Page - 216 - in Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change

216 traditions on biodiversity; (ii) sacred places as repositories of biodiversity; (iii) spir- itual domain within ecosystems services; and (iv) the effects of biodiversity on spiritual well-being. Section 10.4 considers future directions for research. 10.2 Defining Spiritual Well-Being The World Health Organization’s (WHO) (1948) definition of health emphasises physical, mental and social well-being (Box 10.1). While lauded as a holistic approach to health, the importance of considering the spiritual domain is increas- ingly being recognized as well. This can be found, for example, in the WHO’s Health Promotion Glossary (1998) and discussions of health impact assessments (Chuengsatiansup 2003) as well as in medicine’s expanded focus on a biopsychosocial- spiritual model of health (e.g. McKee and Chappel 1992). In debates about health and wellness, spiritual health is considered by some as a com- ponent of overall health or integral to holistic health (e.g. Greenberg 1985; Hawks 1994), and there is a rich body of research on its role in illness recovery and end-of- life care (e.g. McClain et  al. 2003; Lin and Bauer-Wu 2003) as well as its effect on other dimensions of health (e.g. depression; Bekelman et  al. 2007). Despite this growing interest, definitional debates over the meaning  – and measurement  – of the spiritual domain continue. To understand these definitional challenges we first consider the wider context within which the notion of spiritual well-being sits. While the word ‘spirituality’ historically arises from a Christian milieu (Principe 1983), it has been applied to non-Christian religions (e.g. Buddhism) and to non-religious orientations such as ‘secular spirituality’ (Jespers 2011; van Ness 1996). Such applications inevitably raise questions about the concepts of ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ as well as ‘reli- gious’ and ‘spiritual’ (Casey 2013)  – terms that are themselves difficult to define, and for which varying, and sometimes overlapping, definitions exist. For example, while some scholars describe spirituality as a subset of religion (Streib and Hood 2011), others consider these concepts as independent yet complementary (e.g. Berghuijs et  al. 2013; Zinnbauer et  al. 1997). Typically, religiousness is described narrowly as “formally structured and identified with religious institutions and pre- scribed theology and rituals” (Zinnbauer et  al. 1997, p.  551), whereas spirituality is considered more expansively as subjective, eclectic and individualised, with author- ity deriving from personal experience (Fuller 2001). In one cross-cultural study (Gall et  al. 2011), survey respondents claimed that spirituality referred to core aspects of personal identity and experiences of transcendence  – “defined tradition- ally as God or a higher power, or in more secular terms as unity with the greater world or mystery” (p.  158)  – with religion seen as a pathway for accessing spiritual- ity and community. These scholarly distinctions between religion and spirituality reflect the growing population of those who identify as “spiritual but not religious” (Saucier and Skrzypinksa 2006). Rican (2004) and Moberg (2010) provide useful overviews of these debates. K. N. Irvine et al.