On a sunny November day in 1997, I played hooky from a conference in San Diego, California. The surf was up and I was soon chatting with a young woman at a surf shop, deciding which board to rent. When she learned I was formerly an ocean lifeguard from the region, transplanted to Wisconsin, she exclaimed, “Whoa dude, no amount of money is worth living away from Mother Ocean.”
The Hollywood motion picture Point Break (1991) was a campy thriller in which a band of surfers funded their global surf quest by robbing banks. Early in the film Keanu Reeves, acting as FBI Special Agent Johnny Utah, went to buy a surfboard as the first step in his effort to penetrate the surfing “tribe” and find the robbers. Utah explained to the teenager-clerk that he always wanted to learn to surf. The teenager replied, “It’s never too late.” Utah protested, “But I’m only twenty-five.” The young evangelist responded, “I hope you stay with it, surfing’s the source, it’ll change your life, I swear to god.” The movie continued with religious themes woven throughout. The leader of the bank-robbing surfers, for example, was named Bodhi—and this bodhisattva proclaimed a mystical gospel of surfing.
As surfing author Matt Warshaw put it, and as anyone experienced with surfing cultures can attest, surfing “is based in sport, but can drift into art, vocation and avocation, even religion.”1 Jay Moriarity in the Ultimate Guide to Surfing wrote similarly, that surfing is art, sport, and “SPIRITUAL because it’s just you and Mother Nature.”2 In 2005 Brad Melekian even suggested that “surfing may be the next world religion.”3
It does not take long in surf culture to see its spiritual nature. Melekian astutely observed that surfing resembles religion in important ways and he promoted surfing as a legitimate spiritual path. He contended, as well, that surfing can make one more compassionate toward both people and nature.
As the sport has spread so has this form of aquatic nature religion. In June 2006, I found a book in an Istanbul bookshop, translated from German into English by a German publisher. It began with the claim that surfing “has a spiritual aura that you only get once you’ve experienced it” and it “never will lose its soul and spirit, because the magic that envelops you when surfing is far too powerful.”4
The ideas introduced in this chapter—that there is a mysterious magic in surfing that can only be apprehended directly through the experience; that surfing fosters self-realization; that commercialization of the practice is a defiling act but that even such acts cannot obviate its spiritual power; that surfing can lead to a life characterized by compassion toward other living beings—have been expressed repeatedly and increasingly within surfing subcultures. Indeed, a significant and increasing part of the evolving, global surfing world can be understood as a form of dark green religion, in which sensual experiences constitute its sacred center. These experiences, and the cultural enclaves in which people reflect upon them, foster understandings of nature as powerful, transformative, healing, and sacred. Such perceptions, in turn, often lead to ethical action in which Mother Nature, and especially its manifestation as Mother Ocean, is considered sacred and worthy of reverent care. Many surfers also develop feelings of communion and kinship with the nonhuman animals they encounter during their practice. These experiences sometimes take on an animistic ethos and lead surfers to activism on behalf of marine ecosystems and particular species.
Some of those who experience surfing as religious call themselves soul surfers, a term that can be traced to the 1970s in both the United States and Australia.5 There is neither definitive data on the number of surfers globally nor on the proportion of surfers who consider their practice to be spiritual or religious.6 That many surfers do regularly discuss the spiritual dimensions of their sport does, however, suggest that a significant proportion of the global surfing community considers surfing to be a religious practice.
The Ultimate Guide to Surfing, for example, asserted that surfing is “a powerful, elemental activity” involving “the pure act of riding on a pulse of nature’s energy,” which brings contentment and also the “magic that only comes from spending time on the moving canvas.”7 Explaining what this has to do with “soul,” Chris Gallagher added that the key is how the experience connects the surfer to nature, its energies, and its wild creatures, expressing the spirituality of belonging and connection that typifies dark green religion.8 Another soul surfer claimed that surfing “puts you one with nature, clears your soul of bad vibes, and can make you a more humble person.”9
Yet surfers are also known for sexism, territoriality and even violence, as practitioners battle to get the best wave or prevent newcomers from paddling out in places they consider special.10 Is it possible, then, that surfing fosters territorial feelings toward sacred places in which only some people are considered worthy to enter, and others are infidels or desecrating agents who must be excluded and suppressed?
By examining surfing subcultures with the lenses typically deployed by scholars of religion, the question of whether soul surfing fosters humility and connection with nature or exclusionary attitudes and behaviors can be clarified. Such analysis explores the role of myths, symbols, leaders, texts, technologies, and institutions, as well as devotee beliefs and practices, including those having to do with natural forces and living things.
Few elements of a religious worldview are more critical than cosmogony—the narrative understanding about how the world came to be. Among soul surfers there is no common story about the origins of the biosphere. There is, however, significant agreement regarding how surfing emerged, assumed a religious character, was suppressed for religious reasons, and began a revival in the early twentieth century.
