#robertmacfarlane (5 links)
- Robert Macfarlane on filming in Essex theguardian.com
- The strange world of urban exploration - Robert Macfarlane theguardian.com
Urbex is not for everyone. Let me put that differently: urbex is hardly for anyone. Participation is high in profile but small in number (perhaps 20,000 globally), and the thrills are niche. Not for urbexers the sturm und drang of mountains or the arid elegance of desert exploration. Their epiphanies are mucky, their metaphysics mephitic. The short-term risks are grim: drowning in sewage, falling from girders, gralloched by razor-wire, skewered on scaffolding. Longer-term dangers include respiratory problems from exposure to dusts and gases. I know, I know: why would you? Who would? It is a hugely strange scene, and – occasional claustrophiliac with an intermittent taste for decay that I am – I find myself rather gripped by it.
What is required, therefore (and what is difficult to effect), is the translation of these impulses of wonder and joy at nature, into ecologically valuable patterns of behaviour. Into changed patterns of purchase, consumption, disposal, and travel. Into a shifted sense of the universal. We need, for instance, to retire our medieval vision of the skies, seas, rivers and soil as sinks of infinite capacity; free in what they give, and limitless in their capacity to absorb what we discard into them.