Tom M. Wilson

Real environmentalism isn’t just about acknowledgment of the problems of this world and the struggle to right them, it is also a regular, lived appreciation of nature. Try and live the first without doses of the second of these things and you’ll find it a rough path. People whose contact with ‘environmentalism’ goes only so far as a Greenpeace banner, or a newspaper headline, are understandably turned off by the whole movement. The other day I was running on the beach.  Afterwards I jumped in the waves and the warm water, played around, smiled and goofed off. It was like washing all the artifice of modern life off. Unclogging the arteries of my day from duty and chore and other heavy metals. We go to the ocean in Australia to wash off the urban. And we renew our selves. Surfers are more realistic than environmentalists in this respect in that they always balance the bad news of the day with real and regular experiences in the more than human world. Sitting in the city as the weeks and months go by and reading about the ills the natural world suffers again and again gives one a distorted picture of reality. Reality contains ugly destruction, but there is so much more beauty and extant landscape to enrich your days out there. Surfers know this as they don’t forget to pay regular visits to the swelling and swaying landscape of H20 that rings this country. I felt my body and soul profit from my afternoon flop, flail and foam-slide in the surf.

A participatory experience of cosmically generated aquatic waves makes you feel good. Let’s talk about health for a minute. Most of the time in the West doctors use a deficit model of health: that is, if you’re not sick, then you are healthy. But what if we had a more positive conception of human health?

My cousin, Tim Baker, is a freelance writer who lives in northern NSW and does plenty of surfing. He’s just published a book of interviews with surfers, High Surf, and flicking through it the other day I came across the words of Dorian Paskowitz:

‘When you come out of surfing, there is this euphoria, which is part of an actual physical sense of well-being. It’s not that you suddenly hear angels, its that you feel physically remade. You’re not only remade, but remade with refinement, exactness, so that things feel inside you to be gearing and meshing effortlessly. You feel lighter, you feel that you move with more agility. You have more positive feelings, you talk faster. How much more this is than not being sick; how much more this is than just being normal.’ (p.125)

I then read a comment by a surfer in Byron Bay, Rusty Miller:

‘When the surf is good in Byron Bay and a lot of people get a lot of surf, the vibe in the town is actually elevated by the spirit of what you bring in from the water.’ (p.220)

Moving through space in an unpredictable environment and reacting spontaneously to changes in that environment is what our bodies were evolved to do in the Pleistocene environment of our long-gone ancestors in Africa. It seems to me that catching waves triggers all the responses our body was evolved for. No wonder the activity can make you feel so good. Perhaps we should all be praying to liquid drainpipes.

White Australia was born with the sweat and blood of poor British men and women dripping off it. 736 convicts came out on the First Fleet. The ‘First Fleet’ consisted of eleven ships full of people forced into exile from their homeland by a legal system that looked after the rich. The oldest female convict was Dorothy Handland, a dealer in rags and old clothes. She was 82. She had been given seven years for perjury, and in 1789 she hanged herself, in a fit of befuddled despair, from a gum tree at Sydney Cove. She became Australia’s first recorded suicide.

For me nature is a lifeline. My sense of my self as part of the natural world buffers me against depression. But when Dorothy’s body swung from the limb of a gum tree, like the one above, she clearly had no understanding of the lines of nature as lifelines.

Did the Aboriginal people ever record a suicide? I don’t know. As Australia Day approaches this year I’ll be looking back with sympathy not only on the Aboriginal people who suffered the invasion of their homeland, but also on those thousands of men and women who were slaves of the British Empire two hundred years ago.

Last night I and a select group of acolytes gathered for a film night at my place.  This wasn’t any old film screening, this was a journey into light, accompanied by a mix of ambient acoustics that I’d put together.  While we soared over the peaks of the Himalayas the sounds of Aeroc pulsed through us, as flowers in the high mountains opened Triola came through the big sound system, and as we ventured into the dark caves of Borneo the echo of Bill Laswell’s dubs opened before us.  Many of the world’s best nature photographer’s were involved in the making of the BBC’s Planet Earth series (2006), and their superb work needs this kind of soundtrack, not the BBC intonations that the film was released with.  (Sadly the photographer’s involved are not even listed on the sleeve of the DVD, only ‘David Attenborough’ is mentioned.  And of course David didn’t do any of the photography that makes this film so sublime.  Come on BBC!)

That’s my friend Chris having a peaceful inhalation of his cinnamon hookah.  The tethers have now been cut.