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R
|
iding a bike was a
skill learnt in the historic-fog of personal history.
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| Professor Trevor Hancock used this image to illustrate the advantages to a community of "roaming" - advantages now largely lost. |
That relatively simple skill brought many bonuses and chief
among them was freedom.
Suddenly the world was my oyster (well, the geographical
wilds of Echuca east at least) and I was free to roam, pretty much at will.
That wonderful freedom allowed to myself and my friends was
not considered much until recently when a Canada’s Professor Trevor Hancock talked
about how stronger, resilient and healthier communities were when kids had the
freedom to roam.
That roaming, he explained unintentionally informed kids
about their community in that they got to know a variety of people, understand
how it worked, its strengths, weaknesses and along with that understood and
learnt much about themselves, all things that enriched them personally and
aligned them, ultimately with the unstated aims of their community.
A pictorial image illustrated clearly how our roaming has
been reduced to almost nil as the decades have passed taking with it an almost
inexplicable sense of community that arose from kids roaming about the place.
The image illustrated that a kid of today could roam,
unaccompanied, about 300 metres from his home; his mother less than a
kilometre; his grandfather nearly two kilometres and his great grandfather
regularly roamed about 10 kilometres to go fishing.
The visiting professor lamented the loss of roaming and was
able to equate it with the decline in the broader wellbeing of community,
suggesting that it illustrated, in a practical sense, our personal disconnect
with nature.
Humans are unquestionably a part of nature and have long and
rich history of being a part of it, until modernity really took hold.
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| Professor Trevor Hancock - he extolls the community benefits of "roaming". |
Humans have been hand-in-glove with nature for most of their
existence, and many still are, but as Professor Hancock pointed out, we now
spend 80 per cent of our time in a building, and so disconnected from nature,
and of the other 10 per cent, half of that is spent inside a vehicle..
That disconnect from nature is now almost total and what is
happening in the world indicates that such remoteness is bringing unintended
consequences – we are almost absolutely insensitive to the impact our behaviour
is having on earth’s climate system.
Roaming, of course is not the solution, rather just a small
part of it.
The almost incommunicable health roaming brought to our
communities appears to be lost forever as most people, reacting to the few
stories given broad coverage in our popular media about isolated violent
behaviour keep their children pretty much within reach, killing off their
natural adventurous spirit.
Learning to ride a bike was about freedom and primed my
willingness to engage with the other, a desire still with me today.
