Predictions: The Enviro Strikes Back

Just a few days ago I read a truly, quietly horrifying article. 

It was in the Atlantic Monthly and I was directed to it by the splendid Justin Housman, ex-Surfer magazine writer. (Read it here)

The article’s gist is that parts of the world’s oceans are beginning to go anoxic — literally, being drained of their oxygen content thanks to human activity, and therefore their ability to sustain a meaningful Web of Life.

This is a real thing, it’s happened before, and the results are never pretty. It immediately made me think of a current environmental battle on surfing’s radar: the fish farm proposal for the beach south of Martha’s on King Island, site of a beachbreak so gorgeous as to make grown men weep.

The fish farmer Tassal has been doing just that — draining the oxygen out of seabeds around Tasmania by overstocking them with salmon, which shit everywhere and thus kill everything else.

And this made me think, maybe it’s time for surf environmentalism to make a comeback!

Enviro movements in surfing have been up and down stuff generally. Once we thought all surfers were environmental by nature. The Surfrider Foundation, when it got going in California in the ‘80s, quickly had more members than any other surfing organisation. The POOO marches in Sydney helped change Governments.

But since then we’ve been revealed as a bit more complex than that. Tony Abbott surfs for chrissake. How can you be a surfer and think like him, I dunno, but obviously you can.

In between Tony Abbott and, say, Rasta, are as many shades of thought and belief on the subject as there are surfers. You’ve only got to look at the recent shark debate on the NSW north coast to pick up on that. But by and large we tend only to rally to an enviro cause when it’s our back yard that’s threatened. The people rallying to Martha’s are pretty much just the people who’ve been there and surfed it. Barely anyone else even knew it existed.

It only takes a moment to spark a movement though. Specially where a movement has existed before. And at some point it’s gonna start adding up in more and more surfers’ heads — the changes they see along coasts, the increasingly odd weather patterns, companies like Tassal on the doorstep.

Boom.

Maybe 2018 won’t be the year, but maybe it will.