| MAKING WAVES, August 2004 issue: Table of Contents |   |
| Finally: The First Green Surf Magazine By Drew Kampion  Cutting trees to create a surf magazine ultimately seems to be a pretty stupid act.
I've lived in the Pacific Northwest for over a dozen years now. For three of those years, I published and edited my own "regional" independent newspaper, serving the islands and peninsulas of the northern Puget Sound at its convergence with the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I discovered that, if you want to speed-dial into reality, start a newspaper. Working on articles with local experts (and surfing around here) showed me first-hand the connection between the health of the land with its watershed system of streams and rivers, and the health of the sea with its own streams and currents and reefs. Some of the butt-ugliest places I have ever seen are in the so-called "forested" areas of Washington's Olympic Peninsula and British Columbia's Vancouver. Mostly they're what we call "stump farms." Almost no sustainable forestry exists. Even now, the general practice is to clear-cut and replant with a monoculture of Douglas fir, wait 30 years, then clear-cut again. Downstream effects include silted rivers (which inhibit the ability of salmon to spawn) and excessive runoff of eroded material, which chokes local wetlands and reefs. In our sprawling urbanized areas, the effects are much worse, as heavy metals, PCBs, neurotoxins, and all kinds of genetically-creative chemicals and pharmaceuticals follow gravity to the sea. While pulp mills continue to dirty the air and waters, that industry has faded with the trees, and local wisdom counsels that diminishing rainfall and erratic weather patterns are as much the result of eliminating complex forest systems as global warming. So, a couple of years ago, when I began visualizing a new magazine for surfers, I determined that it would have to be tree-free or, at least, "green". Rather than add to the problem, I hoped to model a solution. When 9/11 postponed my own project, I found resonance with the publisher and editor of The Surfer's Path, a global surf magazine based in England. Founded in 1997, The Surfer's Path is a bit of an anomaly in the surf-publishing world — low-key and philosophical, its Caribbean-born editor, Alex Dick-Read, aimed the mag at the environmentally and culturally conscious global surf traveler, chasing after perfect waves with an open heart, that heart being open to the world. In defining the Path's mission, he wrote: "Who knows what it means to be a surfer? There's something extra, something that makes our lives wildly different from those of the uninitiated, but none of us really know what that is. One thing is for sure — we know exactly what we want. And to get it, like the pilgrim or the holy man, we follow our own roads to our own perfection. Call it what you want, we call it the Surfer's Path." Alex (Woo to family and friends) had long advocated taking the publication in a greener direction, and when I came on board last August to help out as American editor, publisher Jim Peskett decided he would do just that.  When I asked him what his motivation was, he answered, "It's the right thing to do." It reads like a clichˇ, but it wasn't spoken as one.
With issue number 42 (May-June 2004), The Surfer's Path became the first green surf magazine — printed on 100-percent post-consumer recycled paper (processed without chlorine bleach) with non-GMO soy inks. Other mags may have recycled content, but only the Path is all post-consumer and chlorine-free. Change isn't foreseen by demographics and so-called experts; they just give you the status quo. Change comes out of the blue — out of spontaneous brilliance, accident, serendipity, and (the mother of all invention) necessity. The world of magazine publishing is one of the most bottom-line-driven businesses in the world, so this green undertaking isn't without an element of heroics. It's just that it had to be done. Some day (and the sooner the smarter for all of us) the word "sustainable" will be written into the mission statement of every legitimate enterprise; sustainability will be a cornerstone of all human activities, as sure as necessity is the mother of invention. Some day, all surfing magazines, if they exist, will be printed according to appropriate "green" standards. It's simple common sense: the survival of our surf spots is directly linked to the health of the ocean, and the health of the ocean depends in some measure on the health of our rivers and streams. The wholesale clear-cutting of forest ecosystems, along with the treatment of wood pulp with toxic chemicals like chlorine bleach in the manufacturing of paper, link directly to many of the water-quality problems being addressed by numerous global environmental organizations, like the Surfrider Foundation and Save Our Surf. Given the condition of the planet, surfers above all should be sensitive to the very large realities behind the principle of sustainability ... before our seas and our reefs perish. Because it's all connected — watershed, stream, and forest, sea, reef, and ocean water — a cycle and a circle. "There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew." - Marshall McLuhan For information on The Surfer's Path, click-surf to http://www.surferspath.com  |