It’s almost as if we no longer understand the crucial links between infrastructure and the health of the American economy, the state of the environment and the viability of the nation as a whole. We’ve become stupid about this.
So writes Bob Herbert in his column, What the Future May Hold, a questions he answers quickly but simply:
The answer will depend to a great extent on decisions we make now about the American infrastructure.
Herbert tells us the future cannot be carbon based . The column is worth your read. I will quote from it again before I finish. Reading got me thinking. This will mainly be my mental meanderings. Use the link above if you want Herbert's words. Continue below if you are curious about mine.
Herbert is correct that, at least as far as transportation we must find a way to come off carbon. I would broaden that to the production of energy as a whole, both of electricity and for heating/cooling our structures, residential and business. That is why the state of the environment is so dependent upon infrastructure, because many of our buildings badly need to be retrofitted to take properly utilize the technological advances by which we can produce and distribute energy.
Last week we lost power for several hours. This is not unusual for northern parts of Arlington County, VA. Several times it has been because of a lightening strike, twice on the transformer immediately next to our driveway. We have lost power because of tree branches covered with ice bringing down the power lines across the street - that time we were without power for 17 hours, but compared to people subject to large ice storms, hurricanes, nor'easters and the like, we were lucky. This time it was some critter crawling into a transformer that caused the outage.
Each day I drive from my home in Arlington to my employment on the other side of Washington in Greenbelt, MD. My usual route takes me up Kenilworth Avenue, with its worn roadway, narrow lanes, ever reoccurring potholes and the like. The basic alternatives would either have me cut through the city on local streets where the roads are sometime worse and traffic lights are not synchronized, or to go around the city on the Beltway, a road in use for more than half a century which is quickly acquiring the characteristics of a parking lot even in the middle of the day, and whose simple repaving - in the middle of the night - can create massive traffic jams.
Perhaps, you say, I should travel by Metro. It is true that there is a stop less than a mile from my home, and one a few miles from the school. The travel time would be well over an hour if I am lucky. And that is only if there are no breakdowns, or trouble on the tracks, if the elevators are working. The Metro system is aging, and prone to problems. And ice storms and heavy snows can also cause problems.
Many of our buildings, public and otherwise, are energy hogs. They badly leak heat, or cool air. The pipes that bring water are often aging, rusting, prone to problems difficult to to address because they are buried. Too many of our our sanitary sewer systems interconnect with storm sewers, with the inevitable problems that result in cases of heavy downpours. We waste water by the time it takes to heat it, by the amount of water used to flush toilets or take showers, and this deluge comes to treatment plants that are often ancient in design and inadequate.
We have dams whose failure could greatly inconvenience, or worse, chunks of heavily populated areas, or swaths of food-producing land. Many are in private hands. They are not part of an overall system, and in many cases are neither regulated nor inspected on a regular basis.
I could keep cataloging the problems with our infrastructure, but I am sure most readers could offer just as complete a list of issues. Yet we lack a meaningful national policy to address these problems.
Such a policy cannot be made in isolation, in separate silos depending upon level of government. A road system, for example, to be meaningful, must take into account its interconnections across jurisdictional lines. And after all, many bridges - which as we learned in Minnesota are among the most vulnerable parts of our infrastructure - cross such jurisdictional lines, often found at rivers and streams. And further, we cannot address transportion without addressing energy, environment, and employment. They are all interrelated, intimately and intricately interconnected.
We are very much fouling the nest of human habitation, cluttering up the pathways we MUST travel if human civilization is to sustain itself, and not destroy the aspects of environment necessary for our habitation and that of other creatures.
I can see the problems. I am not alone in understanding that we need to change our thinking to a more comprehensive and complete grasp of the interconnectedness of human civilization. This already requires us to think beyond our national borders, because unless one is willing to live at a very reduced and limited standard, self-sufficiency within national borders is no longer possible.
Our educational approach lacks the training in systems thinking, even though it has been around for decades. It, and its important subset chaos theory, are perhaps as important as any tools we have developed to help us understand and address what is truly a crisis.
I claim no answers. I recognize that we need to change how we think, act, live. And yes, how we teach. Much of how we approach the various tasks of human life are now counterproductive, even as we are reluctant to let go of well-known patterns of thinking, living, and behaving, as people, as nations, as human society.
Our politics in America remain a real barrier to making the changes we will need to make. Many here realize that, even as we participate. I wonder how many we have elected to high office realize that? Or how many leading our major "private" institutions, like banks and industrial companies? How many of our fellow Americans begin to grasp the seriousness of these problems, consumed as we can become over important issues like health care or gay rights or protection for workers or withdrawal from military misadventures that waste lives and treasure?
Herbert offers a vision in his column which I will share, but which I think is insufficient, does not go far enough, because it is still based on concepts that themselves may be outdated. Still, it is a good place from which we can begin a serious discussion.
So since I began with Herbert, let me finish as he does:
You can’t thrive as a nation while New Orleans is drowning, and Detroit is being beaten into oblivion decade after decade, and a bridge in Minneapolis is collapsing into the Mississippi River, and cities in upstate New York and the Rust Belt are rotting from lack of employment opportunities, and so on.
Imagine, instead, an America with rebuilt, healthy, dynamic metropolitan areas, and gleaming new port facilities, and networks of high-speed rail, an America with electric vehicles and a smart grid and energy generated by the power of the sun and wind and water and the ocean’s waves. Imagine if the children of today’s toddlers had access to world-class public schools all across the nation and a higher education system that is both first-rate and affordable.
Imagine if we set out seriously to do all this.
Imagine.
What say you? What do YOU think we - all of us - need to be considering?
Or does infrastructure seem an insignificant problem, or perhaps one that can be postponed while we address health care, and energy, and whatever issue motivates you?
Peace.