Spiritual experiences and environmentalism of recreational users in the marine environment: New Zealand surfers and scuba divers

Abstract

Coastal management and planning is facing the integration of a new policy dimension: the spiritual connection to the marine environment. This dimension has long been recognised in relation to the lives of Indigenous people and is now being acknowledged through international law as an important aspect of the lives of all people. International law has the potential to influence the direction of national level policy-making. This explicit acknowledgement of a spiritual component to experiencing the coastal environment in policy-making can be seen through the marine protection of surf breaks in Australia. The same level of recognition of spiritual values has not yet been recognised legislatively in New Zealand. Scientifically, while spiritual connections with wilderness are well documented, the potential for spirituality to be a dimension of surfing and scuba diving has received far less scientific attention. Surfing and scuba diving are the focus of this research as a means to inform future policy decisions and research on spiritual connections to the marine environment. This study used quantitative survey methods to research (74 surfers and 83 divers) after participating in their activities. The study was conducted at four sites over the North and South Islands of New Zealand. The research identifies the relationship that spirituality has with leisure activities, ecological paradigms and environmental advocacy. This was achieved through the application of a modified framework based on the Daily Spiritual Experience Scale (DSES) (Underwood, 2006) called the Spiritual Experience Assessment (SEA). The New Ecological Paradigm (Dunlap, R. E., Van Liere, K. D., Mertig, A. G., & Jones, R. E., 2000) was used to establish ecological paradigms to determine the relationship between paradigms and advocacy for the environment. The main finding for this research is that both surfing and scuba diving lead to a spiritual experience for most participants. The relationship between previous research on factors that affect a spiritual experience largely showed little to no relationship, excluding the area of spiritual tradition. Both marine leisure activities presented a heavily weighted pro-ecological paradigm that related directly to advocacy for the environment. Through the use of the Theory of Planned Behavior, normative, behavioural, and control beliefs are established that indicated the level of advocacy seen by the participants for the environment.