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​The first continuous walk around Lake Kariba, the largest man made lake in the world, slowing down to act fast, following a question.​

 The Conservation Conversation

conversation (n.)
mid-14c. "place where one lives or dwells,”
also "general course of actions or habits, manner of conducting oneself in the world.”


We’re on a quest. The act of asking. From walking around Lake Kariba, to sailing from Oman to Mozambique, to flying a hot air balloon over the Namibian desert, we’re moving questions. We want to start a conversation that reaches beyond rhetoric. A conversation that is the place we live, and can speak to our environmental crisis. A conversation that is a way of being in the world, that can speak to our mental health crisis. A conversation between these crises. A  walking question.




What if our joy depended on it?
Exploring the intersection between mental health and conservation
W4Life seeks to enhance dialogue around the relationship between environmental and mental health issues, so that more holistic approaches to these crises can enter our bloodstream. 

​Across the world mental health issues are growing while our environmental space shrinks. Research shows nature is essential to our wellbeing, but in Southern Africa, and many places around the world, conservation areas have been spaces of conflict, not healing. Spaces where people have been displaced. Spaces where anti-poaching wars are fought. Spaces that are accessible only to a privileged few. We talk about human-wildlife conflict, but what if we talked of human-wildlife healing? What if we stopped framing our environment as a problem, and helped each other to see in it the solution?












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Crises hold within them spaces for healing as well as destruction. In A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit explores how, while disasters are terrible, and horrific for many, those on its edges often feel more generous, present and connected to others in a way that is difficult to access in daily life. In Zimbabwe, when Cyclone Idai hit Chimanimani, civilians responded faster and in greater numbers than government and INGOs and across the country people felt their agency and community. As one woman put it, “This disaster is rebuilding the nation, the nation’s heart as a whole.”

Solnit asks how we can access this altruism, connectedness and strange joy when not in times of crisis. But we are in crisis. All of us. Now. We are in a crisis that is unimaginable. We may know it logically, but it has yet to reach us, and perhaps, if we let it, the sense of purpose and connectedness within it, would reach us too. 






Questing is finding a path of joy, curiosity and connectedness amidst crisis, being honest about what we don't know, and embodying what we do. Come quest with us!
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