Sustainable standardization
The very term “sustainable development” is used as a guarantee for the establishment of a tourist economy in countries or areas that were previously untouched by it, since the sustainable aspect justifies and absolves the development aspect.
Was it right for Bali to become what it has? Tourism has created thousands of jobs (the sex industry is prolific), disfigured the face of paradise, polluted the beaches, driven up property prices, and development has hardly been “sustainable”. The question is: will these environmental, social and economic upheavals improve the lot of the indigenous populations in the long term? Should human beings, given their capacity to cause harm, be placed at the center of all policies? Shouldn’t we protect what can still be protected? Sustainable development offers a seductive profile, but it often leads to the folklorization of cultures: for example, many eco-villages are becoming centers of attraction. The reed island on Lake Titicaca is just one example, with its inhabitants living like fairground animals, visited by swarms of tourists, in a setting that no longer has anything authentic about it.
Bernard Brunel gives a negative assessment of tourism development in the countries of the South, in this short article: La panacée touristique creuse les écarts.
Everywhere in these lost paradises, there was the first small surf ecolodge (before the term even existed), run by an expatriate. Sometimes with the excuse “if I don’t do it, someone else will”. Nowadays, beaches are lined with hotels and restaurants, boutiques and clubs. It’s an illusion to think that a commercial monopoly position will last. Unscrupulous, profit-seeking individuals will always exploit the resources of the area, transforming natural beauty into a mask of vulgarity, an overdressed doll.
In France, the coastal law prohibits the concreting of the Aquitaine coastline. The pine forest there is the largest artificial forest in Europe. Artificial indeed, since it is managed by silviculturists, but where else can you find a natural forest, untouched by man? For example, the banks of the Adour, the river that flows through the Landes to Bayonne, are more lush than the banks of the Amazon between Colombia and Peru. The quest for the rainforest is an increasingly distant dream. Travelling brings us a little closer to home every day, as our socio-economic model becomes the global model, transforming landscapes and lifestyles.
Like any industry, surf culture tends to reproduce itself identically throughout the world. Yet the act of surfing doesn’t need to be confined to the reproduction of clichés and fashions that make places hopelessly interchangeable. Surfing is tending to become a mass sport, with communications linking all points of the globe, and finding a surfing destination without its hordes of surfers and stereotypes of surf culture is becoming extremely difficult.
Hence the emergence of surf movies set in Scandinavian countries. Only the cold protects these places from the crowds; they are the last frontier.
The wave, a rare commodity
For any surfer in search of the absolute (which is, in a way, the essence of surfing), virgin or little-known spots are places to be preserved at all costs, at the sacrifice of ego and entrepreneurial pretensions. So it’s depressing to see places that are still confidential and preserved from mass surfing become surf supermarkets in the space of a few seasons, thanks to a few egocentric social networkers: was it really essential, to illustrate one’s surfing vacations, to precisely indicate the location of the spot on one’s Instagram account or on a facebook page such as Hossegor Crew (which attracts thousands of surfers)? Or to stand out from your competitors by doing business on the latest secret spot, via surf lessons, the publication of detailed surf spot guides or the production of surf videos?
Who hasn’t found themselves on a beach on the other side of the world, Nias, Mirisa, Immesouane, nose to nose with the surfers from their town or village (Hossegor, Lacanau, Anglet)? The coveted wave has become a rare commodity, and we must cherish and preserve it, thinking of the other backpackers who will come after us and be happy to discover, in their turn, a pristine nature untouched by industry.
Adam and Eve are behaving like a couple of ingenues: it’s not enough for them to walk around paradise in their shorts, they have to ruin everything by grabbing the forbidden fruit of their Apple smartphone.
