Roaming brings many benefits both to individuals and communities

R

iding a bike was a skill learnt in the historic-fog of personal history.

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.

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.