Spiritual Stewardship and Contemporary Challenges of Sacred Forests in Zege Peninsula, North West Ethiopia: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

Abstract

 This study examined spiritual stewardship and contemporary challenges of sacred forests in Zege Peninsula, along the southern shore of Lake Tana in Ethiopia. The most important spiritual stewardship is the teachings and everyday religious practices of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahdo Church (EOTC) which foster sound tree management and land use systems around the church yard. Specifically, Zege stands out as a reserve of relatively dense trees and bushes amidst highland Ethiopia’s intensively deforested and plowed landscape, primarily due to the continued enforcement of a 14th century religious covenant believed to have been entered between an EOTC saint, Betre Maryam, and residents. The covenant prescribed hoe-farming to cultivate coffee, fruits, spices, vegetables, and crops, while strongly prohibiting intensive plow-agriculture and cattle herding. Framed with the ‘spiritual ecology’ approach, the study discussed these issues based on ethnographic research design through rich qualitative data collected through a combination of participant observations and semi-structured interviews. A purposive sampling strategy was employed to select 46 participants for interviews, which include 26 men and 20 women, based on their capacity and relevance to the research questions. The data were analyzed using content and thematic analyses with an inductive analytical approach. While emphasizing the continued relevance of this deep-rooted spiritual stewardship and associated emotional affective ties of residents in enforcing pro-forest conservation behaviors and collective ownership, the findings also highlight recent trends and factors, such as climate change-related calamities, urban expansion, and increased commercial and demographic pressure on land that have threatened the continuity of the sacred forests. Mitigating these threats requires systematically integrating local ecological knowledge and sound forest management practices with community owned, co-designed, government and/or donor-supported natural resource conservation interventions.