rim Park family relevant and robust.   Partners in seven cities around the Pacific have so far joined us in the belief that having a park dedicated to friendship and a shared Pacific culture is a worthwhile endeavor.  The seven parks we’ve collectively created over 20 years-‘Soil and Soul’ in Vladivostok Russia, ‘Pearl of the Pacific’ in San Diego, USA, a park in China, ‘Entre Corazon Y Mar in Tijuana, Mexico, ‘Salinlahi’ in Puerto Princesa, Philippines, ‘Stepping Stones to the Pacific’ in Jeju Island, South Korea, and ‘Pacific Birth’ in Kaohsiung, Taiwan-are our small ways of exploring an imaginative vision…a new consciousness waiting to be born. Each Pacific Rim Park host city spends months and sometimes years gathering the necessary support, the funding, the materials, and the land to give the park a home. Through this effort, a community is created which makes each park possible and which continues to care for the parks once they’re built.   The host city community ensures that the park mirrors the aspirations of it people.  This makes each park unique to its culture, reflective of its community, and distinctive to its place on the Pacific.   The dream of a culture united around the Pacific goes back three decades to the 1980s, a time when San Diego was reaching out and taking tentative steps in citizen diplomacy.   As the Cold War was thawing, people were once again free to travel and exchange ideas.  Sister City organizations and cultural exchanges were the foundation of many of these interactions.   In 1991 five San Diego artists, including James Hubbell, were invited to take their art to Vladivostok, Russia.  There, they were hosted by the Russian Peace Organization, and by all accounts the trip was a great success with ideas exchanged and many friendships formed including contacts with the Russian Navy.  A conversation between Hubbell and Gennady Turmov, President of Far Eastern State Technical University led them to realize that if war were to break out between the US and Russia, the most vulnerable installations would be its military cities, and San Diego and Vladivostok are both home to large naval installations.  If they were to be friends over time, they needed not just talk but something physical to remind them of their shared destiny.   The park that resulted was called Soil and Earth which was built in Vladivostok, Russia.  At the park’s center was a large mosaic-encrusted orb which symbolized a pearl.  Drawn from nature and the sea, a pearl is a thing of great beauty that grows from an irritant.  The symbol was chosen by the students who came from Russia, the U.S., and Mexico to build the park.  They saw the Park as a pearl, and their new-found friendships as equally precious.  Soon there were other parks, until there was a string of parks, a string of pearls, around the rim of the Pacific Ocean.   In that string of pearls one city stands out.  Jeju Island, which calls itself a ‘Peace Island’ was a natural choice to locate the sixth Pacific Rim Park.  The island’s history of invasion and genocide have shaped its culture and people.  A park here was a necessity, a physical expression of a deep longing by its citizens for peaceful coexistence in the region.  That peace continues to be tested by governments, which makes the Pacific Rim Park a relevant and indispensable appeal by the people of Jeju to all citizens of the Pacific, a call to build a more humane and harmonious world.   Every park is unique, but all have one constant.  The artist, James Hubbell, whose vision, determination, and willingness to journey around the world to use art to transcend differences, as the creative catalyst.  He has inspired strangers to become friends, and changed lives with his Park project.  Despite skepticism and barriers, he proceeded with eyes and heart open.  He built parks, trusting in the potential of beauty, ‘the kind that makes you be quiet’ as a woman in Jeju once told him.   The Pacific contains a multitude of natural wonders and fascinating cultures-explored from the beginning by people in tune with its currents and seeking a new way of life.  In much the same way today, the Pacific Rim Park project is also probing.   What if the Pacific were a new culture, different from the Atlantic culture, and a new way of understanding our place in the world?  What if the countries and people that live by this grand lake thought of themselves as a family?  This may seem hopelessly naive, but if we are able to imagine it, it is possible.  We live in a place unmatched by its diversity of nature, by our overflowing rich cultures, and all our unique ways of celebrating life.   Our Pacific Rim Park is a place of ideas, of hope, of activism, and understanding.  The actions of our governments get a lot of attention. But the Park and its community of supporters understand that change begins with the individual.  We can toss a pebble and start the ripple and we never really know what shift we have initiated.  A hundred of these shifts, a thousand, and suddenly you have a Pacific Rim Park or a Peace Island like Jeju.   On the edge of the Pacific at a beach we call Torrey Pines, I like watching the rainbow of people enjoying the beach as the tide laps the shore.  The sun dips into an indigo sea on its way to wake up our friends in the world we call Asia.  It is their backyard too.  The Pacific, ocean of peace, is large enough to hold us all.   Marianne Gerdes has served as Executive Director of the Ilan-Lael Foundation for 10 years, helping to introduce thousands to the art and creativity of artist James Hubbell and encouraging people to use their hands and heart to affect positive change in the world.  Gerdes is also an award-winning filmmaker whose documentary about James Hubbell titled “Eye of the Beholder” was awarded an Emmy.  Her work with the Pacific Rim Park project helps keep the connections and dialogue among our Pacific Rim Park family relevant and robust.​