Real Life: Ecology organisation founder’s journey to hope after car accident that killed wife

Peter Harris is the president emeritus of A Rocha, a UK-based Christian environmental agency involved in research and restoration of natural habitats.

The founder of a global conservation organisation currently touring New Zealand has opened up on the devastation of losing his wife and two of his closest friends in a horrific car accident four years ago.

Peter Harris is the president emeritus of A Rocha, a UK-based Christian environmental agency with a branch in Aotearoa involved in research and restoration of natural habitats all over the world. He’s currently in the middle of a two-week speaking tour across Aotearoa.

Harris was on a work trip in Port Elizabeth, South Africa with his wife Miranda and colleagues Chris and Susanna Naylor in October 2019 when the car they were in plunged off a bridge into a river. He and the driver were the only survivors.

In a deeply personal interview with Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan that aired on Sunday night, Harris spoke candidly about coming to terms with immense personal tragedy.

“My four kids came straight down South Africa. When I came out of my coma, they were the ones that told me Miranda was gone, and Chris and Susanna had gone,” he recounted.

As a man of deep faith, Harris had to grapple with the reality that the God he believed in had permitted, or potentially even caused, Miranda’s death – the woman he’d been married to for more than four decades.

The former clergyman says coming to terms with that had been a “complicated and deep conversation”.

“God can take [that conversation], and it’s important to have it,” Harris told Cowan.

“It doesn’t always lead you to pat answers. I don’t think the answer to the problem of suffering is formulaic, otherwise the church would have found it centuries ago. But it’s all part of our engagement with God in His world and figuring it out – and I’m still doing that.

“As another friend said to me about some huge tragedy in his life, why should it not happen to me?”

Asked whether joy had returned to his life, Harris said it had – but he admitted it was only “in a flickering way”.

“Miranda and I were married for 43 years… She was an extraordinary bright light in the world, just extraordinary, and so it’s been a massive adjustment.

“Joy is there. I think creation brings joy. Music brings joy. Chocolate ice creams at strategic moments bring kind of a kind of comfort. I’m leaning into [joy] and I’m leaning into the future, advised by wise people.”

Despite recovering from personal tragedy, Harris says he still has hope for the future – both in his ecological work and his own life.

“The Bible says for a little while, we may be suffering trials. There are millions of people in the world now living far, far more wretched lives than I will ever know. And that’s the world we’re in, but it’s not over yet.

“And both our conservation work and my personal life are animated by this deep sense and rock-solid logic that this is God’s world – and however it’s going to come good, it’s going to come good.”

Harris will be speaking at an event at St Andrew’s Centre in Wellington CBD on Monday night before events in Christchurch, Dunedin and Auckland over the next fortnight.

Real Life is a weekly interview show where John Cowan speaks with prominent guests about their life, upbringing, and the way they see the world. Tune in Sundays from 7:30 pm on Newstalk ZB or listen to the latest full interview here.