Bring It On!

Posted on May 16, 2007 @ 12:06 PM

Feeling good? Loving the life? Cool. That’s the way it should be. Surfing adds something extra special to our lives and, if asked, most of us put it waaaay up there, top of the list of our favourite things – family, sex, surfing, friends, good food, music ... what else is there?

Can something that’s already this good keep getting better? Well, maybe. Here’s the news: this green movement we’re unashamedly pushing within the surf world seems to be just growing and growing. Here’s an example: The Reuters international newswires recently buzzed with a business story announcing: Companies that outfit surfers are looking to environment-friendly materials as concern about polluted beaches and coastal damage crosses over into surfer fashion.”

Well, I’ve never been one to follow fashion too much, but if this is the trend, I’m down with it. The story goes on to quote the CEOs of several major surf brands who, while admitting it has a long way to go, generally agree that this is “the next big wave” in the US$3 billion surf industry. Wow! It wasn’t long ago that we had to watch our p’s and q’s when it came to talking about anything organic, sustainable, natural, recycled, etc. around potential advertisers. Almost no one prioritized environment anywhere near as highly as profit. Even if you wanted to, just a year ago, it was difficult and expensive to find environmentally-benign surf-related products. Okay, it still is, but it appears the tide has turned.

Two recent and random surprises that herald something big: organic/recycled shoes. The ones I saw at Simple HQ were made from jute, bamboo, water-based glue, natural latex, and reclaimed auto tires. All the materials are either grown or recycled, and the shoes are absolutely solid, wearable, and totally stylish.

Then there’s the Patagonia wetsuit – absolutely the best suit I’ve ever worn, and guess what it’s made from? Natural tree rubber, recycled polyester, and merino wool. Sounds weird, but it looks great, feels warm, and stretches like Larry Bertlemann at Off The Wall.

More and more products are coming out of every corner of the industry, from the core (new foam blanks, eco-friendly resins and glassing materials, green wax) to the frilly fashion fringes. Many of these products are early, almost prototype versions of what’s to come, but damn, it’s a start and way better than the head-in-sand approach we’ve seen up to now.

The good shit doesn’t appear overnight. It needs an investment of time, money, and brainpower. So, for example, Simple spent a small fortune developing their shoes – finding, inventing, and adapting materials, designing and inventing machinery to effectively make the products, re-designing their factories to accommodate the changes, etc., etc. Patagonia employed a high-flying textile scientist, Tetsuya Ohara from Japan, to disappear into a lab and come back with a wetsuit that doesn’t damage the environment as much as the petroleum-based ones we’ve had to date. After four years, he emerged with something new, and something that shows that with effort and investment focused in the right direction, we can move forward, have great gear, and maybe even influence some of the bigger, non-surf industries along the way.

Bottom line is, supply and demand works both ways. We have power. The more “environment-friendly” stuff we demand, the more the corporations (and, indeed, governments) have to follow. Every penny we spend is a vote. So, if we want to see a saner approach to this consumer lifestyle, vote green by buying the greener and saner stuff. You watch; the big guys will follow.

Meantime (and I don’t mean to piss on your permafrost or anything), here are some tough questions about being a surfer. They boil down to this: how much of this wonderful surfing life would you actually sacrifice for the sake of a cleaner planet? Would you, for instance, ride a crummier board because it was made of more ‘eco-friendly’ materials than your usual high-performance stick? Would you walk to your nearest beach and just surf there, instead of cruising the coast in your car to find a bank or reef throwing better barrels? Would you stay home this year and not book a trip to Indonesia because of all the CO2 your flight would emit? Would you accept a reduction in wave height at your local break because a wave power device just offshore was using the same swells to make clean, green electricity?

These are the elephants in the green room – the difficult questions, the contradictions within the movement for change. Personally I don’t want to sacrifice any more of my surfing pleasure than I already do to the great god Real Life. It’s hard enough as it is to find the tube-fix I need to fuel my addiction. So, in the interest of keeping this surfing life absolutely wonderful, can I urge everyone to carry on thinking in the right direction? We need solutions, and they’re out there, so let’s keep looking for them. Sooner or later, wonderful will get even better.

Meantime, may you be blessed with deep pockets and showered in spit.

– ADR

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