Spiritual values and nature

by Sylvie Shaw

Walking along the edge of the Brisbane River or riding on the City Cat over the weekend, I have mixed emotions. The river, the heartland of the city and outlying districts, is a contested place. Contested are human constructions related to view and highrise, development and riparian zone degradation, as well as channelling and concrete piping of inflowing creeks. This change cannot however override the river's beauty and its ecological importance. 

I've been walking the river for some time now but over the years have watched with varying degrees of sadness and anger as trees are felled, the bush is bulldozed (so not one tree remains), south bank open-space parkland is overrun with buildings, and the public has little acknowledged say in the way Brisbane's inner city-space is becoming, and has become, far less green than when I first arrived. Although I don't want this blog to be a scene of depression, sometimes the continued change along the river and urbanscape affects me deeply.

It is possible to design a city that celebrates both natural and the urban environments. But in Brisbane, that balance seems to be loaded on the side of fast-growing, ever-expanding, tightly-packed urbanisation. This view also seems out of kilter with all the research on the significance of nature and nature places for human health and wellbeing. We need nature to give us life.

Sometimes our innate connection with the natural world seems paved over with ideas, plans and polices that are detrimental to being human and certainly detrimental to terrestrial and marine environments. To counter these destructive ideas and habits are a wealth of research on the human-nature relationship and numbers of people who care for the health and wellbeing of both people and planet.

Perhaps one reason for not including the personal, health, wellbeing, social and even spiritual perspectives within planning and policy decisions is the difficulty of putting an economic value on how people feel about and engage with local environments and special places. Conflicts over environmental change and increasing development are often regarded as a disposition among the public about the effects of change per se, rather than changes to a vital ecosystem, special place, heritage site or beloved tree. The dubbing of those who are socially and environmentally active as 'nimby-ites' is an easy stone to throw. Such ad hominem arguments avoid the real issue - that people care.

Imagine if issues beyond the narrow confines of utilitarian and economic frameworks were celebrated? But enough of this. Let's shift the stance from the problem to the potential and consider the beauty and spirituality of places rather than the concretisation and degreening of suburban Brisbane. Let's look to the benefits of nature connecting for both human and nature.

All over Brisbane people are working to restore the natural environment. Through creek watch and bushcare groups, people are replanting, weeding, and cleaning up degraded environments. As they are restoring the environment, they explain they are also restoring their health and wellbeing (Shapiro 1995). Others express a spiritual connection not only through connecting with the natural environment but also the social connections they find as well (Gooch 2005).

Psychological as well as physical health and wellbeing, and evocative spiritual experiences, have been the focus of several research studies since the 1990s - from the viewpoints of wilderness studies, ecotheology, ecopsychology, nature religion, and outdoor adventuring. From the ecological and resource management side, several studies have touched on the spiritual especially the work of Herbert Schroeder from the US Forest Service over several decades.

Some more ecologically-focused studies tend to conflate religion and spirituality, or confuse spirituality with psychological or feel-good qualities. For example, under the spiritual rubric in a study by Pike et al. (2011:197) on coastal and marine areas in Britain, are the terms ‘tranquility, relaxation, the experience of nature, beaches and coastal towns as part of a recreation experience, and peacefulness, filled with sounds of nature’. Other research on environmental values locates spirituality within therapeutic values (e.g. Seymour et al. 2008, 2010) or as aesthetic value and scenic beauty (Raymond et al. 2009). The problem with these broadened perspectives is that spirituality is not adequately defined or is relegated to other feelings-related values which do not necessarily indicate a spiritual or transcendent connection to nature.

To counter this conundrum, researchers such as Herbert Schroeder, have for years expressed the need for the spiritual to be adopted into resource management policies and understanding. Schroeder (1992:25) defines the spiritual as 'the experience of being related to or in touch with an "other" that transcends one's individual sense of self and gives meaning to one's life at a deeper than 'intellectual level'. Schroeder's definition highlights two key aspects - relationality and transcendence. These perspectives extend a more nature-inspired approach to spirituality into the postsecular. 

