Return to Eden: nature as spiritual experience in a secular world

Surfing culture, and the data that surrounds it, such as diary entries and artworks, has been under the research spotlight, as Melbourne researcher Robin Canniford endeavours to get a closer look into surfers’ relationship with nature.

“Surfing for me was an easy choice because I’ve been a surfer since I was a teenager growing up in the south-west of England, surrounded by the chilly North Atlantic ocean. It was always very attractive to me,” Dr Canniford says.

“The perspective I took to this research was to embed myself long-term (eight years so far) and quite deeply among the people who are engaged in nature consumption activities, and also to participate in them myself.”

Dr Canniford says nature takes on a spiritual form for some people who feel they may have lost touch with religion or “the sacred”.

“Being in nature is perhaps one way to re-achieve that link without having to resort to religion or organised religion,” he says.

“Whether it be surfing, climbing, white water rafting, hang gliding, for that sense of challenge and for a little bit of a sense of uncontrollability, losing ourselves in a place which can’t be exactly controlled on a daily basis. 

“Sometimes these sublime experiences can be so awe-inspiring that they lead almost to a nature worship, to an experience we might call magical. I think the investigations into how people consume nature – be they surfers or climbers – often we find forms of new age spirituality emerging among those consumption practices.”

Throughout the podcast, Dr Canniford discusses the various ways in which the corporate world uses nature through branding, the idea of primitivism as a consumable product, and the conflict between the forces of nature and the human desire to control nature.

“At a very concrete level, nature just doesn’t do what we want it to do. That is a foundational principle in ideas of magic, the sublime and, indeed, the primitive,” he says.

“Nature just sometimes doesn’t obey what we want it to do and forces us to react spontaneously and redevelop those lost virtues of adaptability and, perhaps, even spirituality. Nature constantly reminds us that we’re not in charge.”

Dr Canniford says how we consume nature will determine the preservation of nature.

“I think that the necessity to consume nature is always there. What are the ways that we can try to improve how we consume nature? A concept I’m working on is this idea of redress.

“This is to say that we can continue to use natural geographies and environments, but the way that we use those geographies has to change, both in the technologies that we develop and bring there, and in the stories that we tell ourselves.”

Dr Canniford says it’s important for people to recognise that nature and culture are deeply connected. 

“That story of pristine nature, as not contaminated by culture, underpins so many economies, be they tourism economies or the ability to advertise four-wheel drives effectively. People want to tell themselves the story of leaving culture and becoming more primitive, at one with nature.

“But I think that’s actually very damaging to the natural environments that we seek to support. It’s only through recognising the hybridity and, perhaps, abandoning these false stories, that we can begin to move forward.”

To listen to the full podcast of ‘Return to Eden?: How we “consume” nature and what it says about us’, go to 

http://upclose.unimelb.edu.au/episode/329-return-eden-how-we-consume-nature-and-what-it-says-about-us.