Today is the 4th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana. It is one of those anniversaries that media outlets love — a chance to recycle the old footage and provoke a tear or two for a woman who so tragically went before her time . Yet Diana — who I once met at a concert in Italy hosted by Luciano Pavarotti — had evolved into someone who cared about spotlighting some of the world’s tragedies. Especially the human wreckage caused by landmines.

As I write, a remarkable American woman named Heidi Kuhn, introduced to me by the musician Nenad Bach, is in Croatia as part of an innovative project to turn mine fields into wine fields as part of an impresive NGO initiative called Roots of Peace. (Check out their inspiring state of the art web site at http: www. roots of peace.org, brilliantly produced as a pro-bono gift by an advertising company called DIGITAS.)

Roots of Peace has mobilized support among wineries in California who have helped fund an initiative praised by UN Secretary General Kofi Anan. This is the type of project that should be marked on the anniversary of Diana’s death — but will it? Will the media remind us of this issue she cared so passionately about?

There are 70 million landmines in 70 countries still causing death and destruction years after the Nobel Prize went to the Coalition of organizations lobbying for their eradication. The US government, you will recall, failed to ratify the Ottawa Treaty to Ban Landmines passed to stop the slaughter of 10,000 children a year.

The landmine issue deserves more media visibility, and not just on anniversaries like this one. It also demands a practical response. Who woulda thunk that wine luminaries would be taking the lead?

For more information, you can call Roots of Peace at 1.888.ROOTS 31 which will soon be working in many more countries as part of that injunction turn swords into ploughshares, or in this case weapons and spoiled agricultural land into productive uses.

Let’s raise our glasses and toast to that.