Outdoors Environmental Education for the Service of Peace: Lessons from a 2-Year Youth Program for Reconciliation in Cyprus

This paper examines the merits of the proposition that outdoors environmental education can be used as a means to promote reconciliation, and in essence peace, among communities in Cyprus. It does so through an examination of an outdoors youth program called CAFE (Camping, Fitness, and Education) that aimed to promote the awareness of members of two conflicting communities, Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot, about local environmental issues. More specifically, the objectives of this program were to determine whether a specially-designed outdoors environmental program can assist in bringing the two communities together. In this paper we describe the nature of the program activities and provide some participant perspectives as anecdotal support for the program's success. The evidence suggests that the outdoors environmental activities provided the participants with opportunities to view socially constructed "realities" and "truths" from the other's point of view, while concurrently developing an understanding of local environmental issues.