Glenn Hening, who in 1984 founded the environmentalist Surfrider Foundation and assembled the team of surfer visionaries who would develop the organization, began during the late 1980s to explore the possibility that ancient Peruvians were the first surfers, basing his speculations on their art and architecture, which he began to learn about during a surfing trip.11 Ben Finney, a Southern Californian surfer, ocean lifeguard, and anthropologist, found evidence of ancient Peruvian wave riding that used small reed-woven boats as early as 3000 B.C.E.12
Until these suppositions, a somewhat less speculative origin myth, based on extant documentary records, had gained currency within surfing cultures. This narrative traced the origins of surfing to Eden-like Polynesian paradises, where people were at home in and at play with the forces and spirits of nature.13 For a millennium the people of the South Pacific rode waves on small boards. The practice was highly ritualized, the story continues, and this extended to stand-up board surfing, which developed later, perhaps first in Hawai’i. Before trees were felled to construct boards, for example, the Kahuna placed a fish offering by the tree and prayers were said. Additional rites were performed at the board’s dedication, all of which reflected an animistic spirituality.14
The arrival of Captain James Cook and other Europeans in 1778, however, with their guns, diseases, alcohol, and “strange new religion[,] led to the cultural implosion of the indigenous Hawaiian civilization,” including the near extinction of surfing culture.15 The surf-focused culture came under direct assault with the arrival of missionaries, beginning in 1820, who sought to destroy what they considered to be its pagan dimensions. This dark period of cultural genocide and deterioration almost ended the sport, according to surfing historians, and by the late nineteenth century surfing was rarely practiced.16
After Jack London and other adventurers began to write about the practice in the late nineteenth century, however, and commercial interests saw its potential as a tourist attraction, a surfing renaissance began. This occurred first in Hawai’i and soon after in California, where surfers adopted much of surfing’s Polynesian/Hawai’ian ethos. This revitalization was driven in part by George Freeth, the Irish Hawai’ian surfer lionized by Jack London in a 1907 magazine article. Freeth later moved to California, becoming a surfing icon as well as the state’s first professional lifeguard.17 But by most accounts, the most decisive figure in the revitalization and globalization of the sport was the charismatic full-blooded Hawai’ian swimmer and surfer, Duke Kahanamoku.
After swimming his way to an Olympic gold metal in 1912, Kahanamoku demonstrated surfing to enthusiastic crowds on both coasts of North America and then in Australia. Glenn Hening, who later in his activist career cofounded the Groundswell Society, commented, “The Duke promoted surfing around the world, and modern surfers see him as the embodiment of an ethical spirituality that may be just this side of a religious belief system.”18 Hening and many other soul surfers trace surfing’s “aloha spirit” to Kahanamoku. Among soul surfers, discussion of surfing’s aloha spirit is sometimes accompanied by understandings of the word aloha as originally having to do with one’s frontal presence and breath, and with the exchange of breath or spirit, and even the breath of life.19 For some surfers, and the native Hawai’ians they are inspired by and with whom they feel affinity, the expression of aloha is indeed as much a spiritual blessing as a salutation or goodbye. As Kekuhi Kealiikanakaole, a native Hawai’ian scholar explained, when I asked her about the meaning of Aloha:
“Alo” means your frontal presence. So when we say, “he alo a he alo” we mean face to face. “Ha” means breath. The importance of this word . . . is that when each of us breathe those cavities that we use to have air enter and leave are the same cavities with which we share the breath of a friend, neighbor, relative or acquaintance. That is the meaning. And surfing, well for the local surfer guy, it’s his/her daily spiritual experience, a sort of reconnection or meditation. On another level, the ocean for us is Kanaloa, or deep knowing and ancestral memories. This is why we need the salt water for cleansing, whether it’s a sea bath or just a stroll.20
There are clear affinities between such ideas and dark green spiritualities of connection, including those that understand wind and waters as holy.
In the wake of Kahanamoku’s travels, the mainstream of surfing evolved as a self-consciously “tribal” subculture in California and Australia, eventually expanding to other continents. As author Drew Kampion observed, as surf culture spread it maintained a Polynesian ethos in its rituals, language, symbols, lifestyle, and spirituality.21 The ritualizing mentioned even included sacrifices (usually of real or model surfboards in bonfires) and prayers to Mother Ocean to call forth waves, and such rituals were loosely based on what was known or surmised about Polynesian and Hawai’ian rites.22
Surfing historians credit Tom Blake (1902–1994) with the extension of Hawai’ian-flavored surfing spirituality to California. Born in northern Wisconsin, Blake saw a newsreel about surfing a decade later, met Duke Kahanamoku in a Michigan movie theater lobby as an eighteen-year-old, and soon afterward moved to Los Angeles to pursue the sport. He eventually revolutionized surfing by inventing lighter, hollow surfboards, thereby making surfing easier and more popular. Blake also became deeply involved in both lifeguarding and surfing subcultures in California, Hawai’i, and Florida before returning to Wisconsin in 1967. There he wrote the animistically titled “Voice of the Wave,” which was published in Surfing magazine in 1969.23 For its time the essay was remarkably innovative. Blake found a divine force in all of the waves in the universe, including ocean waves, concluding that “nature is synonymous with God.”24 In this essay and a subsequent one titled “The Voice of the Atom,” Blake expressed reverence for the sea and a biocentric kinship ethics, which was also the ground of his vegetarianism and belief in the equality of all peoples.25 He also articulated a metaphysics in which the atom was equated with the soul, and a belief that “even when we die, we are never lost, but revert back to the kingdom of the atom, nature, or God.”26 Blake here was articulating a kind of Gaian Naturalism akin to that found in many of those already discussed, wherein science and religion are reconciled in a pantheistic naturalism. He sometimes put his faith simply in this way: “Nature=God.”27
Blake’s spiritual message was not lost on soul surfers. For Kampion, Blake “enlivened the essential surfer’s philosophy of respect—for others, for history, for the power of nature. . . . He believed that it was all God. The intrinsic sustaining balance of the natural world is self-evident [to] . . . each surfer. If you ride waves long enough and keep your eyes and heart open, you get it.”28 Kampion accurately read Blake’s spiritual epistemology, one shared by many soul surfers, that the sacredness of nature will naturally occur to surfing’s open-hearted practitioners. Through such interpretations, Blake became a patron saint to the devotees of the surfing cult, as did Kahanamoku.
A biography of Blake well illustrates perceptions of him as a surfing saint-guru.29 In a review of it the author and surfboard shaper Dave Parmenter agreed, asserting that Blake was worthy of being at the right hand of Duke Kahanamoku in surfing’s guru pantheon:
When all the waves had been ridden . . . what looms above it all is Blake’s unique spirituality. He formulated a belief system that was predicated on the idea of “Nature=God,” and he practiced this faith out-of-doors in what he called “The Blessed Church Of The Open Sky.”
