Prior to joining A Rocha, Chris had wide experience of science teaching and schools’ management in the UK and the Middle East, attending Bible College and learning Arabic (in Jordan) along the way. He joined A Rocha in 1997 working, until 2009, as Lebanon Director where he cofounded the work. He oversaw the habitat restoration programme at the Aammiq Wetland, the development of the environmental education project and the field research programme, identifying 11 new Important Bird Areas. Since April 2010 he has been Executive Director of A Rocha International and is based in Oxfordshire. His book Postcards from the Middle East: How our family fell in love with the Arab world was published by Lion Hudson in March 2015.
We were often asked to study the wildlife of areas in need of conservation, but even more often groups came to Aammiq to see how a community dialogues and decides to restrain itself from more and more consumption of land, resources, and wildlife to the benefit of all and for a heritage to be passed on to future generations.
Every spring and fall, the North American prairies host a remarkable event. It’s called kettling. Migrating Sandhill Cranes Grus canadensis pause en route to come together and ride the thermals. I’ve just come back from a similar sort of family reunion.
“You are breaking the mould. Abu Charbel, like many others, thinks the church should keep to traditional areas of work.” “But what about priorities?” I pressed. “What is the most important thing? Preaching, poverty relief, or conservation of rare species?”
This April there were unseasonable storms in Cyprus. Travelling around to see if there was any potential for an A Rocha project, I was struck by the contrast between the resulting shadow and the sunlight. That combination of light and dark seems to typify the island.
It was a transformed class that reconvened under the shade of the ash tree a couple of hours later. It was like conducting an orchestra to establish the learning objectives of the lesson; the wetland provided invaluable services to the human communities of the Bekaa, it contained rare and beautiful species and it needed protection. We didn’t stop there; questions tumbled from the class all the way back to the bus.
Kenya has been in the news this month because of the massacre at Garissa University. Supporters have been asking about any impact here on the coast, where A Rocha has its field study centre, Mwamba. We feel perfectly safe here and are keen to welcome visitors.
The tent was dark but warm inside, a simple wood stove providing a flickering light. The bitter, piping-hot coffee was in an elaborate brass pot. Most of the year they lived in Homs in Syria but each spring, and sometimes in the autumn, they would get the tent out of storage and make the trek to the Bekaa for extra work.
St Helena is a sobering place to ecological eyes. In the early 17th century the Portuguese landed goats and in a hundred years they had reduced huge areas of lush landscape to bare rock. In the centuries that followed, we have made the world itself an island where the goats of hyper-individualism, corporate greed and short-term political ambition are roaming more or less unchecked.
After explaining that I was going to be the new science teacher at the large secondary school in the valley (which seemed to explain my weird views on animal life), I was escorted by a gaggle of boys and young men into the wetland proper, on the trail of Yusef.
Taking care of creation is sometimes more than mere words and issues. For some, it is a matter of life and death. Such was the case for Honduran preacher and community leader José Matilde Bonilla.
