Leaving the body behind

Another dispatch from a noted holiday spot: this is Annecy, Haute-Savoie, in the French Alps, with its steep green-clad mountains and immaculately clean deep blue lake – warm enough thanks to a constant Southern sun through spring and summer for the fussiest of urbanites to swim in. And in the winter there’s snow for skiing: from October through April, year in and year out – making this region a prime holiday destination for six months or more of the year.

It’s curious to reflect that the high Alps as little as 200 years ago were regarded with horror as quite beyond the pale by the cultivated upper classes of Paris, Lyons or Geneva.

The simple log houses, which nowadays have turned into million-dollar second homes, were in those days the dens of near-savages who masticated incomprehensible dialects, slept with their animals, and eked out the most pitifully basic of existences on the most inhospitable of territories.

To gain some perspective and stretch my legs I decided to hike up the steep but well-marked trail that leads from the village on the lake where I was staying to the mountain above – a fitness-challenging ascent of over 2000 feet in about two miles. I noted that none of the holiday-makers in the countless hotels, camping-sites and holiday villas were venturing the same trail – there were just a handful at the viewpoint itself who had driven up to a nearby parking lot from where it’s an easy 15-minute ramble.

And why should they? Ascending 2000 feet in two miles on a day when the temperature is in the 80s (high 20s °C) is seriously hard work, and in this respect perhaps we do have something in common with the pre-industrial Savoyards. They surely avoided expending unnecessary physical effort; no one would have climbed that peak except for the pressing reason that its name suggests: Col des Contrebandiers (Smugglers’ Pass).

It must once have been the most convenient (or least inconvenient) way to convey brandy, tobacco, or gold around the customs barriers that used to separate every small European province from its neighbours.

But of course, those (few) of us who walk those trails today, quite unlike the smugglers of 200-300 years ago, do so simply for pleasure and for exercise. We live in a world where the movement of people and goods is almost totally disconnected from physical effort: looking down on the lake I saw a water-skier, her movement sustained entirely by the rapid burning of large quantities of diesel fuel. In the days when most movements around the lake were by rowing boat, people would have had a healthy respect for its 20 km length and 3 km width; today a couple of liters of diesel will get you across it in barely five minutes.

Fossil fuels and the internal combustion and jet engines have “virtualized” distance and location; in a world where you can fly overnight from Hong Kong to New York with no more inconvenience than a sub-optimal choice of movies, the ten thousand miles that separate China from the United States have become almost meaningless. (In the days when you had to travel by ship, though there was no effort and little risk involved, you would at least have been aware of the distance.)

The disconnection from the physical body – considerably accentuated by the increasing amount of time we spend online – has many well-documented effects on people’s physical and psychological health and on their relationship with the natural world, and the comparison with our pre-industrial ancestors points to yet another effect. They could rely on the signals from their own bodies and from the world around them to assess any possible action or movement in terms of the effort or resources required. To survive the winter, snowbound in those high mountains, they gathered wood in the autumn, and they knew exactly how much was needed.
They didn’t stay up till 3:00 am to play cards, burning precious wood (and expensive candles), but rose and went in with the sun, to make the most of its warming rays before the long dark freezing nights set in. No one walked up and down those precipitate trails, or rowed a heavy wooden boat across the lake, without measuring very precisely (and almost instinctively) whether the eventual payoff justified the necessary physical effort.

The absence of that sort of immediate and natural feedback is surely one of the reasons why we don’t seem to be able to deal with the causes and consequences of global warming: why not water-ski across a lake if you can afford the fuel? Why not fly 2000 miles on a whim if you can pay the airfare; why not burn a few more liters of gas to drive up a mountain on a hot day, rather than expend the effort of walking up it? The signals of what this is doing to our planet are there, but they’re not immediate, not part of an instinctual and familiar response system like tired legs and arms, or a prematurely depleted woodpile.

Meanwhile and for now, Annecy and other places like it around the world are still there and still lovely – and for that let’s all give thanks. But I wonder what of all this my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be able to enjoy? Perhaps if they have no choice but legs and rowing-boats it might actually be the best outcome.