Some argue that surfing is a religion. If so, the great Hawaiian surfer and Olympic swimming champion Duke Kahanamoku would certainly have to be seen as surfing’s messiah or prophet, and from the vantage point of the present day we can see that Tom Blake became his chief apostle. . . .
The resulting friendship, with Duke as the catalyst, helped to accelerate a modern rebirth of the Hawaiian sport of kings, which had been in a state of lethargy brought on by the decimation of the Hawaiian people and their culture by Western encroachment. . . . The missionaries brought their western God to Hawaii, but in the end it was surfing missionaries such as Duke Kahanamoku and Tom Blake who had the last word. Not only is surfing more widespread than many established religions; it has also proved to be a far more peaceful, benevolent, and inclusive “faith” than most. Aside from isolated pockets of territoriality, surfers of many races and languages co-exist with a degree of tolerance and harmony that should be envied by many world faiths.30
Parmenter also expressed a naturalistic metaphysics of interconnection and profound environmental concern reminiscent of other practitioners of dark green religion.31
Parmenter’s perspective illustrates the ways in which many soul surfers had come to understand the narrative cosmogony of surfing by the early twenty-first century. Parmenter also noticed that surf culture had many of the things that usually constitute a religion (beliefs, saints, ethical ideals), and he had a sense that surfing had become a globalizing religious movement. Perhaps most remarkable, he expressed faith in the beneficence of this movement, that it could even play a role in promoting world peace and environmentalism, while still acknowledging that it had a shadow side.32
The emergence of such a perspective is difficult to imagine apart from the influence of other sources of dark green religion in American culture, as well as without the profound changes in religion that began largely in the 1960s and that decisively transformed the West’s religious land- and seascape. Surfing had become a bricolage, incorporating ideas far and wide.
During the 1960s cultural ferment, surfing’s spiritual revival intensified as it fused with new religious and political currents, blending antiestablishment and antihierarchal attitudes with holistic metaphysics that were connected to psychedelics and to religions originating in Asia, found in indigenous societies, in contemporary Paganism, and in America’s own metaphysical traditions. The impact was that surfing, for some, became a part of a wider American turn toward nature religion, and some of this assumed characteristics common in dark green religion.
The influence of the psychedelic age was then and can still be discerned in surfing cultures. Graphics from surf magazines, surf-film posters, surf-music album covers, and designs on surfboards and other elements of surfing’s material culture—especially those dating to the 1960s and 1970s—illustrate the sport’s psychedelic dimension.33 Beginning in the late 1960s, surf movies revealed that the sport had “proudly and enthusiastically joined the counterculture,” overtly promoting LSD and other drugs, including as spiritual aids.34 The titles and advertising copy on film posters show the development of nature spirituality in the sport and how this was sometimes intertwined with the psychedelic era. The film The Natural Art (1969) was “an organic 90 minutes of positive vibrations.” Pacific Vibrations (1970) resembled “Woodstock on a wave,” and its famous poster was crafted by Rick Griffin, one of San Francisco’s best-known psychedelic-era illustrators, who also produced cartoons in surfing magazines that depicted the sport as a mystical, nature-bonding experience.35
This is unsurprising because two of the most perennial themes in surf movies are surfing as an ecstatic and mystical experience and the pursuit of perfect waves. During the 1960s and 1970s, surf movies had not yet gone Hollywood; they were usually shown at civic auditoriums, fraternal clubs, and other small venues, where they were greeted with riotous enthusiasm, reminding those present of the experiences they all pursued. Having seen surf movies in such places, it is easy for me to retroactively apply scholarly lenses learned in part from the anthropologist Victor Turner, and to view these events as powerful ritual forms that produce and/or reinforce the perception that surfing induces liminal experiences. These events also fostered a collective identity, often expressed with references to the surfing “tribe.” Turner can help us understand why some prominent soul surfers today suggest that surf film viewing is best when it is a collective experience, held in intimate, noncommercial venues.36
In addition to reinforcing the “stoked” feeling that surfing brings, surf films reprised the dream of Edenic return common within surfing cultures. The most famous surf film, Bruce Brown’s Endless Summer (1963), depicted a global search for pristine paradises as well as “the perfect wave.” According to Matt Warshaw, the film became “the sport’s finest emotional and spiritual envoy,” explaining even to those who had never surfed how surfing feels.37 Similarly, Morning of the Earth (1972), which was produced by the Australian Albert Falzon, focused on surfing in Australian and Indonesian locales constructed as paradises. Its poster described the movie as “a fantasy of surfers living in three unspoiled lands and playing in nature’s ocean.” Surfer magazine’s review explained that the film was “about the Garden of Eden, plus waves, minus serpent.”38
Almost every issue of the hundreds of surfing magazines reprise the Edenic theme, showing artistic depictions and photographs of pristine beaches, beautiful waves, and ocean-loving communities. Articles often feature pilgrimages to such places and the pursuit of harmonious relationships with the people and habitats there. The two surfing magazines that best represent this genre are the beautifully produced Surfer’s Journal (from 1992), which eschews (defiling) advertising, and Surfer’s Path (from 1997). The latter magazine especially insists that the “surfer’s path” must also involve the quest for environmental sustainability, announcing in 2004 that it would henceforth use only “100% post-consumer recycled paper [and] non-GMO soy-based inks.” In 2005 it established Green Wave Awards to recognize environmental initiatives within the surf industry.39 This magazine also explained its title by referring to spiritual pilgrimage: “Who knows what it means to be a surfer? Perhaps it’s something in our exposure and connection to the passions of nature that makes our lives wildly different from those of the uninitiated. One thing we know for sure: we want those perfect waves. . . . Like the pilgrim or the holy man, we follow our own roads to our own perfection. Call it want you will, we call it The Surfer’s Path.”40
