Yucatan peninsula, Mexico: the home of the Mayan culture was the destination of recent (earth)collective journey. Two EarthCollective initiatives came together to showcase their experience gained over the last three years in South Africa to participants of the 4th World Conference on Ecological Restoration held in Merida. The initiatives, eyes4earth and PRESENCE, were represented by Matthew Zylstra (for Stellenbosch University) and Dieter Van den Broeck (for Living Lands) respectively. The presentations they delivered during the conference were well received.
The conference is organised every two years by the Society for Ecological Restoration’s (SER) and this year almost 1000 delegates attended the conference.
This year’s theme of the conference was “Re-establishing the Link between Nature and Culture”. The theme had a lot of linkages with both the work of eyes4earth and PRESENCE: eyes4earth is creating a better understanding of how meaningful nature experiences reconnect people with nature and culture while PRESENCE, as a social learning network, is linking people (social capital) to ultimately restore nature at the landscape level (natural capital).
Matt provided some preliminary results from his PhD research related to the role of meaningful nature experiences (MNEs) in social-ecological restoration and education. During his presentation, Matt introduced the types of MNEs, e.g. peak and awakening experiences, profound and synchronistic encounters with wildlife and how those experiences appear to link nature and culture across geography and traditions. To date, Matt’s research has found that these experiences are often associated with emotionally-charged encounters in relatively pristine or wild settings. However, does biodiversity and habitat loss through alien invasive species threaten these MNEs? Matt answered this question during his presentation in terms of whether it had an effect on people’s MNEs. Matt says “the results of my research show that invasive alien trees generally have a negative effect on most people’s experience - but there are also cases where emotive feelings of ‘oneness’ ,kinship and sense of belonging invoked during MNEs may displace the rational knowledge of alien trees being ‘bad’ or out of place”. Lastly, Matt concluded his presentation with ways in which we need to rethink how to educate children, the public and ourselves in relation to this topic. [Download the PowerPoint presentation here]
One of the presentations delivered by Dieter at the conference was around his PhD design. The research has been inspired by the last four years of work with Living Lands and in facilitating PRESENCE. Dieter is convinced that enabling a profound change in collective awareness, understanding and intelligence (social capital) is of crucial importance to initiate and create alive and sustainable landscapes. Dieter presented the three main research questions of his PhD:
- How do we create a better understanding of how profound change happens in different sectors of society (e.g. businesses, sport teams, landscapes)?
- Which frameworks and tools are available and how can they be integrated to facilitate these kind of changes?
- What kind of (emerging) leadership is needed and what are the important personal capacities of this leader? (this is where Dieter’s personal passion really is)
Dieter was grateful to have been invited to this conference by Parks Canada/SER to participate and share the PRESENCE experience in a workshop aimed at developing Guidelines for the Ecological Restoration for Protected areas. The development of the guidelines was commissioned by IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA). Dieter reflected that “it was a valuable experience to be part of a great group of people and seeing that people realise that to restore nature we need to restore people as well, connecting them with themselves, with nature and their communities”. Dieter will now contribute to the section around stakeholder engagement with two main ideas: meaningful stakeholder engagement is needed for the success and sustainability of restoration; and restoration is a great activity to connect people with nature, with themselves and with the community. One of the keynote speakers, UNEP’s Pavan Sukhdev , mentioned during his plenary talk that planting trees together with other people was for him a memorable and meaningful experience.
After the conference Matt and Dieter experienced some of the rich Mayan culture, food and friendly Mexican hospitality. Of course tequila was not left behind. This journey also served as a platform for re-establishing the tight link between the eyes4earth and PRESENCE initiatives. So in the end, the conference theme was fully realized.
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