Authors: Borde, Radhika;

This world café will be a forum for thinking through ‘non-rational’ drivers of ecologically oriented action, exploring both emotion and faith. Our interest focuses on collective forms of action that result in the conservation of species or natural habitats, as well as individual forms involving daily behavior and acts that mitigate carbon emissions or enhance natural habitats for non-human species on a small scale. We will focus on two such non-rational drivers – emotion and faith. We take emotion to encompass aesthetic emotions (feelings of awe caused by natural landscapes, etc.), relational emotions (relating to non-human, and particularly, wild species, positively), emotions of fear/anxiety (fear/anxiety surrounding what might be caused by the climate crisis). We take faith to encompass religious faiths, spiritualities, as well as personal beliefs that provide a moral imperative for ecologically oriented action or a conviction that humans have agency vis-à-vis impacting the environment positively.
In the 45 minutes that this world café will last – we will first introduce our work on this and related topics briefly. We are two of the four editors of a new book collection on a related topic.
(see https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003246190/religion-nature-conservation-stephen-awoyemi-radhika-borde-andrew-gosler-alison-ormsby)

We hope to be able to divide participants into 5-6 small groups – they will be asked to discuss this topic based on sub-themes (to which they can also add or remove depending on their knowledge and interest). Some examples of these sub-themes include the following: sacred natural sites, faith-based conservation, sacred species, cultural values of nature, deep ecology, climate anxiety, the natural sublime, relating to non-humans, etc. The facilitators (Radhika Borde and Alison A. Ormsby) will be moving between groups and noting key thoughts and messages. Final thoughts/messages will be co-created by the facilitators and café participants, and projects that could conceivably result from this exercise will also be discussed.