Wilderness Foundation UK CEO Jo Roberts is currently in Mexico attending the ninth World Wilderness Congress (WWC) – dubbed “Wild9 – Feel, Think, Act.”  The WWC is the longest-running, public international environmental forum. It is a conservation project that creates coalitions, establishes time-lines, sets objectives and achieves practical outcomes. Established in 1977, it has in the past convened on eight occasions in 30 years to review progress, debate issues, announce results and celebrate the importance and vitality of wild nature.

On Thursday this week (12th Nov. 2009) Jo will take the platform along side Alistair Little from the Sustainable Peace Network in which the Wilderness Foundation UK is a key partner, and they will deliver a keynote speech entitled “Humanising the Enemy: Wilderness and Peace Building”.

In recent years the Wilderness Foundation UK has taken the lead in evidencing the social benefit value that wilderness and wild places have to offer society and has used this material as an argument for their conservation and preservation.  We had always known the effect that wilderness has to offer the individual, and society, but through our work monitoring and evaluating every exposure that a participant has to wilderness over the course of the three years, and having that data analysed by researchers at the University of Essex, we have proven without doubt that time spent in wilderness has a positive and lasting effect.     It is our work with the Peace Programme in Northern Ireland that Jo and Alistair will be focusing on this week, but the same holds true for our intervention programme for vulnerable youth – TurnAround and Umzi Wethu, the support programme for young people affected by HIV and Aids in South Africa.

Good luck to Jo and Alistair this week.   The world will be watching and we hope listening to the wisdom from the wilderness.