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Archive for August 18th, 2008

An Absence Also Becomes Visible

As I’m going to the U.K. next week, I was particularly interested to come across these lines from Robert Macfarlanes’s scintillating book The Wild Places.

Macfarlane writes: “In Britain, over sixty-one million people now live in 93,000 square miles of land. Remoteness has been almost abolished, and the main agents of that abolition have been the car and the road. Only a small and diminishing proportion of terrain is now more than five miles from a motorable surface. There are nearly thirty million cars in use in Britain, and 210,000 miles of road on the mainland alone. If those roads were to be stretched out and joined into a single continuous carriageway, you drive on it almost to the moon. The roads have become new mobile civilisations in themselves: during rush-hours, the car-borne population across Britain and Ireland is estimated to exceed the resident population of central London…”

“…The commonest map of Britain is the road atlas. Pick one up, and you see the meshwork of motorways and roads which covers the surface of the country. From such a map, it can appear that the landscape has become so thickly webbed by roads that asphalt and petrol are its new primary elements…. [C]onsidering the road atlas, an absence also becomes visible. The wild places are no longer marked.”

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Posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 2:04 pm by: Tom Vanderbilt
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How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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