I have no answers to the world’s big problems. I’m no guru,” wrote artist, teacher and peace-promoter Winslow Myers in a recent e-mail. Although he lives high up in Vermont in Stowe, he’ll be speaking here this weekend. He’s the author of Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide (Orbis Books, $16) and director of a group, Beyond War, that for the past 25 years has worked to change the world’s thinking about military aggression and nuclear armament.

Mr. Myers may believe he has no answers – or he is simply instinctively modest – but the difference between a committed nonviolence advocate and a run-of-the-mill dopey peacenik such as this reviewer, is that he’s able in his philosophy, much like the ancient Greek “mills of the gods,” to grind things “exceedingly small.”

For example, on Osama bin Laden’s recent, frankly breathtaking assassination by Navy Seals (of which even the Dalai Lama vaguely approved), Mr. Myers’s take on it is different from most Americans’ thumbs-up reaction, as he stated in a recent online op-ed essay: “We lost an opportunity to put bin Laden on trial, which would have been the beginning of a deeper dialogue about the futility of revenge on all sides. We could have taken a greater step toward reducing terrorism than assassinations accomplish, let alone trillion-dollar wars of revenge.”

In the same essay, Mr. Myers wrote that we need to ask ourselves, “What is it in my own inner condition, or that of my country, that might play a part in leading to a phenomenon like Osama?”

In a recent phone conversation with the 70-year-old author, it was clear he’s still haunted by the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. “It’s a miracle that no country has deployed nuclear weapons in the post-Hiroshima period.”

We agreed that Hiroshima had been possible because, for that short window of time, only a single country – ours – had access to this terrible armament. Mr. Myers worries that people rest easy in their assurance that mutual annihilation will always keep us safe. On the contrary, the peace activist believes two sworn enemies like Pakistan and India could “fall into the omnicidal trap of a full nuclear exchange, plunging the world into nuclear winter.”

He’s also concerned that younger generations, having grown up without a mushroom cloud on the news, have no sense of the danger of so many nuclear warheads ready to be launched around the world. He finds a positive trend in the fact that in the post-Cold War age, 50 per cent of these armaments have been reduced. But there are still a great number of nuclear missiles poised to pack a punch. (Hint to people planning to attend Winslow Myers’s program: Bring family members and friends under 60!)

Anyone 60 and older has lived through enough unmanageable wars to despair that anything in the nature of lasting peace on the planet can be achieved. Yet a person committed to nonviolence, such as Mr. Myers, is more open to and aware of all the positive signs.

“Today there are tremendous economic incentives not to get into more wars,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We’ve spent ourselves into a black hole of debt on weapons and now we’re hurting at home. Oil runs as a theme through everything today, but in the larger picture, the Age of Oil is over.”

This is good news, although the author projects that the big oil interests will scramble with desperate measures to seize more of their product. We can only grin and bear it – and find ways not to need their services, nor their wars – as they work out their end game.

He glimpses wonderful signs in the Arab Spring. “I look at the difference between Egypt and Libya. The Egyptian uprising was planned over a period of two or three years by young people who studied nonviolent revolution.”

Libya, on the other hand, as well as nations like Afghanistan, are ruled by tribal elements, and the best we can hope for in those places is stalemate. Again however, on a positive note, countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia have demonstrated how a change-over to democracy can occur without bloodshed.

Like Gandhi, Mr. Myers in Living Beyond War states definitively, “It is essential to decide in advance to reject violence.” He is also encouraged by the fact that in millennia leading all the up through the mid-19th century, slavery was accepted as a normal part of doing business. Just as the practice is now appalling, not to mention illegal, so too might war become archaic and unthinkable to us and to future generations.

Mr. Myers believes in ever-expanding humanitarian aid: In Beyond War he writes, “Diplomacy undertaken with an attitude of goodwill widens the understanding of common interest among all parties, beginning a ‘virtuous circle’ that is the direct opposite of the vicious circle of war and terror. After the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, America saw that it was in its own interest to help those we had defeated become more stable and prosperous. Now we need to think in terms of ‘Marshall Plans’ that prevent war as well as ones that allow recovery after wars. Beyond ‘us and them,’ what makes ‘them’ more secure makes ‘us’ more secure.”

Myers’s work can be accessed through beyondwar.com online.

On whatever side of any of these globally crucial issues one has positioned oneself, Winslow Myers’s talk on Sunday, with time planned for questions, is bound to be lively and up-to-the-minute informative.

For the time being, let us end on the final message in Mr. Myers’s book: “Think about the Hopi expression ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.’”

Winslow Myers is speaking on Sunday, May 22, at 5 p.m. at the Unitarian-Universalist Society on Main street in Vineyard Haven.