Longboarder magazine volume four is spearheaded by themes of Blue Health and Green Diesel. Blue Health is that body boost we get when we surf, bathed in a chemical cocktail of charged ions whipped up by breaking waves. Green Diesel is the exact opposite - the impactful petrochemicals we burn up to travel to waves. This awesome new volume explores the paradoxes of the blue and green sides of longboard surfing. But first we have to tackle a fault-line in surf culture - individualism. We are not encouraged ‘to share’ in surfing. So in this volume we celebrate the ideology of indigenous South Africans who cherish ‘ubuntu’, or ‘togetherness’ and ‘collectivism’ and ‘collaboration’. The outcome can be longboarding at its most inspired, blue health at it’s very best, slicing in style across the alchemical transformation of green glass to white foam.
To the background beat of ubuntu, the message of this volume is that longboarding is inclusive and not exclusive. Ubuntu invites talking with other surfers, reminiscing, sharing stories; and then communing with sealife. So, from Uruguay to Iceland, alongside El Salvador, Sweden, Norway, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Morocco, Papua New Guinea, Mexico, the Philippines, Spain, California, Cornwall and Devon, our contributors explore the blue health of longboarding in conversation with activists and artists and alchemical wavescapes sought by all travellers and locals.
Contributors include Dom Stone, Tom Prentice, Chris Burkard, Elli Thor, Armando Márquez, Malva Lorensson, Ignacio Pignataro, Giulia Panzetti, Mike Guest, Hamid Naciri, James, Paige and Zennor Parry, Carl Rowlinson, Sam Manning, James Stuart, Matty Hannon, Nathan Benham, Virginia Von Westphalen, Coko If and Ryan Watts.
Throughout the volume, there is regular reminder of our pressing duty to conserve the fluid ‘wild’. As longboarders, we must insist that the technologies that sustain every sweet noseride continue to explore sustainable futures. We must square our intense hunger for the punchy pockets in life-enhancing waters with these more extreme climate-change driven storms and natural hazards. It is no longer simply surfers against sewage, but surfers for sustainability - and for public health, spearheaded by the blue health movement that calls on us to reconnect with blue and green spaces rather than slump in front of the social media feed on our ‘phones.