Such statements have much in common with the long-standing depiction of the sublime in nature in American and European landscape art, which is one of the major tributaries of dark green religion. Such art depicts natural habitats as sublime places and pilgrimages to them as a way to discover one’s authentic self.41
Drew Kampion, twenty-four years old in 1968, began to make his own contributions to the construction of surfing as a nature religion when he became the editor of Surfer magazine.42 According to Matt Warshaw, who also took a turn editing Surfer, Kampion “led the effort to transform the industry-leading magazine from a . . . sports publication into an innovative, mischievous, drug-influenced counterculture journal.”43 With the books he produced in subsequent years, and his contributions as an editor and writer for Surfer’s Path a generation later, Kampion played an especially influential role in promoting surfing as a practice with religious value, also arguing the view common among soul surfers that surfing can put human follies and tragedies in perspective and can help people find peace of mind in a turbulent and troubled world. In diverse ways, including in their motion pictures, soul surfers articulate the peace and equanimity they find nowhere else than in the ocean.44
Like many in America and beyond during the 1960s and 1970s, some surfers were drawn to religions originating in Asia, which grew popular among those seeking alternatives to what they saw as a materialistic and violent mass culture. Most famous among such surfers was Gerry Lopez, who had what many considered the most elegant surfing style of all time and who was one of the first who learned to “rip” (surf awesomely) the Banzai Pipeline in Hawai’i. His image sitting in lotus position appeared repeatedly in surfing publications, beginning in 1968, as he became known for his Zen-like equanimity in monster surf.45 Reflecting on this era and his surfer friends of the time, Lopez later recalled, “We became hippies and got into yoga and that whole self realization thing and started to realize that those moments when you were completely focused on riding a wave are actually kind of spiritual . . . religious moments.”46 Lopez led explorations of discovery to paradises he likened to heaven, in Indonesia and beyond. Indeed, surf travel to pristine, untrammeled surfing Shangri-las is a form of pilgrimage that has long been a centerpiece of surf culture.
Asian religion has continued to infuse surf culture and spirituality, as seen in art published in surfing magazines as well as in surfing-themed decor. Another example of surfing being linked to Asian religion is found in the views of Marilyn Edwards, the publisher of Wahine, a surfing magazine that caters to female surfers. She believes that surfing, as a Zen-like experience, is not only a male province. Blending surfing spirituality with an ecofeminist sensibility, she said, “When I see a female on a wave, I see the connectedness with the wave. Women’s emotional energy is about unity. The masculine energy is more independent, more ‘me’ out front. And that is not true for all men, but sometimes men surf ‘on’ the wave, whereas women surf ‘with’ the wave.”47 Surfing is not about achievement, she continued, “It is about balance, blend and unity. . . . The Zen of surfing is about being mindful of the energy you are joining forces with, not conquering it.” Among other things, Edwards was articulating the spirituality of connection and belonging shared by many soul surfers.48
For some surfers this sense of belonging to nature represents an important dimension of the experience. When such feelings were incubated in the environmental age, they inspired kinship feelings with nonhuman organisms and environmentalist action.
Overt surfing environmentalism began as early as 1961 when Save Our Surf, the first surfing environmental organization, was founded in Hawai’i.49 It was formed to stop a development that would have ruined a surfing break, but it soon developed an environmentalist agenda. In Southern California in 1984, surfer-activists formed the Surfrider Foundation, initially to prevent the destruction of prime surfing breaks and to promote the positive dimensions of surfing culture. Like Save Our Surf, however, Surfrider soon developed a clear environmentalist identity, even adding as a primary principle a concern for biodiversity.50 This development was in large part due to Tom Pratte, one of Surfrider’s cofounders, who had developed an affinity for Arne Naess, deep ecology, and radical environmentalism as an environmental studies student at California State University, Humboldt.51 This was the campus where one of the early scholarly proponents of deep ecology taught, the sociology professor Bill Devall. Pratte hoped to shape Surfrider so that it would become effective at protecting marine ecosystems. By 2008 the foundation boasted fifty thousand members and more than eighty chapters and affiliated groups around the world.
Despite its avowed environmentalism, however, in 1994 a number of individuals split from Surfrider, complaining that it was insufficiently aggressive in defense of nature. They formed the Surfers’ Environmental Alliance, borrowing its ecocentric mission statement directly from Aldo Leopold (demonstrating further the range of his influence), declaring that their goal was to “preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community.”52 They nevertheless stressed that they still respected their comrades at Surfrider and considered themselves all part of the same tribe.53
In 2001, Glenn Hening led another start-up effort, cofounding the Groundswell Society with two surfer colleagues. The society celebrates indigenous cultures and their connection to the sea, evoking images of a past and hoped-for paradise in which people would live in harmony with nature. Hening sought to reprise the aloha spirit of the sport, which he felt had been marred by commercialism and violence. His passions extended to a desire to help the surfing community better appreciate and develop the best of its own culture, including its spirituality.54
There appear to be a number of affinities between surfing and dark green religion. The sport has a sacred story wherein an earlier, ecologically harmonious culture, which was spiritually attuned to nature, was nearly exterminated during the colonial mission period. Surfing was revived and spread globally by charismatic spiritual leaders during the twentieth century, leading many surfers to increasingly assume a religious and environmentalist identity. Some of them drew on the same sources that undergird other forms of dark green religion. One study even found a positive correlation between the length of time as a surfer and environmentalist concern.55
Surfing spirituality is, of course, grounded primarily in the experience of surfing and the often-ritualized behaviors associated with it. This includes the construction and aesthetic embellishment of the materials needed for the practice, which symbolize and express the surfer’s identity.
