Gene Scott Keyes (born October 24, 1941) is a former Assistant Professor of World Politics, a sometime peace activist, noted cartographer, and promoter of the international second language Esperanto.

He achieved considerable attention for his peace activism when his mother, Charlotte E. Keyes wrote an article for McCall's, Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came (October 1966).

Young Gene absorbed his parents' pacifism even to the point of worrying about the insects his mother killed as she cleaned house.

Without a lawyer, Keyes fought for equal-shared-parenting all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada but was only given limited "visitation" rights when the divorce was finalized in 1984.

Currently Dr. Keyes is retired and living in Berwick, Nova Scotia, where he continues to manage his website, uploading material about Bernard J. S. Cahilll, the Cahill-Keyes projection, Esperanto, and strategic nonviolent defense.

[5] After graduating high school, Keyes was accepted at Harvard, class of 1963, and during his time there joined demonstrations at Woolworth's in support of desegregating their stores in the American South (inspired by the Feb. 1960 Greensboro sit-ins), taught Spanish at the local jail, leafleted about nuclear weapons, and joined a variety of liberal groups.

[3] Then in February 1961, he left university to join Polaris Action, an activist group bent on civil disobedience to protest against nuclear weapons.

He wrote his parents that "the business of Polaris Action is mostly leafleting, speaking, clerical, canvassing, with infrequent melodramatic and physically dangerous moments of submarine boarding.

"All the hospital work a conscientious objector could do in two years would not make up for a single day of napalm and pellet bombs," he wrote.

[8] In 1962-63, he enrolled at Pendle Hill, a Quaker study center near Philadelphia, to research ideas for unarmed military forces.

In December that year he wrote to two local newspapers in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois to announce that he would celebrate Christmas, the time to think about peace on earth, by burning his draft card.

He wrote, "As a prayer for peace on earth, I will be holding a vigil on Christmas Eve in front of the local draft board."

[10][11][17][18] In 1966, his mother, Charlotte Keyes wrote about Gene's pacifism and activism culminating in his draft card burning in an article for McCall's Magazine called Suppose They Gave War and Nobody Came.

[1][2] A 1970 anti-war movie adopted the same title and the rock group, The Monkees recorded a song called "Zor and Zam" based on the idea.

[20] One of his interests was Fuller's Dymaxion Map, an attempt to show in a flat projection "all continents uninterrupted and with minimal distortion".

[5] As a political science professor, Keyes continued to promote the idea of an unarmed military and wrote extensively on the subject.

[21] "On November 4th, 1975, after 40-days and nights," notes an article in Wired Magazine on Keyes' forty year quest, "he emerged with a six-and-a-half square foot, hand-drawn, featureless graticule".

Absent the physical version, a 9,000 square foot pdf of that full size map can be easily navigated on a home computer.

Keyes and Roubal's one-degree globe won Honorable Mention at the 41st Annual CaGIS Map Design Competition (Cartography and Geographic Information Society).

Keyes also wrote and uploaded a free HTML edition of a romantic comedy s-f novel (La Mi-Klono, The Me Clone), with English and Esperanto in side-by-side columns.

[30] In it, he elaborates ten kinds of missions for unarmed forces, including such obvious ones as Humanitarian Assistance / Disaster Relief (HA/DR), and hypothetical ones such as Defense in the spirit of Brazil's great national hero, Major-General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon (1865-1958), who fostered the motto "Die if you must, but never kill.

[31] After Keyes lost his battle for shared-custody of his children in 1984, he led a shared parenting advocacy group in Nova Scotia.

"I think that situation, where 60,000 children a year are forcibly denied any kind of equal parenting time with their fathers, is one of the worst state-enforced abuses of human rights in Canada today," he told the committee.

Keyes submitted a 17-page brief called Family Rights for Children of Divorce, a document his Nova Scotia advocacy had created.