Spirit in the woods: A story about one of our PhDs and her research

Read about the increasing importance of spirituality in forest management below.

Catherina Henriëtte de Pater’s professional life story reads like one of those timelines displayed on museum walls. The documented dates, places and events tell of a life richly spent in the pursuit of a range of interests, culminating in her PhD thesis which she successfully defended at a ceremony in Wageningen on 16 April. Her supervisor is prof. dr. Arjen Wals.

Cathrien – as she is known to colleagues at FNP – is described by many as good natured, helpful, energetic, dependable. She is a pioneer and a go-getter but in a calm and composed way. Her strength and perseverance is expressed inconspicuously. She is there when you needed her.

According to records at the Office of the Dean of Research, Cathrien is the oldest female who has obtained a PhD from the Wageningen University since 2010 (as far as available records show). There were four older than her, and they were all men, the oldest having graduated at age 78 in 2017. “I was determined to get my doctorate before I turn 71,” she said, and she did on 16 April, one day before her 71^st birthday!

But you would never have guessed her age, looking at how vital, agile and nymph-like she is. This septuagenarian practises and teaches Aikido, a non-competitive form of martial arts. She holds a 4^th dan, which means she has passed all Aikido exams and is a full-fledged practitioner. FNP team-building events would be different without one of her Aikido demonstration classes, where this petite woman in an Aikido stance showed how helpless three or more bigger colleagues could be when they tried to topple her from an upright position.

Cathrien retired from the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality (LNV) at age 61, after a career spanning 35 years in many countries and various organisations, Not one to sit still nor blend into the fabric of retired life, Cathrien went through three years of searching, before joining FNP as an external PhD candidate in 2017.

Cathrien is an external PhD candidate but she made it a point to be in the office one day a week to mingle with the team. Within FNP, she was involved in helping several students with their MSc and BSc theses, and was always present at group meetings and events. She has been paranymph thrice to other PhD colleagues when they defended their theses. Her enthusiasm is infectious and her stories never-ending; she has so much to tell.

One project which had a great impact on Cathrien was when she joined the Nepal-FAO Community Forestry Development Project in 1983, and spent two years in Ilam District. There, she assisted in the development of village forest nurseries, plantations, woodstoves, and community forest management planning. “I lived and worked with farmers and forestry staff in the Middle Hills to pioneer new concepts of community-based forestry. I was deeply immersed in the Nepalese culture and learnt more from the people than I could ever give back.”

Another highlight was her MSc studies in Interreligious Spirituality at Radboud University (2001-2007). She did it because there was no specific ‘religion and nature’ programme in The Netherlands then, and she wanted to be knowledgeable in the subject of religion and spirituality to be able to say something about its interface with nature. “While I had often felt reluctant to discuss spirituality openly in my work, I could study it as a legitimate subject there.”

After her PhD, Cathrien hopes she will be able to continue to share and increase her knowledge on forest spirituality. “Research on this topic will continue to develop internationally,” says her co-supervisor dr. Bas Verschuuren. – by K.M. Poon

The increasing importance of spirituality in forest management

Cathrien’s PhD thesis is entitled ‘Spirit in the Woods. The Grounding of Spiritual Values in Forest Management’. Interest in academia relating to religion and spirituality in forest management has increased quite sharply since she started her own research.

During the 1980’s, arguments for biodiversity conservation were mainly based on intrinsic values which did not carry much weight in political debates, remarks Cathrien. “Then the concept of ecosystem services arose, introducing instrumental values of biodiversity in the debate. The usefulness of biodiversity was emphasised to gain policy impact. However, cultural and spiritual values did not fit well into that frame, so we had to find new ways to put spiritual values on the stage.”

During the course of her travels and work, Cathrien became gradually aware of the importance of religion and spirituality in people’s dealing with nature. When she obtained a part-time position at LNV in 2001, she embarked on a Master's study in Interreligious Spirituality at Radboud University Nijmegen and graduated with honours on a study into Dutch forest managers’ spiritual concerns in 2007.

“The role of spiritual values in forest and nature conservation has increasingly become more important and mainstream since the turn of the century,” remarks Cathrien’s daily supervisor dr. Bas Verschuuren. “Especially the past 10 years have seen an increase in the amount of research done into this topic but it’s also of interest to professional organisations working on forest and nature conservation. Interestingly, a wave of publications on this topic appears to have just started and new terminology marking this new field of study – e.g. ‘forest spirituality’ - has only recently been coined.

"Cathrien's research is making waves that will have significant ripple effects across disciplines such as forestry, religious studies and conservation science!

“Her empirical research sheds light on how the spiritual dimensions of forests permeate forest management activities. This generates new insights, not only on the importance of spirituality in day-to-day management, but also in the ways that foresters understand and value their work. For example, we have only just started to scratch the surface of the economic importance of forest spirituality, which is emerging in activities such as forest bathing, retreats, nature burials and recreation. At the same time, through workshops conducted as part of Cathrien’s research projects, we realise that we know relatively little of the learning needs and capacities of forest and nature conservationists in dealing with forest spirituality.

“The empirical studies in her thesis also show that spirituality plays an important role in the management and policy-making processes of Dutch forests."

One scientist who has much influence on her is prof. Bron Taylor. , Professor of Religion and Environmental Ethics at the University of Florida. “I feel honoured that he has come to Wageningen as an opponent at my defence,” says Cathrien. Taylor is a well-known international scholar and will speak/also spoke at a seminar held in conjunction with Cathrien’s defence ceremony.

And how does Cathrien’s own religious and spiritual background and upbringing influence her work?

“My parents were Protestant (Dutch Reformed), and I was baptised and raised in this liberal-Christian environment. I wandered away from the Protestant church environment in my teens, explored other religions (mainly Catholicism, Judaism, Native American religions, etc.) and later in Wageningen, all kinds of revolutionary thinking and New Age. I gradually turned into a critical agnost.

“This critical agnostic view helped me to embark on my study, which I try to align with the scientific principles I was expected to follow. For instance, I applied the ‘family resemblances approach’ and ‘dimensions of religion’ because they put all religious traditions on an equal footing without a bias towards one or another.

“Buddhism, Zen meditation, courses in ‘vital energies’, Aikido, and a lot of reading made me realise that there are forces beyond the material world. How can we match these with the material world and rational thinking? We shall never know if what we experience as ‘divine’ or ‘spiritual’ is out there in the universe of generated by processes in our brains. An eye-opener was Ken Wilber’s ‘four-quadrant’ model of the world as a system of ‘inner‘ and ‘outer’ realities that are intricately related.

“I think it’s not either-or, but both. I also think that basic human values such as compassion, honesty, righteousness, courage, modesty, detachment, and perseverance can be truly developed when one is spiritually attuned to his/her place within this Earth. And that attuning is different for every person and culture, as all humans and other-than-humans are unique sentient beings. I add other-than-humans because my studies helped me realise that they matter as much as everyone else, and that the planetary crisis we are now experiencing can only be solved if we include all of its inhabitants in our valuations.”

- by K.M. Poon

Read what a fellow PhD candidate says about Cathrien in this blog.