Surfing’s most important ritual dimension is rising at dawn to greet the sun, waves, and sea creatures. The practice also has a collective if irregular service, involving attendance at surf films, which reminds surfers of the experience and reinforces tribal identity. Other identity-expressing and solidarity-promoting adornments, objects, and practices are prevalent: surfers read and scatter surf magazines about their homes, mark their automobiles with surfing symbols and slogans, decorate their houses with surf and nature-themed art, listen to surf music, and wear Hawai’ian shirts or dresses or clothing covered with ritual objects (like surfboards).
As we have seen, some surfers have come to see their practice as religious. Some arrive at this understanding by recognizing themselves and their subculture after reading or hearing such an analysis. After I posted online a draft article about surfing spirituality and invited surfers to comment, for example, I received numerous messages expressing approval. I also received a request from Drift magazine editor Howard Swanwick to publish excerpts. When my article appeared, Swanwick explained his rationale for featuring it: “For most of my life it seemed that religious ideals are nothing more than conjecture, but then I started surfing. I have come to understand that my religion is nature, just as Blake discovered. . . . Bron Taylor’s piece captured my imagination, and also summarized my own thoughts toward religion and secular beliefs.”56 Matt Walker, a senior editor of Surfing, read my piece and reacted in a way similar to Swanwick. He later called for an interview. In the article he subsequently wrote, he further buttressed my argument that surfing has a strong religious dimension:
In the absence of all other forms of worship, surfing has become my religion. My rock. My go-to source for solace and celebration. A way to track time and form social bonds and—most importantly—a sanctuary where I feel a strong spiritual connection to something ultimately unknowable. Where, I find myself every once in a while—for no special reason—looking skyward and saying “thanks” to whatever strange cosmic forces wait behind it all. And, as weird as that sounds to some people, I know I’m not alone. In fact, I’m less alone than ever.57
This was both a personal confession and an observation from deep within the subculture to the effect that surfing was increasingly being understood as religious. Quoting widely from my article and our interview, Walker found “cool” the idea that surfing could be called “aquatic nature religion” and commented that after 150 years of “being told surfing was sinful,” surfers had been “screaming for someone to recognize our favorite pagan ritual as a legitimate act of worship.” Another illuminating passage reinforces that insiders increasingly recognize the religious dimensions of their practice: “Taylor’s manifesto . . . is . . . the greatest validation of surfing’s spiritual value by outside sources, a trend that’s been on the rise for the past 10 to 15 years, as more new humans enter the water seeking another action sport thrill—and find themselves leaving somehow reborn.”58
These two surfing-magazine editors, Swanwick and Walker, clearly want to promote an understanding of surfing as religion. Indeed, Walker confessed his own belief and worries about its possible shadow side—the territorial feelings and sense of superiority over nonsurfers and less practiced surfers that is common in surfing cultures. He then wrote, as have other soul surfers, that surfers should labor to teach the best of their spiritual traditions and to be more inclusive. He concluded by urging his readers to “invite everyone into our church.” For, “if you—like me—believe surfing is a spiritual connection and whatever created this universe doesn’t exclude one solitary soul, then you have a moral obligation to live out that belief.”59
These sentiments expressed by Swanwick and Walker suggest that understanding surfing as religious is not something I have concocted. It is, rather, a phenomenon I have observed and with which some surfers identify. Moreover, at least some surfing spirituality is dark green and has inspired surfing environmentalism. In this light it is unsurprising that an increasing number of the nearly four hundred surfing magazines published globally aspire to publish in environmentally friendly ways.
It is the sensuous experience of surfing, however, that is the root of its religious ethos. For some surfers, such experience leads to feelings of humility, belonging, connection, and a reverence for life. Surfers also report that the practice can lead to personal ecstatic experience, healing, life purpose, and can even shed light on “the meaning of life.”60 Such is the rhetoric of surfing subcultures. Many surfers refer to the sea as Mother Ocean, just as the wahine did that day in a San Diego surf shop.61 Mother Ocean as a trope goes back at least to Surfer magazine, with the beginning in 1970 of its environmentalist “For Our Mother Ocean” column.62 Mother Ocean has become a metaphor for intimacy with the sea, functioning like Mother Earth does for terrestrial participants in dark green religion.
A segment from the movie Five Summer Stories (1972) illustrates the point. After footage of surfers both riding and wiping out on big waves that break over a reef at the famous Banzai Pipeline in Hawai’i, the film turned to more graceful surfing on smaller waves, as the background music changed from dramatic and energetic to melodic and gentle. These shifts seemed designed to evoke the sublime as the narrator’s voice intoned, “On smaller days, Pipeline is the perfect place for intimate relationships with Mother Ocean.” Here is the heart of surfing spirituality for many—its connection to Mother Ocean understood as a beneficent, personal presence. This is arguably a form of Gaian spirituality.
Other surfing neologisms, such as the exclamation “cowabunga!” and references to being “stoked,” express the joy if not ecstasy that can accompany surfing. Such terminology testifies to the power of the practice. So does surf writing, which repeatedly returns to the experience of wave riding, understanding it as the sensual center of the sport. This practice does what many religions purport to do, namely, it transforms consciousness and facilitates the development of an authentic, awakened self. Some of the most dramatic examples of heightened consciousness are what happens perceptually in dangerous situations, especially when a surfer is riding “in the tube” of a large hollow wave. Such situations intensely focus one’s attention, forcing one to truly “live in the moment.” This kind of presence is a centerpiece of certain religions originating in Asia (especially Zen and some other forms of Buddhism). But it is also an idea that New Age subcultures have appropriated. Living in the moment is believed to bring peace, wisdom, and divine purpose.
