Base jumping

©InfoSome people avoid risk whenever they can. Others seek risk for the fun of it. Explore different attitudes and choices by focusing on an extreme sport. The point is not to judge others, find fault or take moral highground. It is to try to understand other points of view, think through events, and work towards the best options. Ready to jump...

Jumping off

Show this photograph, available in a powerpoint.
 
What is happening? No, it's not an historical re-enactment group. Or gathering of neo-medieval wizards. Or a batman film set.

Invite suggestions, and see if the group can come to agreement through discussion.

It is a group of people readying themselves to jump from a mountainside. They first fall freely using their wingsuits to slow descent. Shortly before they hit the ground they open a parachute and glide to a safe landing.

The activity is known as base jumping. It is an extreme form of recreational thrill-seeking. One study calculated that in one year the death rate among participants was one in 60.

Show additional photographs available in the powerpoint and invite responses. 

©Info

©InfoSay that the photographs were taken in the Swiss mountain village of Lauterbrunnen, an area which is extremely popular among base jumpers. The risk of injury or death is high. If the wind changes, or the jumper miscalculates, a collision with the rock is likely to be fatal. Each year people die – with the death toll in Lauterbrunnen alone standing at 28 to date.

After discussion, ask students to choose one of the following statements which best describes their current views about base jumping.

• It is up to people what they do. Provided they don't harm anyone else, they can take whatever risks they like.
• Base jumping is far too dangerous and should be made illegal.
• Everyone involved in base jumping or affected in any way by it should work together to agree ways to reduce the risk of injury or death.

Encourage students to select the view closest to their own, and count the result. Keep the score for the group, and then repeat the vote and compare after doing some of the following activities.

Impact on observers

A recent article in the newspaper Der Spiegel highlighted some of the controversy around base jumping at Lauterbrunnen. Here's one incident:

Local primary school children were marking the end of their school year with a theatre performance, followed later by a picnic on the football field. It was a beautiful day with a bright blue sky. The children could hear the whooshing sound of base jumpers in the air. Then they heard a shrill scream. The teacher said, "We looked on as a jumper slammed against the rocks a couple of times. At the end, the man was left lying lifelessly in trees on a slope."

As a group exercise, boardblast a list of adjectives to describe the atmosphere and activities among the school group. Create two lists – one before the incident, when the children were excited about the start of the holiday, and one after it. Compare the lists. What impact might the differences have had on the children and their families?

As a pairs or small group exercise, ask students to think about the following comment from a teacher in the village. "We teach the children that it is important to be careful when crossing the street. How can we explain at the same time that people go base jumping?" List some explanations and arguments that the teacher might use to encourage children to look after their own safety, even if others seem not to care about theirs.

For a written exercise, ask students to imagine they were writing a diary entry, a letter to a friend or a blog post, by one of the children or teachers who witnessed the fatality during the end-of-year celebrations. Concentrate on describing your feelings before and after the event and how people around you reacted.

Tourism

Hold a debate on what to do about base jumping in Lauterbrunnen. Imagine that interested parties who have come together include:

• Farmers whose fields jumpers land in. They want to protect their crops and are disturbed by deaths. They also appreciate the fees that some jumpers pay as a "thank you" for the use of their land.
• Base jumpers who are keen to continue to practise their sport in one of the most challenging and beautiful areas of the world.
• Hotel, restaurants and other village businesses which rely on tourism for their livelihoods. There were around 15,000 jumps in Lauterbrunnen last year.
• Mountain rescue and medical teams who attend to casualties.
• The mayor who is responsible for smooth running of the village as well as stimulating the economy.
• Local people, including those concerned about the welfare of children.

Assign roles and give time for students to research or think about their arguments. Then come together in discussion and try to agree a series of measures that will allow, even promote, base jumping in the valley while minimising some of the areas of concern.

Discussion could begin with a viewing of the following video, particularly the first two minutes:

Try to create a poster listing any guidelines and working principles agreed during the debate. More ambitiously, the group could agree a written script, or even add a voice-over, to the video that stresses the safety and other measures that they want base jumpers to follow.
 

Degrees of risk

Who are the experts in risk? Ask students for their thoughts. Then point out or confirm that insurance companies tend to know quite a lot about it. Their business depends on it.

A good starting point for seeing how risky different recreational activities are is to look at the coverage offered by travel insurance. If a standard insurance policy covers an activity, it must have been assessed as relatively low risk from the insurer's point of view. The activities that are excluded from a standard policy, for which customers are charged extra, are those the insurance company considers to be high-risk.

As a group activity, call out some of the activities from the list and get the group to decide whether is it low risk (covered by ordinary travel insurance) or higher risk (requiring additional insurance). Or work individually or in pairs to sort them into groups. 

	Covered	Excluded
Abseiling	X
Archery	X
Ballooning	X
Base jumping		X
Boxing		X
Bullfighting or bull running		X
Bungee Jump	X
Camel riding	X
Canoeing	X
Cave diving		X
Cycling (including mountain biking)	X
Diving (down to 30 metres and qualified)	X
Diving with sharks		X
Football (in an organised team)		X
Hang-gliding		X
High diving		X
Hiking (up to 4000 metres)	X
Hockey (in an organised team)		X
Horse riding	X
Ice hockey		X
Ice skating	X
Jet skiing		X
Karate		X
Kayaking (up to grade 3)	X
Martial arts		X
Mountaineering		X
Paint balling	X
Parachuting		X
Paragliding		X
Parascending (if unsupervised or over land)		X
Parascending (over water)	X
Polo		X
Pot holing		X
Quad biking	X
Rock or cliff climbing		X
Rugby		X
Show jumping		X
Ski-jumping		X
Skydiving		X
Snorkelling	X
Swimming with dolphins	X
White water rafting (grades 1–3)	X
Windsurfing	X
Wrestling		X
Yachting	X

How accurate were students' guesses? What surprised them most?

Revisit the question posed in the starter activity. Does anyone who thinks base jumping is just too risky and should be illegal feel the same about any of the above activities? Has looking at the list changed anyone's view in any way?

Note: these examples, taken from a single insurer, have been simplified for the activity. Stress to students that the list is not to be relied on when choosing a policy. Insurance policies vary and require close individual scrutiny.

Who deserves medical attention?

It is a principle of humanitarian help that it is provided according to need. Medical treatment is a good example. In some situations it can be seen as a form of humanitarian assistance. Although in practice the provision of medical assistance will often involve complex dilemmas, those providing it try to ensure it goes where it is most needed. Who needs it, and why, is disregarded. The overwhelming impulse is to reduce suffering, irrespective of the person's background, race, class, behaviour, beliefs or anything else.

Expressed like that, it makes sense. But the implications are far-reaching, and sometimes run counter to some other feelings people have. For example, it means that the following people should be provided with medical help if they need it on exactly the same basis as anyone else:

• an enemy soldier
• a drunken driver
• someone injured while committing a crime
• a thrill-seeker injured while base jumping
• an old person with a terminal illness
• a suspected war criminal.

Discuss in class. How might humanitarian principles help doctors decide who to treat first? What difficulties might there be in making judgements about whether a patient is deserving or undeserving?

Then, as an action project, ask students to devise a questionnaire to use among friends and family to gather attitudes to categories of people "deserving" and "undeserving" of medical help. This could be as simple as agree/disagree to a single question – "should people who engage in extreme sports expect the same medical response as everyone else?" Or it could involve a series of more specific questions.

Gather the results of the survey. What do the findings say about the humanitarian impulse? Are people more judgmental than students expected?

 

 

Credits

This free resource was written by PJ White and published in November 2011. For more similar resources, sign up to receive newsthink.