Lanterns for Peace

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Hannah Mortensen

media release: Local peace and public health advocates will gather on Sunday, August 4, which marks seventy-nine years since the U.S. nuclear bombing of Japan, to call for a nuclear-free world. This year's "Lanterns for Peace" event, will be held at the John Wall Family Pavilion of Tenney Park in Madison and features a sing-a-long and with participants decorating and floating paper peace lanterns on the Tenney Park Lagoon. The event begins at 6:30 pm and lanterns will be placed on the Tenney Park lagoon around dusk.

Lanterns for Peace commemorations are organized around the world during the first week of August to remember the devastating humanitarian effects of the nuclear bombs detonated during World War II. On August 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped the first nuclear bomb on the civilian-filled city of Hiroshima, Japan, and a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later. The Lanterns for Peace event features a collection of 7,000 origami cranes donated to PSR Wisconsin by the Hiroshima Peace Foundation.

Lanterns for Peace is a family-friendly event with refreshments, lantern decorating and music. There will be a short program at 7:30 pm, talking about the history of this event in Wisconsin, begun originally on the Mississippi River in La Crosse in 1985, and continued by PSR Wisconsin on Madison lakes since the early 1990s. We will talk briefly about Back from the Brink’s five solutions for global elimination of nuclear weapons

(https://preventnuclearwar.org), presented in the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The TPNW has been signed by 93 non nuclear nations and ratified by the governments of an additional 70 nations. We will sign and present a public thank you letter to our Wisconsin 2nd District Representative, Mark Pocan, for his continued resolute work to abolish nuclear weapons, including his co-sponsoring of House Resolution 77,

Embracing the goals and provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. We’ll also celebrate with PSR WI’s 16 peace and faith organizational cosponsors, the Madison Common Council’s unanimous approval of a Back from the Brink Resolution on October 3, 2023, Madison being the third largest city in the US to limit investments in and/or contracts with nuclear weapons producers.

The program will be followed by a sing-a-long featuring Backyard String Band and the Raging Grannies. At dusk, illuminated lanterns will be placed in the Tenney Park Lagoon

For further information, or to volunteer with the event, please contact Amy Schulz, 608-692-2639 or email info@psrwisconsin.org

Lanterns for Peace is hosted annually by Physicians for Social Responsibility Wisconsin and generously cosponsored by Friends Meeting of Madison, Interfaith Peace Working Group, Linda and Gene Farley Center, Madison Arcatao Sister City Project, Our Wisconsin Revolution, Outrider Foundation, Peace Action, United Nations Association - Dane County, Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, World BEYOND War, and Veterans for Peace - Clarence Kailin Chapter.

PSR Wisconsin is an organization of health professionals and other concerned individuals who work to protect

human life from the two biggest threats to human survival: nuclear weapons and climate change.

For more information, visit https://psr-wisconsin.org/lanterns-for-peace-2024