In collaboration with Presca, the world's first climate-positive sportswear brand.

In many ways adventure is rooted in abundance. Nature’s awe, new places to experience, the promise of feeling alive. The great, endless unknown. This Edition celebrates some of this abundance, but takes a critical and creative look at how it plays out.

We’re proud to deliver this Edition in partnership with Presca: the world’s first climate-positive sportswear brand. To dig into what that means, and to learn more about the challenges it presents, we enjoyed an honest conversation with CEO Rob Webbon. Use the code 'abundance' for a free sugarcane water bottle with any purchase over £20, until the end of August (just add the bottle to your basket).

More than anybody in this Edition, Neftalie Williams embodies the critical celebration of abundance. Passionate skateboarder, skate scholar and ambassador for skate culture, his deep belief in skateboarding’s distinctiveness, richness and potential to improve the world offers a compelling vision of a truly unique sport.

Jonathan Purkis’ recent book, Driving With Strangers, looks with similar abundance upon hitchhiking. Long considered a dead or dying art in the West, Purkis makes the case that hitchhiking is in fact a diverse and fascinating subculture with much to tell us about how we might live better. We thoroughly enjoyed a wide-ranging chat with the 'vagabond sociologist'.

If skateboarding and hitchhiking are tied to urban infrastructure, much outdoor culture relies on environmental abundance. But this is problematic, and two complementary essays explore.

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA), the subject of Joe Whitson's piece.

Em Hartova holds a mirror up to the language we use in the outdoor industry. Pointing to our ongoing reliance on fossil fuels, and critiquing the idea that outdoor recreation is sufficient as environmental action, she calls on us all to agitate for change. 

Joe Whitson makes a similar argument against the imperative to ‘explore’ underpinning the outdoor community. He advocates for a more humble, reciprocal relationship with the outdoors that remains open to learning from cultures and ecologies, not just realising individual conquest.

The difference between the perception and reality of environmental abundance is particularly stark in the UK, where the national myth of bucolic countryside obscures a bleaker reality. Only by acknowledging this can we change it, as environmental campaigner Guy Shrubsole knows better than most.

Wistman's Wood, one of the many pockets of Britain's lost rainforest Guy Shrubsole is fighting to restore

A reminder of the regeneration possible in our landscapes arrived during lockdown, when wildlife reemerged into the space vacated by humans. Wildlife filmmaker and author James Aldred had a remarkable front-row seat, with permission to shoot New Forest goshawks through the spring and summer - the subject of his Wainwright Prize longlisted book Goshawk Summer. We asked him about those weeks.

On the topic of abundance, it’s impossible not to think of the acute cost-of-living crisis. Nik Elvy, who has written for us before on the myth that the outdoors is free, re-emphasises that message, with a particular emphasis on food: too often the hidden ticket to outdoor participation.

Sometimes adventure takes place in the shadows of abundance. When Eloise Stark moved to Paris a few years ago, she found herself living in the opulent neighbourhood of Saint-Germain-des-Près. There was only one catch: she was in the servants’ quarters, shunned and stowed away by her bourgeois neighbours.

And sometimes abundance, or its lack, is internal. Climber Victoria Wilson has experienced this in the gender stereotypes at play in the climbing world. Too often, she argues, women are discouraged from dynamic, expansive styles of climbing. How can climbing culture change?

We hope this Edition helps you explore with abundance, and of course a critical eye, this summer. 

The AU Team.