The issue with the term spirituality within postsecular western perspectives is that it is often used broadly to refer on one hand to the growth of a personalised and privatised expression of religion or spirituality since the 1960s, while on the other, it continues to be a significant aspect of traditional religious faith. Other tensions in definitions of spirituality are hightlighted by philosopher Patrick Curry (2011: 139) who maintains that spirituality is often linked to a definition of religion which deals with the supernatural, which he deems 'prejudices nature from the start, since whatever this being or power is, it cannot be in or of nature, since it is supernatural' (Curry, 139, italics in original). It is also bound up with the concept of spirit in Western theism defined as 'that which is not matter' (italics in original). To counter these confusions, Curry points to the terms 'the sacred' and 'sanctity of nature' (Kaebnick in Curry 139), while Milton (1999:441) cites Szerszynski's use of 'sacrality' referring to the way 'environmentalism has been shaped by religious modes of action and corporateness' (Szerszynski 1997:50).

The difference between these environmental theorists and the way public talks about their nature experiences is that they may not use terms like spiritual, sacred, sanctity or sacrality or not define them clearly. People I have interviewed might say: 'It's something I can't really explain', or 'It's beyond human understanding' (Shaw 2012) or even 'I know what you mean but I don't use that word [spiritual]'. 

However, while the spiritual is positioned as a felt and acknowledged experience in the research literature and among the general public, resource managers might not logistically be able to deal with non-tangible and not quantitatively measurable terms like spirituality, sanctity or sacrality.
 ...

Walking along the Brisbane River this week stirs my spirit two ways. I am saddened by the massive new development taking place on the old site of scientific research of Queensland's Dept of Primary Industry. The local community lobbied the government for the area to become parkland or an environmental park but there seemed (and seems) limited understanding or acceptance about the need to acknowledge the intangible, non-material and relational component of values research. People honoured this space as special. They, like me, desired the retention of one small wild place in the heart of the city for peace, tranquility and spiritual connection and for the ecosystem to continue to flourish. Seeing the river flowing out to the sea, noticing the way the tide shapes the banks, listening to the birds' evocative calls, all this keeps me afloat in the knowledge that the river has been and will be flowing for some long time to come.

References

- Gooch M. 2005. Voices of the volunteers: an exploration of the experiences of catchment volunteers in coastal Queensland, Australia. Local Environment 10(1):  5-19.

- Kaebnick G.E. 2000. On the sanctity of nature. Hastings Centre Report 30(5): 16-23.

- Milton K. 1999. Nature is already sacred. Environmental Values 8: 437-449.

- Pike K., D. Johnson, S. Fletcher, P. Wright. 2011. Seeking spirituality: respecting the social value of coastal recreational
resources in England and Wales. Journal of Coastal Research 10061: 194-204.
- Raymond C.M., B.A. Bryan, D. Hatton MacDonald, A. Cast
S. Stathearn, A. Grandgirard, T. Kalivas. 2009. Mapping community values for natural capital and ecosystem services. Ecological Economics 68: 1301-1315.

- Schroeder H. 1992. The spiritual aspect of nature: A perspective from depth psychology. In Vander Stoep, Gail A., ed. 1992. Proceedings of the 1991 Northeastern Recreation Research Symposium; 1991 April 7-9; Saratoga Springs, NY. Gen. Tech. Rep. NE-160. Radnor, PA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northeastern Forest Experiment Station: 25-30, http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/35254.

- Seymour E., A. Curtis, D. Pannell, A. Roberts, C. Allan. 2008. Exploring community values assigned to natural assets on the Moolort Plains, Victoria. ILWS Report No. 47, Institute for Land, Water and Society, Charles Sturt University, NSW.
- Seymour E., A. Curtis, D. Pannell, C. Allan, A. Roberts. 2010. Understanding the role of assigned values in natural resource management. Australasian Journal of Environmental Management 17: 142-153.

- Shaipro E. 1995. Restoring habitats, communities, and souls. In T. Rozak, M. Gomes and A. Kanner, eds., Ecopsychology. Restoring the earth, healing the mind. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. 
- Shaw S. 2012. 'My God, it's our river, shouldn't we preserve it? Without the river, what else have we got?', Concilium 5: 24-34.

- Szerszynski B. 1997. The varieties of ecological piety. Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 1: 37-55.