Experiment Zero - The Peace Experiments: Ch 7 - No Gates in the Garden

Today’s chapter takes us out of meetings and into the soil. Kitty visits a place where ideas don’t argue. They decompose, rest, and come back changed. If you’ve ever wondered whether peace has a practice, not just a policy, this chapter begins to answer that question.

Experiment Zero is the prequel to The Peace Experiments, a peace-forward series where a group of young people are brave enough to challenge conventional arguments against peace and disarmament.

Next here on Peace is Here: Peacewarts School (Understars 101)

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Music: Alana Jordan (alanajordan) on Pixabay

Experiment Zero - The Peace Experiments: Ch 6 - The Science of Skepticism, Scarcity Edition

Kitty O’Compost visits Room 213 at Osprey Point High School, where skepticism is treated not as an attitude but as a scientific discipline. Under the guidance of Ms. Finch, students are running live experiments on the stories adults tell about competition, fear, and scarcity.

At the center of the lab is a single slice of cafeteria pizza, framed as a scarce resource and then deliberately removed from circulation. What follows is not conflict, but a shift in tone, imagination, and cooperation. The students observe what happens when the object everyone is meant to fight over no longer exists.

As Garrett and her classmates collect data, Kitty begins to see that peace may not be a moral argument or a policy goal, but a methodology. One that questions who decides what is scarce, who benefits from that belief, and what becomes possible when the rules are tested rather than obeyed.

Experiment Zero is the prequel to The Peace Experiments, a peace-forward series where a group of young people are brave enough to challenge conventional arguments against peace and disarmament.

Join the Community / Get the Books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com

Free 2025 Podcast Recap eBook: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com/2025

Music: Alana Jordan (alanajordan) on Pixabay

Experiment Zero - The Peace Experiments: Ch 5 - Arguments Against Peace, Interview Day

Kitty O’Compost spends a single morning gathering the most common objections to peace, beginning with a defense contractor’s carefully rehearsed fears and ending in a public school science lab where those fears are treated as testable claims rather than permanent truths.

As corporate language leans on economic anxiety, innovation myths, and national identity, a science teacher and her students respond with hypotheses, experiments, and clarity, reframing peace not as an aspiration but as a practice subject to evidence.

This chapter sharpens the divide between postponement as policy and inquiry as action, revealing how power protects itself through delay while younger minds quietly begin designing what comes next.

Experiment Zero is the prequel to The Peace Experiments, a peace-forward series where a group of young people are brave enough to challenge conventional arguments against peace and disarmament.

Join the Community / Get the Books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com

Free 2025 Podcast Recap eBook: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com/2025

Music: Alana Jordan (alanajordan) on Pixabay

Experiment Zero – The Peace Experiments: Ch 4 - The Leak: Protocol of Postponement

In this chapter, Kitty receives an unexpected document that reveals how close the world is to disarmament and how far it remains from choosing it. What appears to be a serious plan for peace is revealed instead as a ritual of postponement, built from charts, committees, and comfort thresholds.

As Kitty reads deeper, the real obstacle becomes clear. The technology is ready, the safeguards are complete, and the systems can act. What is missing is not capacity but courage.

This chapter explores how bureaucratic language can function as a form of fear, how delay is disguised as responsibility, and how peace can be quietly stalled by those who insist it must first be made comfortable.

Experiment Zero is the prequel to The Peace Experiments, a peace-forward series where a group of young people are brave enough to challenge conventional arguments against peace and disarmament.

Join the Community / Get the Books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com

Free 2025 Podcast Recap eBook: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com/2025

Music: Alana Jordan (alanajordan) on Pixabay

Experiment Zero – The Peace Experiments: Ch 3 - Scratch-Fact-Check, The Global Pothole

A routine local story takes an unexpected turn when Kitty O’Compost realizes her reporting has begun to attract attention far beyond Midway. What started as a single pothole on County Route 12 now sits at the center of a widening web of polite warnings, unfamiliar acronyms, and unusually interested observers.

