ski guyEDGE ESCAPISM
August 23rd 2006 05:25
The edge. The edge attracts us. Edge is the threshold. Edge is sublime. The edge is point of no return. An escape. A tunnel beneath today’s walls of stress, deadlines and expectations.
But, isn’t it funny how you destroy the thing you love most, just by being there and loving it. Our addictive faith in the Edge has blunted its potency. The tunnel is crowded, too many escapees jostling for position, but refusing to let go of their creature comforts.
We try to escape our daily lives by constantly replicating the situation from which we flee! Australia’s epidemic of edge escapism is growing and growing fast. People pursue authentic wilderness experiences by fanatically transporting their fully air conditioned, fully equipped supermarket accessible homes…to the edge…the edge of our continent, where the land meets the sea.
Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows us that most of Australia's population is concentrated along the coast….Half the area of the continent contains only 0.3 per cent of the population, and the most densely populated one per cent of the continent contains 84 per cent of the population. This amazing statistic means that we must pay more attention to the problems associated with the coastal zone. For example, the cost to the community of coastal flooding could more than double in some areas in the next fifty years due to global warming. And…the effects of extreme weather events will be worsened by the increase in Australia's coastal population.
Nowadays… the edge is changing before our very eyes. Gone is the humble, brown paper wrapped shack. Gone is the icon of understatement. The beaches brim is lined with up market holiday homes! Forget the ideology of: “we’re grubby we’re on holiday” twaddle. WE have inadvertently transformed tin roofs to tiles, dunnies to en suites, and the beach to a feeding frenzy of human beings desperate to get a taste of ‘the edge’.
Isn’t it great? It prevents us homo sapiens- WHO are almost incapable of understanding the term “roughing it” from the need to interact with nature AT ALL. We can stay inside fully protected from the elements experiencing nature on the Adventure Channel!
When I tell people I go bush walking for my holidays and cross country skiing instead of staying in a resort- the usual reaction is an open mouthed expression of disbelief and comments regarding those types of activities as “boring”. The state of civilization has become so acquisitive that I doubt some people could even save themselves if they were out in the wilderness without their material possessions.
The reason is obvious. It’s a simple comfort thing. Humans are comfort seeking creatures. And what could be wrong with that? Especially when we’re on our precious holidays? Well, nothing really. But it just does not work. We become so concealed from actual reality that we cocoon ourselves against the very comforting barriers we strive our whole lives to achieve. The human urge to create a glad wrapped plastic packaged life still remains, perhaps its just part of our evolving culture. But it isn’t until it’s too late until we realize that we now crave HARDSHIP- not comfort.
We CRAVE the reality that we strive SO HARD to conceal. It then casts as a shadow on our lives. We crave to experience silence without a mobile phone screeching away in the background. We crave seeing the wilderness without some newly constructed holiday home protruding from the headland out of the gum trees. We crave revival. We crave refreshment. We crave REAL LIFE.
Our refuge? The beach. The ultimate edge licking its lips in the harsh sun… beautiful…but vulnerable… Our last resort of visiting our un- tame selves. At the beach, in the water there are no mobile phones, no cars no TV’s. My fear is that this utopian impulse we possess may gradually infect our precious beach sides as well. That even there…development and the desire to bring our urban necessities with us will ruin the last place that is really natural. It is already starting to occur…
… what can be done?
People don’t seem to realize that it is not the development companies or local council that we’re up against on this issue- its human culture in the contemporary society. So many things in life created to make things better, actually make them a lot worse.
This is a problem worldwide...edge attraction is everywhere…WE can’t stop edge escapism but we can do something about the way we personally treat the edge and GOVERNMENTS can do something about developing policies to actually limit coastal development and development in wilderness areas..
The fundamental question still remains: Are our minds evolving less quickly than our culture?
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