Such notions are often equated with a Zen state of mind, as Gerry Lopez did in a Surfer magazine interview: “To be truly successful at riding a wave we’re approaching a Zen state of mind . . . and you’re in the pure moment. Other parts of your life might be in shambles, but because you’re tapping into the source you’re truly happy.”63 Lopez did not define what he meant by “the source.” Neither did the surf shop youth who urged Agent Utah to find this source and “change his life” by getting in touch with it. Yet one can surmise that it has something to do with the source of life, however differently this can be understood, and that Lopez and the young surfer would both agree that connecting with this source is part of the surfing experience. Not incidentally, Agent Utah did discover the joy and peace of surfing and at the end of the film left his mundane existence as a law-enforcement officer to follow the surfer’s path.
What is it about surfing that gives it a religious aura? Joseph Price, in an article analyzing the religious dimensions of outdoor recreational practices (including surfing), drew on a study by the research psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who concluded that there are characteristics of peak experiences that are commonly interpreted as religious and that are similar in diverse cultures. Csikszentmihalyi used the word flow to describe these experiences. He claimed that they “usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”64 For Csikszentmihalyi, and Price who drew upon his study, flow is “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost.”65
Surfers who find their pastime addictive might well find this study interesting as they wonder why they are willing to assume its inherent risks. Jay Moriarity found part of the answer in the way surfing transforms consciousness. For this he offered a naturalistic explanation of fear, understanding it as an adaptive form of evolution: “A good dose of fear is soothing for the human psyche. When the brain detects danger, the human body sends out norepinephrine to every part of the body. Once this danger has passed, the body sends out dopamine to the brain, a pleasurable chemical, as a way to congratulate the brain for surviving. These chemicals are what make people want to surf big waves.”66
Although Moriarity found this naturalistic explanation plausible, he nevertheless labeled surfing spiritual. Whatever brain chemistry may be involved in what surfers crave (which cognitive science will likely illuminate further in coming years), certain patterns are reflected in how surfers describe their experience.67 This is certainly true when surfers recall dangerous surfing, as mentioned above, that can call into question one’s ordinary sense of time: “Riding in the tube is by far the most frightening and exhilarating part of surfing. One top surfer in the 1970’s, Shaun Thomson [sic], summed up its indescribable delights by saying that ‘time slows down in the tube.’ ”68 These words of South African surfing champion Shaun Tomson have been repeated often, as have similar formulations, whether in conversation, publications, or in online discussion groups. Asked how he could stay calm in the tube, for example, Gerry Lopez replied, “The faster I go out there the slower things seem to happen.”69 Glenn Hening concluded that even though surfing sometimes involves fear and pain, it is “from the unique and extraordinary vision while riding inside a perfect wave [that] the mystic kernel of the religious in surfing grows.”70
From the many descriptions of surfers’ experience, it is easy to see why they make such statements. It is also unsurprising that many surfers refer to surfing as going to church, or use other religious terminology, thus construing their experiences as spiritual or religious.
As with most dark green religion, for soul surfers their practice evokes feelings of belonging and communion with other living beings, with the earth’s environmental systems, and even with the universe itself. They also often believe that such connections are transformative and healing. Mandy Caruso, for example, wrote a story in which Mother Ocean washed away her fears and became an agent of healing by bringing her a sea turtle as an oracle of hope during a time when she was preparing for a mastectomy to treat breast cancer. In a Surfer’s Path article, which was accompanied by paintings depicting her surfing with animal companions, Caruso related her story with words that demonstrated the importance of animistic Hawai’ian themes among surfers:
In the Hawaiian culture, all ohanas, all families, have guiding spirits that watch over them. These spirits, usually dead ancestors, take visible form in the shape of animals: sharks, owls, turtles. The belief is that . . . at crucial moments . . . your guiding spirit, your amakua, will appear to you, and you will know you’re being given a message, a warning, or a blessing.
Now, being haole (white) and a malahini (not born Ka’maaina—in Hawaii), I liked the idea of the amakua, but I never expected to have one.
Yet, years before I learned to board surf, in the darkness before dawn, I would rise and drive to a little cove with the gentlest, most caressing bodysurfing waves in the world. . . . One morning, as I was . . . reveling in the luscious velvet caress of the waves, a head suddenly popped out of the foam beside me. My fast-beating heart caught in my throat as a large turtle floated to the surface of the water. His ancient gaze considered me for moments that seemed like eternities. It was as if the Earth herself had come to look at me.
Long, long the turtle looked at me, and I looked at the turtle. I heard a sound, knew a wave was coming, and glanced out at the entrance of the cove. I saw it would be a good, surfable wave, and glanced back at the turtle.
Still the turtle stayed right beside me, looking, watching, waiting.
The wave came, I leapt into it . . . and the turtle surfed right alongside me, in perfect position. Wave after wave we rode together that glittering, blue dawn, and the turtle stayed as close to me as my outstretched arm.71
The rest of Caruso’s story described how she received strength and courage from her aquatic friend, and she concluded with gratitude to the ocean for her healing. Caruso thus found communion with another being through eye-to-eye contact and believed she received healing from nature, reprising the theme that the ocean and sea creatures can bring healing, serenity, and even ecstatic experience.
Many soul surfers believe that nature in general and Mother Ocean in particular can assist with physical and psychological healing.72 Keith Glendon wrote similarly about a teenaged surfing star, Chad Compton, who was sent into a life-threatening coma after a skateboarding accident. Glendon described how the surfing tribe sent prayers and “healing vibes,” while appealing “to the spirit of the sea,” after which the teenager awoke and soon returned to the sea.73 As Glendon put the credo-like moral of the story: “The sea holds a magic for those of us who know her. A magic so simple, pure and powerful it works as an unseen force in our souls. We’re drawn to her. The spirit of the sea moves in us as we move within her. . . . The sea brings comfort, solace, release and escape. The sea brings healing. The spirit of the sea, for some of us, is the very essence of life.”
