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”…