Walking the questions. The act of asking a question. Being in the thing. Living out the thing. Living out the alternative. We talk about nature and climate change at the moment as if we know. But we don't know. |
Approaches to conservation in Southern Africa have historically excluded local communities, and then gradually tried to engage them through economic models, with the idea that people simply 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. It has been said that, “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, an approach that puts well-being at its centre.
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? |
How can we awaken to our crisis in what becomes not a way of dying but a way of living? Where would happiness take us, if we followed it? |