Page - 217 - in Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change

217 These conceptual difficulties and cultural transformations have proved problem- atic for efforts to define and measure spiritual well-being. Its meaning is also often confused by the use of similar concepts, including spiritual health (e.g. Bensley 1991) and spiritual wellness (e.g. Westgate 1996), with debate as to whether these are synonymous or distinct (e.g. Ingersoll 1998). Some scholars (Klein et  al. 2016; Koenig 2008; Moreira-Almeida and Koenig 2006; Salander 2006; Tsuang et  al. 2007) have argued that spiritual well-being conceptually overlaps too much with existential well-being, psychological well-being and mental health, suggesting that spiritual well-being may be insufficiently distinct to stand as a separate category in rigorous empirical research. Similar problems attend distinctions among psycho- logical, emotional or mental well-being (Hird 2003; Veenhoven 2008). These dis- parities may be a corollary to the fact that discussions are undertaken across multiple fields of inquiry: sociology (e.g. Moberg 1971, 1979), psychology (e.g. Paloutzian and Ellison 1982; Ellison, C. 1983), palliative care (e.g. Lin and Bauer-Wu 2003), nursing (e.g. Buck 2006) and leisure studies (e.g. Jepson 2015), which may under- stand and use the terms differently. The concept of ‘spiritual well-being’ originated in the sociology of aging and health (Moberg 1971); there, it referred to social and psychological adjustments that draw upon a person’s “inner resources” and “central philosophy of life” to provide meaning, stability and coping (p.  10). Spiritual well-being was subsequently defined at the US-based National Interfaith Coalition on Aging (NICA) as “the affirmation of life in a relationship with God, self, community and the environment that nur- tures and celebrates wholeness” (NICA 1975, as cited in Moberg 1984, p.  352). This definition provides some guidance for understanding the phrase “connection to something greater than oneself” in Linton et  al.’s (2016) definition of spiritual well- being. J.  Fisher (2011) has further developed the relational element, arguing that spiritual health is dependent on the “extent to which people are living in harmony within relationships” (p.  21), i.e. relation with self, relations with community, rela- tion with the environment and relation with a transcendent other(s). Thus, for J.  Fisher (2011), “when [these] relationships are not right, or are absent, we lack wholeness, or health” (p.  23). Across multiple disciplines, conceptualisations of the spiritual aspect of well- being and health appear to share a number of consistent features (Table  10.1) includ- ing: meaning, intrinsic values, wholeness, community relationship and transcendence (Bensley 1991; Fisher, J. 2011; Hawks 1994; Hood-Morris 1996; Ingersoll 1994; Westgate 1996). J.  Fisher’s (2011) articulation of the environmental aspect of spiri- tual well-being suggests that a relationship with the environment can go “beyond care and nurture for the physical or biological, to a sense of awe and wonder” (p.  22) and, for some, a sense of unity with the environment and a feeling of connection to nature. This same sense of oneness with nature is identified in Hawks’ (1994) spiri- tual health literature review, which also examined how a spiritually-well individual would outwardly act (e.g. altruism, compassion, service). This section has examined the development of the concept of spiritual well- being, the health contexts in which it originated and the variety of meanings that have been applied to the term ‘spiritual’ over time. For the purposes of this chapter, we take 10 Biodiversity and  Spiritual Well-being