Some may think that the forthcoming Nooksack water adjudication will drive wedges between competing water use communities in Whatcom County. That needn’t be the case.

Professor Aaron T. Wolf’s 2017 book, The Spirit of Dialogue, Lessons from Faith Traditions in Transforming Conflict, Island Press, suggests that it rather presents a social context within which maturation of community is possible. Professor Wolf, a trained mediator/facilitator seeking peaceful approaches to international competition over water resources, sits at Oregon State University, in Corvalis. He knows his stuff, having consulted with the World Bank, the Vatican, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. He has helped me immensely in my own research. You can check him out by clicking here.  

Based on an impressively broad reading of faith literature (Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, Bahá’í Faith), facilitation of water conflict agreements in the Middle East (Israel, Palestine (River Jordon)), North Africa (Egypt, Sudan (Nile River)), Southeast Asia (Mekong River), the Caucuses (Azeri, Armenia and Georgia (Kura-Araks River), Wolf asks,

“What, precisely, can spiritual traditions offer the fields of facilitation, mediation, and conflict transformation, especially when people in conflict often come from a variety of backgrounds and belief systems?” He answers: “Well, quite a lot, it turns out.”

Later, he explores the “constructs of anger and conflict, as understood by faith traditions, and some of the tools and techniques to assuage both.” A worthy study indeed.

The Spirit of Dialogue

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We don’t all come from the same place in our attitudes about water. “[T]he Western legal structure is very comfortable with the idea that one side in a dispute can be found entirely right and gain everything, while another side is found entirely wrong and loses everything. In contrast, the balance of justice and mercy in many communities of the South and East can retain individual rights and honor on both sides of a dispute and lead to reconciliation of a wrongdoer within one’s community. Consider the Arabic word tarrahdhin, for example, defined as ‘resolution of a conflict that involves no humiliation,’ a profound concept with no Western equivalent."

In Wolf’s “glass half full” approach, he says, “As the historically contrasting worldviews of the global North and West and the South and East increasingly interact more, both within and without the worlds of complex negotiations, we have the opportunity to heal historic divisions. The history of conflicts and cooperation suggests that people do come together, even across vociferous divides. And yet the suffering created by scarcity and conflict will only increase with population growth, poverty, and global change. As the dangers grow, however, so do the opportunities for dialogue and healing.” Water conflicts Wolf has facilitated have reached “general consensus that the highest priority [of needs] should be given simultaneously to drinking water and to water for spiritual purposes.”

Water plays a significant role in the spiritual practices of most the world’s religions and is central focus in the lives of indigenous peoples. “Both faith and water ignore separations and boundaries. Thus they offer vehicles for bringing people together, and because they touch all we do and experience, they also suggest a language by which we might discuss our common future.” Wolf’s approach to water negotiations is first to remove reference to artificial boundaries, permitting the parties opposite to focus on the organic watershed, to look at systemic issues within the whole. Negotiations focused primarily on rights, rather than shared goals, he suggests, exacerbate rather than resolve conflict.  

Professor Wolf admonishes that “the impact of conflict is generally felt by a much larger population than is charged with resolving it.” His facilitation works systematically to identify common interests, ascending through “four worlds”: the physical (positions, warrior, adversarial), the emotional (interests, lover, reflective), the perceptual (values, thinker, integrative) and the spiritual (harmony, dreamer, a “world without” which “straddles the internal (intellectual mind) and the external (intuitive mind, which seems to tap into deeper and wider knowledge).”

The Spirit of Dialogue is a thoughtful read. I recommend it.