Deb Chachra – Treehouse Writers

About a year and a half ago, I wrote on this blog about Deb Chachra’s fabulous book How Infrastructure Works.

One of the key messages I got from that book – outside of the fact that Prof. Chachra loves to tour power plants and dams – was that infrastructure makes modern life possible. We have hot and cold running water in our houses. A flick of a switch gives us power.

Flick another one and you’re online, having a video chat with your friend on the other side of the world.

At the moment I’m reading another book – Carl Zimmer’s Air-Borne – and while that’s a book that discusses germ theory and contagious disease (indoor air quality is another passion of mine and you’ll hear more about this book another time), it made me realize something else: so much of the infrastructure we rely on is incredibly new.

In discussing some experiments that required collecting air samples high in the atmosphere by airplane, he mentioned Charles Lindbergh’s flights in the 1930s when he was scouting out routes for commercial airlines. Because in the early 1930s, we didn’t yet have commercial air traffic across the oceans.

I’m sure if you were born in the 21st century, 1930 seems like the dark ages. But there are still people around on this planet who were alive back then. It’s not very long ago.

We’ve become very accustomed to a lot of this infrastructure – including flying from continent to continent – in a short period of time.

We really don’t want to lose it. As Prof. Chachra points out:

We’ve created these collective infrastructural systems that make our lives, as we know them, possible. Any future with limited, reduced, or even more frequently interrupted access to them is recognizably worse than our present, if not downright dystopian.

She was speaking about climate change, which is already taking a toll on our infrastructure. It’s also been eroded due to poor maintenance over the years. In Oakland, where I live, a lot of water pipes are over a hundred years old because it was just over a hundred years ago that the water system was firmly put in place.

And while a hundred years isn’t a long time to have a municipal water system, it is a long time to rely on the original pipes.

But now we’re facing a third attack on our infrastructure, one that is causing much more immediate damage than even climate change and neglect. I refer to the chainsaw destruction of the federal government by the broligarch in chief and his grifter in the White House. Continue reading “The War on Infrastructure”…

I just finished a wonderful book that explained what it would take for everyone on Earth to live the good life. It was all about infrastructure.

Don’t stop reading! Infrastructure is far from boring, I promise you, especially when the person explaining it to you is Deb Chachra, an engineering professor who both understands how things work and how to explain them. (I’ll just note right here that she has read some science fiction and philosophy along the way.)

The book is called How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems that Shape Our World. And no, it’s not a treatise on pipes or wiring or highway construction. It’s an overview of how all those things come together to make modern life possible.

Even if you’ve thought a lot about infrastructure — most of us only think about it when ours fails — this book will give you some deep insights into just how important it is and, even more importantly, how infrastructure design sets in place all our lives.

One of the first things I got from the book is that modern infrastructure is what makes our lives comfortable and possible in the United States and other highly developed countries. We have power at the flick of a switch, water when we turn on a tap, phone service (land lines even still exist, though most of us are using mobile phones these days). The wastewater gets taken away and treated.

Further, we have roads that go everywhere. In some places, we also have other transit options besides cars.

Most of us have access to good food even if we don’t live near where food is grown. That’s due to shipping systems, which also bring us other things we need.

That’s the point: all these things make modern life possible. We don’t have to dig our own wells or fetch water from the nearest creek (if there is one). We don’t have to cut up logs and feed them into a wood burning stove to cook and keep our homes warm. We can be in touch with people all around the world without leaving home or even waiting for the mail (and of course, mail is an infrastructure).

A couple of hundred years ago, people didn’t have most of these things. There were roads and there were shops and some supply systems, but they were not nearly as convenient as they are today.

Despite the fantasy of the “freedom” of living off the grid, the truth is that living in a system with modern infrastructure gives people a great deal more freedom to do something beyond just survival. Continue reading “The Joys of Infrastructure”…