Nature-based relational peace cultivation in Northern Ireland and South Africa

Abstract

This article offers practitioner reflections on a continuous, nature-based thread of relational peace building, over more than two decades on the island of Ireland and in South Africa. This nature-based thread included multi-day journeys into the Scottish Highlands and into the iMfolozi wilderness area in South Africa, as well as the deliberate use of workshop venues in relatively remote, beautiful natural settings. The author revisits earlier reflections with two Northern Ireland-based co-facilitators (2018) and draws on the last decade of faith-inspired racial conflict transformation experience in ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa, including ‘white work’ within the Dutch Reformed Church and the ‘deepening’ of higher education transformation at Stellenbosch University. Having clarified the meanings of key concepts such as ‘relational peace cultivation’, ‘nature-based’ and ‘social restitution’, the author locates his peace work within a typology that distinguishes between instrumental, intrinsic and relational ways that people value nature. The author presents the peace cultivation potential of nature-based relational work through an integrated ‘6 P’s’ framework. This framework draws attention to the importance of combining physiological, place-sensitive, psychological, poetic, political, and ‘pneumatic’ (spiritual) aspects in pursuit of sustainable peace. The relevance of this ‘6 P’s’ framework for socio-economic transformation, especially in post-1994 South Africa, is spelled out in terms of the conceptual, instrumental and ontological contributions of nature-based relational peace cultivation. The article highlights the profound challenge of implementing the ‘holistic trinity’ of ‘Soil, Soul, Society’ (Kumar), the ‘interconnectedness of humanity, spirit and nature’ (Wilderness Leadership School) in the quest for embodied, restitutional reconciliation in, for example, post-1994 South Africa.
Contribution: This practice-based article argues for an ecologically informed, spiritually grounded, politically aware approach to relational peace cultivation. It contributes to public and practical theology, (eco)spirituality, peace and conflict, and critical whiteness studies, trauma healing and fits the interdisciplinary, hermeneutical scope of HTS.