As Marzipan delivers increasingly emphatic scratch-fact-checks, Kitty begins to name the pattern emerging beneath the language of “harmonization” and “metadata.” This chapter introduces the idea of the global pothole—the space between ordinary facts and the carefully managed stories meant to contain them—and marks the moment when simple journalism starts to feel like evidence.

Experiment Zero is the prequel to The Peace Experiments, a peace-forward series where a group of young people are brave enough to challenge conventional arguments against peace and disarmament.

Join the Community / Get the Books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com

Free 2025 Podcast Recap eBook: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com/2025

Music: Alana Jordan (alanajordan) on Pixabay

Experiment Zero – The Peace Experiments: Ch 2 - The Council Meeting of Unwanted Attendance

Kitty O’Compost arrives at a so-called informational meeting in the Old Gym, where folding chairs, fluorescent lights, and carefully chosen language are meant to keep the public at a comfortable distance. Joined by Marzipan and an unexpected student attendee, Kitty listens as officials explain a new facility using jargon that seems designed to obscure more than it reveals.

As terms slip, silences stretch, and a forbidden idea briefly surfaces, the meeting exposes a quiet tension between governance and participation, secrecy and shared responsibility. What was meant to reassure instead sharpens Kitty’s sense that something important is being managed out of sight—and that certain concepts unsettle authority simply by being named.

Experiment Zero is the prequel to The Peace Experiments, a peace-forward series where a group of young people are brave enough to challenge conventional arguments against peace and disarmament.

Join the Community / Get the Books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com

Get the 2025 Podcast Recap eBook: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com/2025

Music: Alana Jordan (alanajordan) on Pixabay

Experiment Zero – The Peace Experiments: Ch 1 - Goats, Potholes, and Servers

Chapter One introduces Kitty O’Compost, a small-town reporter easing into an ordinary assignment in Midway, armed with a notebook, a sense of humor, and a highly observant goat named Marzipan. What begins as a routine walk toward town—past murals, potholes, and familiar civic neglect—takes an unexpected turn at the edge of a newly built facility that doesn’t quite belong.

This opening chapter sets the tone for The Peace Experiments: attentive, wry, and quietly unsettled. It’s a story about noticing small things, trusting instincts, and recognizing the moment when a local story begins to lean toward something larger—before anyone has named it, and before anyone admits they’re watching.

Experiment Zero is the prequel to The Peace Experiments, a peace-forward series where a group of young people are brave enough to challenge conventional arguments against peace and disarmament.

Join the Community / Get the Books: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com

Get the 2025 Podcast Recap eBook: www.AvisKalfsbeek.com/2025

Music: Alana Jordan (alanajordan) on Pixabay

This year-end episode offers a moment to pause and take stock. Avis reflects on the work of Peace is Here in 2025, the questions that shaped the podcast, and what it has meant to study peace seriously in a world still organized around war.

The episode looks back on a year of daily practice through series such as Wolff Peace, The Great Disfarmament and The Great Disarmament, Architects of Enough, and the introduction of The Next Peacelands. It also marks personal and creative milestones, including the release of Mono Mutante, the first Kickstarter campaign, and the arrival of Kitty O’Compost.

Looking ahead, Avis shares the direction Peace is Here will take in 2026. The podcast moves into a more intentional curriculum, inviting listeners to become peace scholars through attention, inquiry, and lived moral practice. Peace will be explored through history, philosophy, satire, and fiction, with an emphasis on imagining peace as a practical path rather than a distant ideal.

The episode closes with The Tip of the Peaceberg Prayer, a quiet New Year reflection on gratitude, unweaponed life, and the deeper truth of peace beneath the surface of the world as it appears.

Tomorrow begins a new thirteen-episode fiction series, The Peace Experiments Experiment Zero, where a small town reporter, a fact-checking goat, and a group of young people begin asking the questions adults avoid.

Thank you for listening, for your presence this year, and for walking into the next one together.

Peace and love,

Avis

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• Music: “Una Manana” by Javier “Peke” Rodriguez

Bandcamp: https://javierpekerodriguez.bandcamp.com

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3QuyqfXEKzrpUl6b12I3KW

• Upcoming series: The Peace Experiments – Season Zero starts 1/1/26! (Ep 184)