What if our joy depended on it?

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.

Approaches to conservation in these areas have historically excluded local communities, and then gradually tried to engage them through economic models, with the idea that people just need financial incentives to protect their environment. These models have proven too narrow to work for we cannot think of our environment only in terms of money. As a friend says, “In the place of understanding nature as material reality, it’s impossible to also be in a space where nature is healing.” In Southern Africa, most peoples’ relationship to land is foremost a spiritual one. We seek a more holistic approach to conservation, a value-based approach, a spiritual approach, an approach that puts well-being at its centre.

We talk about human-wildlife conflict, but what if we talked about human-wildlife healing? 
What if we stopped framing our environment as a problem, and instead looked to it for solutions? 

Many NGOs approach problems from the negative example, from gender-based violence to environmental crises, instead of asking what a positive relationship might look like, or how to honour the agency that is often found in natural disasters. We believe in a strength-based approach, where there is space for joy, and questing creates that space.

In Falling Together, Rebecca Solnit explores how often a curious utopia emerges in crises. Disasters are terrible, and horrific for many, but those on the edges often feel more 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.” Crises hold within them spaces for healing as well as destruction. 
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Solnit asks how this altruism, connectedness and strange joy can be kept alive when not in crisis. But we are in crisis. All of us. Now. We are in a crisis that is unimaginable. Many of us know it logically but it has yet to reach us. 

How can we awaken to our crisis in what becomes not a way of dying but a way of living? 
Where would joy take us, if we followed it?