Surfing-related healing may be more than physical or psychological, however, as Colleen McGloin argued in her study of surfing cultures in Australia. She described a documentary produced by aboriginal surfers that depicts an indigenous surfing contest, which was sponsored by the international surf company Billabong. According to McGloin, the film Surfing the Healing Wave (1999) revealed “a difference in philosophy and practice, both in conceptions of the beach and in the practice of surfing” between aboriginal and mainstream surfers.74 In comparison to surf films produced by white surfers, there was less emphasis on competition, surfing shots, and beautiful women. Instead, there were pictures of families and children, earnest discussion of aboriginal struggles and land rights, and respectful depiction of rituals that took place. McGloin concluded that the event and the film contributed to personal and cultural healing, helping aboriginal “blackfellas” (a term used by aboriginals in Australia to refer to themselves) get back in touch with their cultures and turn away from destructive white ways.
McGloin also recorded how the aboriginal surfer Dhinawan G. contrasted his own surfing culture with that of “whitefellas”: “When Aboriginal people are in the ocean, they know they are in their country. They belong to it. They don’t own it. . . . Surf rage? What’s that about, that’s white man’s culture. We know there is always another wave. Surfing’s about being part of the wave. I have a shark tattoo on my body. This is . . . to remind me that the ocean is superior to me and that I shouldn’t try to conquer it.”75 With these words, Dhinawan expressed both a spirituality of belonging and the kind of humility that corresponds to nonanthropocentric environmental ethics. His thoughts seemed to echo that of an earlier indigenous surfer, Duke Kahanamoku: “You know, there are waves coming in all the time, you don’t have to worry about that. Just take your time—wave come. Let the other guys go; catch another wave.”76 Both Dhinawan and McGloin seemed unaware, however, that many nonindigenous surfers would applaud what she found in that aboriginal event and would wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments expressed by Dhinawan. Many nonindigenous surfers have drawn surfing-related ethics from Kahanamoku’s aloha spirit—including surfing historian Matt Warshaw, who has promoted Kahanamoku’s views; and Glenn Hening, whose Groundswell Society organizes events and programs that embody many of the virtues that McGloin found among aboriginal surfers.
Another long-term surfer who demonstrates such affinities is Pierce Flynn, who earned a doctorate in semiotics and served as executive director of the Surfrider Foundation from 1995 to 1999. Between 1996 and 1999 he also produced three Music for Our Mother Ocean CDs to raise funds for Surfrider. In 2001 Flynn was interviewed by Hening, who asked him about his best surfing experience. It had occurred only a short time before, Flynn said, and he elaborated:
While surfing after time spent in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I was mindful of how that snowmelt had fed the ocean nearby. I felt the Chumash Ancestors present somehow.77 I felt appreciative to be alive. As I rode beautiful, rolling waves I noticed the moon starting to reflect in the wave faces and even on the droplets of my board. I felt stoned as a gopher, but it was a natural high, I joked pleasantly with the other surfers in the water and it felt like aloha ohana.
My best surfing experiences are those ongoing moments, like this one, where I feel and intuit/think everything together and the eternal now emerges. I want everybody to somehow receive the benefits of this experience, it is so rare. That becomes my meditation and that enhances my surfing experience because it is now somehow shared with everything and everyone. I think this is the essential idea behind the Surfrider Foundation and what provides for its real greatness. Sharing the positive force that you have been given by the waves. Living aloha.78
Like many other soul surfers, Flynn feels affinity with indigenous, seafaring peoples, and this was woven into his own spirituality, including by means of his invocation of aloha.
Surfer intellectuals may be especially adept at expressing a spiritual belonging to nature, as Drew Kampion did in The Book of Waves: “Everything is waves. The universe of space and matter is charged with energy . . . waves of energy. Like echoes of the heartbeat of the absolute being, waves give expression to the divine will. They give form to the universe. . . . Waves are the imprint, the signature, not only of life, but of existence itself.”79 In Stoked!, Kampion wrote similarly: “Surfing is magic, riding liquid echoes of cosmic energy at the wild fringes of continents.” These words were superimposed over the book’s final photograph, a surfer sitting on his board facing a huge setting sun with hands raised in symbolic embrace of these cosmic energies.80 Such writings and images show that for many surfers the heart of their spirituality lies in a deeply felt connection to Mother Ocean and the energies of the universe.
Equally critical for many soul surfers is the communion they feel with nonhuman creatures while engaged in their sport. As expressed by Chris Gallagher, “I think the soul [in soul surfing] comes into it more when a surfer appreciates nature and the true gift of surfing. Much of the satisfaction comes . . . from . . . the connection made with nature. Dolphins, whales, fish, birds, trees, reefs, sunsets—take these things away and you strip a perfect wave of its soul.”81 For many surfers, interspecies encounters are more important to surfing spirituality than experiences with fast and dangerous waves, even constituting the kind of Naturalistic Animism repeatedly found in dark green religion.
With my research into surfing spirituality well underway I had a conversation in December 2004 with Gordon LaBedz, an ardent surfer and physician from Southern California.82 A tenacious Sierra Club activist, LaBedz helped the Surfrider Foundation during the 1990s to develop its chapter structure and thereby its economic viability.83 LaBedz had also been a regular reader of the radical environmental journal Earth First!, and while critical of much in that movement, he shared its biocentrism. When I described how some surfers understood the practice as religious, he first expressed skepticism and said that he was an atheist. But he was nevertheless intrigued with the idea of a close relationship between religion and nature and asked, “What is spirituality?” I responded by asking him whether he had ever seen the Sierra Club poster with tree trunks and human legs intertwined, nearly indistinguishable, with prose stating that Sierra Club activists are motivated by a sense of belonging and connection to the earth (figure 1).
