War Against Ourselves. Jacklyn Cock

having completed a hike or climb’ (Roberts, 2006).

      One participant said that through this experience he discovered ‘the power of nature and my ancestors’: ‘Going up one steep slope my legs started shaking — I started having flashbacks, seeing people I had killed, blood. Nature played a big role in bringing power to my mind and heart. Even my mother said I changed’ (Smith, 2000). Another said that he was now able to sleep, although he still had nightmares, and had overcome much of his resentment towards whites. ‘Now I realise we are all just human’, he said.

      These personal transformations seem to confirm an observation of people who had been into wilderness:

      Somehow they emerge from the wilderness transformed, as if they were coming from a highly sacred atmosphere. Indeed wilderness is the original cathedral, the original temple, the original church of life in which they have been converted and healed and from which they have emerged transformed in a positive manner (Player, 1997: 287).

      The pioneer South African conservationist Ian Player has often articulated this notion of nature as a healing, therapeutic force and has stressed the spiritual importance of wilderness. Player’s ideas, when articulated with his focused intensity around a camp fire deep in the Kgalagadi National Park, are especially compelling. According to him, wilderness is a ‘place for the human spirit to reconnect with its primaeval self’, ‘food for the soul’, and a place of ‘spiritual recreation’.²

      For Player, a devout Christian, ‘wilderness and Christianity are part of the same thing.’ He emphasises the time Christ spent in the wilderness: ‘Wilderness and wild areas give man the opportunity of looking at himself/herself in a different way. Time in the wilderness is a different kind of food — it can sustain one for a long time’, he maintains.

      NATURE AS A DIVINE PRESENCE

      For many religious people, God is not separate from nature, but immanent within it. However, there are widely divergent views on the impact of Christianity on attitudes towards nature. In the Judaeo–Christian tradition, humankind’s place in the universe is regarded as separate from and above that of nature and all that is non-human. Consequently, one strand of thinking blames the Judaeo–Christian ethic for putting humans above nature, for emphasising domination, control and an exclusive concentration on human salvation in a world beyond the present. Others point to a ‘Green theology’ — the creation dimension of Jesus’ teaching, along with the holistic creation theology of Paul, Benedict, Hildgarde von Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas and especially St Francis of Assisi. The latter tried to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including humans, for the idea of humans’ limitless ‘rule of creation’. Early Celtic Christianity also advanced a view of the mystical intimacy of human, nature and the divine. A strong Christian ecology is now emerging from the writings of people like Matthew Fox, who argues that because of the ecological crisis, a new beginning is required centred on the sacredness of the planet (Cock, 1992; McDonagh, 1990).

      But this sacredness has been central to many other religious traditions. For all of human history, nature and its forces have been personified as deities to be worshipped and revered. A reverence for nature deities is present in many different spiritual teachings. The interconnectedness of humans, animals, plants and all of nature is to be found in Jain, Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist thought and many indigenous traditions.

      Buddhism stresses that everything is intrinsically connected, and that we ought to respect other living beings, including animals and plants. All living beings are objects of compassion and ‘loving kindness’. ‘From a Buddhist perspective, all beings are seen as interconnected with one another in a great web of interdependence rather than as isolated and independent entities’ (Payutto, 2000: 170). There are dangers in objectifying the ‘environment’, in thinking about it as something removed and separate from ourselves, because we are not separate from the rest of nature.

      The notion of nature as a divine presence has even been discovered by copywriters. A recent advertisement for Mpumalanga is headlined, ‘Discover God within. Discover yourself.’ The smaller print goes on to read: ‘They say there’s a bit of the eternal inside all of us. Head for Blyde River Canyon, Kruger National Park, or Pilgrim’s Rest and if Mpumalanga will offer you a glimpse through God’s window … what else might you discover within’ (Endangered Wildlife, 2005).

      NATURE AS A REPOSITORY OF INDIGENOUS TRADITION

      For many indigenous people, nature is more than a source of food, more than a place to carry out subsistence activities, or even more than a place of beauty. Nature also involves a congregation of spiritually powerful beings. The enveloping landscape is the dwelling place of both the living and the dead; it is not only connected to one’s long-dead human ancestors, who are objects of ritual reverence, but each animal has its own kind of spirit, and there are rules that are intended to show courtesy and humility toward each of these beings.

      The boundaries between nature and society are blurred. Although it is dangerous to generalise,

      according to a number of African symbolic systems, the relationship between humans and the natural environment engages the entirety of social relations, including the connection to dead ancestors and the spirits who people the forests and sacred woods. The local universe is experienced as a continuous process that is conceived and organised as an integral whole. The precolonial African world integrates the use of plant and animal resources as part of a general relationship to the world (Ouedraogo, 2005: 16).

      ‘Many African societies have a pantheistic concept of nature, which is conceived and experienced as a living being, inhabited by supernatural beings and living creatures’ (Ouedraogo, 2005: 19).

      This direct connection between the human and animal and plant world has practical implications. For example, adultery on the part of a hunter’s wife can directly influence the availability of game, and the religious function inscribed in nature protects it against degradation (Ouedraogo, 2005: 19).

      This kind of thinking is displayed by Nokwethemba Biyela, a driving force behind the Royal Zulu Reserve and Biosphere project, who says:

      Animals like leopards and lions are signs from God. When the animals were gone there were no more signs. Hunting the animals was a mistake. Traditionally hunting took place for rare ceremonies and it was done properly. A lion is like a godfather, you can’t just let anybody kill it (cited in Macleod, 2001).

      Biyela wants not only to breed endangered species for their survival and to attract tourists, but to revive respect for the traditional cultural and spiritual values attached to natural resources. But, as a local Zulu chief said, ‘animals and nature is a business now’ (CNN, 2001).

      It is good business with rates at the Thula Thula Private Game Reserve, which traces its origins to the private hunting grounds of Shaka, founder of the Zulu empire, of ZAR 1 400 per person per night. The Zulu reserve will not allow hunting, unlike the Makulekes, who use the money from hunting to establish clinics and schools in the three villages that make up the 11 000 strong Makuleke community. But both the Zulu and the Makuleke elders emphasise the importance of nature in indigenous traditions:

      Like the Zulus, the elders of the Makuleke community ask how their children will grow to love and protect the wild animals if they never get the chance to see them and live among them. They may eat the meat from the hunts, they may benefit from the building of schools and clinics, but they will always be at one remove from the animals without the knowledge of living with them (Macleod, 2001).

      In traditional Zulu society, nature was not seen as separate, and cattle play an important role in Zulu culture. The intimate and appreciative links between humans and animals are most dramatically illustrated in the naming of Nguni cattle. The colour and pattern of a hide or the shape of a pair of horns is linked to images in nature of birds, animals and plants (Poland and Hammond-Tooke, 2003). Nguni cattle were a central element of social organisation. In similar terms, Xhosa society showed an intimate and sophisticated knowledge of the natural world. In the traditional Xhosa view, humans are part of nature, part of one community bound together through principles of respect and restraint, a very different view from the Western conceit of separation from and dominion over nature. Traditionally