![]() Garrett reckons there are around 100 active urban explorers in London, perhaps a few thousand in the UK, and tens of thousands across the world, concentrated in major cities and often communicating with explorers elsewhere. What the British Transport police wanted to do was stop me from publishing photos and stop me from writing about this thing, because what we did undermined their narrative of security.” Garrett had demonstrated that the secret, impenetrable world was not so secret or impenetrable after all.īradley Garrett at the top of Battersea Power Station in London. “When I reflect on the whole process,” he says now, “I realise that the trauma we were subjected to was actually the point. The case dragged on for two years, and he was eventually given a conditional discharge and ordered to pay costs of £2,000. ![]() “They didn’t have any evidence that we had committed any criminal damage, so they charged us with a thought crime,” he says. In 2012, Garrett and several fellow explorers were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit criminal damage. It’s also fraught with difficulty and danger. This breaking into closed-off spaces isn’t an explicitly political act – there is usually no attempt to change anything specific – but in an over-regulated, over-securitised world, it feels like a way of kicking against the system. “There’s a very particular kind of agency that comes from using the body to get into spaces that you’re not supposed to access,” he says, “and that translates very easily into a kind of politics.” Garrett talks about the “personal sense of empowerment” urban exploration provides. There’s an addictive quality to it, because once you start going into these spaces and understanding the city in a different way, it’s very hard to fall back into normal rhythms.” “You are able to see the abandoned buildings, the infrastructural systems, the construction sites, all the things that comprise the city. You can view my funding sources and project here.“Exploring the city gives you a chance to understand it in a different way,” Garrett tells me. You can listen to a podcast by myself and Shaun Quegan, from NERC’s Planet Earth, entitled “Space Mission to measure biomass” here. You can watch my inaugural lecture, April 2012, entitled “Seeing the forest for the trees, a journey from Plant to Planet” here. Understanding and simulating the non-steady state behaviour of ecosystems is a current focal interest. I focus particularly on issues relating to the drought sensitivity of forests, the role of disturbance (fire or anthropogenic) on forest biomass, the sensitivity of Arctic ecosystems to warming, and the yield of crops. Linking to earth observations, I use models to upscale field measurements and ecological experiments, to investigate landscape processes and predict their sensitivity to disturbance and climate. I use process based modelling and data assimilation methods to extract information from detailed ecosystem measurements. ![]() I explore feedback processes between soil, vegetation and the atmosphere, over timescales from days to years, to improve modelling of climate change. I study carbon cycling of plants and soils, and their interactions, across environmental and biodiversity gradients from the tropics to the arctic, to understand carbon sinks and sources across the globe. Carbon, through its links to natural resources such as food and wood, is fundamental to our society and its sustainability. The carbon cycle links the biological processes of living things to the physical environment and climate. My research is on understanding the terrestrial carbon cycle and its links to global change. You can find out more about my research group, the Global Change Ecology Lab here. My goal is to understand the dynamics of the carbon cycle, plant growth, and to support sustainable management of the global landscape. I study the interaction of terrestrial ecosystems with the climate system, disturbance and management.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |