I loved the novelty, in the Thatcher years, of striking off through the conflicted Docklands to Woolwich, Tilbury, Gravesend, as an entropy tourist with a fetish for future ruins.

It’s easy and unfulfilling to just consume what other people (or nature) have already created. That’s just entropy tourism. You’re watching things wind down.

Smithson was fascinated by the way in which landscape is marked by man's use of it, seeing this as a wholly natural process. For him, such sites embodied the sense of collapse—of entropy—that he felt was a guiding principle of existence. Smithson would probably have been surprised to know that the phrase "entropy tourism" has been coined.

One response to our stunned impotence in the face of financial meltdown, political chicanery and the creeping surveillance society, is to indulge in fugues of entropy tourism.