LaBedz had seen the poster and found it “powerful and moving.” He especially appreciated “its powerful message about how we are all a part of nature.” Bernard Zaleha, who was national vice president of the Sierra Club from 2004 to 2006, and was participating in the conversation, added that the poster was one of the favorites of the Carl Pope, then the club’s executive director, who was also moved by the sentiments expressed in it.84
I returned to LaBedz’s question about spirituality and answered that, for a growing number of scholars, there is no obvious boundary between spirituality and religion. I added that, while there is no consensus regarding the roots of the term religion, some trace its origins to words having to do with being bound to, tied, or connected, presumably in this context with something greater than oneself. I also suggested that religion confers meaning and provides transformative and healing power, and that for me this need not involve nonmaterial spiritual beings.
FIGURE 1. This Sierra Club poster includes statements that clearly reflect dark green religious sentiments, including:
This is not about getting back to nature. It is about understanding we’ve never left.
We were born here and we’re part of it—like any ant, fish, rock, or blade of grass.
When you accept your connection to nature, suddenly you can’t look at the world without seeing something very personal in it.
You are part of it, and you work for the planet because it gives you joy to do so.
You work for the planet because you belong to it.
As we continued the conversation we turned to the experience of surfing. LaBedz clearly understood and agreed with those who believe that surfing involves transformational systems of energy. I mentioned Sierra Club founder John Muir’s dangerous and dramatic mountaineering experiences, which provoked instances of Zen-like satori where he felt time slowing down and the universe flowing through his body, enabling his escape, providing a kind of divine rescue. I mentioned similar experiences I have had, while surfing, for example, and also during my state park career when engaged in cliff or ocean rescues, when time seemed to stand still, allowing a remarkable clarity of vision, seeming to make possible a safe if unlikely outcome.
Like many surfers, LaBedz identified with such experiences. Then he mentioned that with rare exceptions he goes surfing every day at dawn. I commented on the sense of connection, communication, and even communion with nonhuman life that one can feel while offshore surfing. At this statement he became even more animated. He definitely felt deep kinship with the ocean creatures he encountered during his early mornings. Like many others for whom wildness is the centerpiece of spirituality, LaBedz spoke glowingly of how wild the ocean is and how wonderful it is to put the city behind him and have in front of him so much wildness.
LaBedz’s thoughts and a short essay by Kampion are aquatic echoes of Thoreau’s aphorism, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” In Kampion’s words, “the wild restores the essential human spirit. The wild is where we come from. Every meeting with it brings us more fully into our eyes and ears and lungs and fingertips. Without the wild, we are asleep in our lives.”85 Kampion then described the ways that surfers encounter the wild and how it transforms their consciousness.
These are common perceptions among soul surfers.
Two days after my conversation with LaBedz, after he had returned home to California, he sent an e-mail to me and Zaleha: “5:30 AM, sitting next to the Seal Beach Pier by myself, looking out at Mother Ocean. I realized that you guys have convinced me that there is a religiosity to environmentalism. You guys won over a hardened atheist-materialist.”
LaBedz’s e-mail message, and the discussion throughout this chapter, underscore several impressions about surfing that apply to dark green religion more generally: whether nature-related practices and experiences can be considered religious depends on how religion-related terms are constructed and understood. Under the flexible definitions guiding this study, what might seem at first to be a mundane activity is revealed as sacred. This illustrates what the sociology of knowledge has long taught: what people perceive and believe is shaped by conversation. Therefore, as more surfers speak of their pastime as religious, more will come to see it in this way. As the surf magazine editors demonstrate, this is a process well underway. And the same sorts of dynamics are occurring with other outdoor sports and activities, although they seem not so far advanced: some fishers (especially fly-fishers), whitewater kayakers, skiers (especially backcountry), rock climbers and other mountaineers, for example, also have experiences they construe as religious.86
Observers of surfing enclaves certainly have noticed that the practice and its devotees engage in behaviors that resemble traditional religions. Surfers have myths, rituals, symbols, terminology, and technology; a sense that some places, animals, and plants are especially sacred; convictions regarding what constitutes proper relationships within the community of practitioners as well as with outsiders, human and not. As is the case with other forms of dark green religion, surfing spirituality is a bricolage. Some blend their surfing spirituality with religions (or aspects of them) that have Abrahamic or Asian roots. Others feel more affinity with indigenous traditions or Paganism. Still others are skeptical about conventional religious beliefs. This last kind of surfer finds sufficient resources in the surfing experience itself, and even in scientific ways of understanding it, to construct meaningful spiritual lives. For these surfers, it is enough to tap into the source of life, which from an evolutionary standpoint, whatever else it may be, is the sea itself.
For the current study it is most important to note that there are a significant number of surfers who, through the sport itself and the conversations and practices surrounding it, have developed a sense of connection and belonging to nature (to Mother Ocean in particular) and to the diverse life-forms they encounter during their practice. The resulting spirituality has both animistic and Gaian dimensions. Sometimes referring to themselves as soul surfers, they distinguish themselves from those who have not learned surfing’s spiritual lessons, express humility about their place in the world and reverence toward it, and feel a deep sense of kinship and communion with nonhuman beings. They desire to help heal people and the planet. They also report that the practice itself can bring a wide range of benefits: physical, psychological, cultural, and spiritual. And many soul surfers become ambassadors if not evangelists for the practice, introducing prospective devotees to their meaning-filled world.
As surfing continues to spread, there is every reason to expect that some engaged in it will continue to represent it as a contemporary religious alternative. Soul surfing does not appear to be extreme or dangerous, as do some forms of radical environmentalism. This is not to say that it would be surprising if some of its devotees were to take up militant tactics in the cause of environmental protection. While soul surfers may struggle with their own sense of spiritual superiority and territorial feelings, they are the ones who are the most aware and resistant to the shadow side of their sport. Soul surfers appear, therefore, to be a counterweight to the kind of territoriality and violence that sometimes accompanies the sport. Meanwhile, such surfers are helping the sport to gradually develop an environmentalist identity.
For many, this analytic surfing safari will be surprising. But there are other manifestations of dark green religion that are even more shocking, promising, and perilous.
