Before we begin, we must first understand what is concrete . . . .
Timothy P. Dolen, “Historical Development of Durable Concrete for the Bureau of Reclamation”
Paul Simon’s “Like a Bridge over Troubled Water” is my leading candidate for designation as the best known and most influential “Song of Infrastructure.” This statement leads instantly to an invitation for audience participation: Readers, please provide me with your nominations for “Best Song of Infrastructure”; send those nominations to pnl@centerwest.org.
“Like a Bridge over Troubled Water” came out in 1970. If we had not had more pressing matters on our minds, we should have celebrated its fiftieth birthday last year. And yet, in 2021, as that song heads out into its second half-century, we should still take this opportunity to note that the song taps into the powerful and positive associations that bridges hold, not only as physical structures that carry traffic from one point to another, but also as figures of speech that offer a persuasive alternative to division and separation in a troubled society.
Bridges—and infrastructure in general—also carry the quality of mystery. The completion of bridges, along with other material forms of infrastructure, has provided the occasion of innumerable dedication ceremonies. Unless I have missed something, dignitaries giving the speeches at those ceremonies have rarely (maybe never?) said, “As happy as we are today to open this bridge, we must interrupt that happiness to ask ourselves a crucial question: how long will this bridge last? We know this bridge spans this river, but what is its lifespan over time, and how can we prolong it? Will we and our descendants remember our obligation to inspect and monitor the integrity of this structure? Will we have the wisdom—and the resources and the will—to invest steadily in its repair and maintenance? Are we able to recognize this bridge as our commitment to the people of the future?”
In his unforgettable song, Paul Simon contributes to this association of bridges with unaddressed mystery. “Like a bridge over troubled water,” he sang in a tribute to the reasons why we can depend on friendship, “I will lay me down.”
Lay me down? Like a bridge??
Would we want even to think about, much less trust our lives to, a bridge that is inclined to lay itself down?
How would society have benefited if Paul Simon had consulted with engineers when he wrote this song?
“Like a bridge over troubled water, I will keep myself vertical, steady, and without design flaws, cracks, or major structural fatigue” might have made for a better tribute to friendship, albeit a terrible song.
But when our minds are on bridges or other features of infrastructure, we are not always at our peak of clear thinking.
Possibly the Most Trivial Loss from the Pandemic:
My Chance to Be Lionized for My Obsession with Infrastructure
Until President Joe Biden announced his big plan for infrastructure, I had not realized how much I miss cocktail parties, receptions, icebreakers, and meet-and-greets.
My conversational fate at such gatherings has been divided into three distinct eras.
Era #1: I entered parties where I didn’t know anyone and surveyed the room for a dog or cat I could pet.
Era #2: Once I chose my field of study in graduate school, I gained the confidence to enter a party expecting that when someone said to me, “What do you do?” I had a promising answer: “I am a Western American historian.” At that point, my new acquaintance would often say, “Oh, I love Western history,” and conversation would go racing along from there.
Era #3: When a new historical enthusiasm took possession of me, awkward social encounters made a resurgence. “What do you do?” a stranger would ask. “I’m a historian,” I would answer, and then with ill-considered honesty, I would add, “and I am now very excited about the subject of infrastructure.” “Well, that’s quite an interesting subject,” the stranger would say in that tone of voice that reveals the word interesting to be code for breathtakingly boring. “Excuse me, but I just saw a friend over there who I haven’t seen in years, and I really must say hello.”
And now that President Biden has made infrastructure into the word of the hour, just imagine the social whirl that would now be mine—if I weren’t immobilized by a nationwide moratorium on receptions, cocktail parties, icebreakers, and meet-and-greets.
So this would be a good time to let fantasy take over.
In a world that does not now exist, when I arrived at a party and declared my professional interest in the history of infrastructure, this is the enthusiastic response I would receive: “Why, that’s what everyone is talking about these days! Wait right here; I see several friends, and I will round them up and bring them over to meet you! They will be as delighted as I am to learn that I have found a person who is totally geared up to talk to us about infrastructure!” In seconds, the word would spread through the gathering. A hush would fall on the crowd, and everyone would turn toward me with eager anticipation . . .
And I cannot imagine a reason to interrupt this extremely enjoyable fantasy.
So why not let it run?
Ladies and gentlemen, I am so grateful that we have this opportunity to gather together and think hard about infrastructure, and I will try to make these deliberations worth your while. So let’s start with five very efficiently expressed (at the price of mild over-simplification) lessons from the history of infrastructure!
The Context of Our Times: Five Historical Observations that Lots More People Should Be Paying Attention to in the Spring of 2021
Historical Observation #1
Support for public investment in infrastructure was hard-wired into our nation’s origins. Enthusiasm for what Americans of the past called “internal improvements”—canals, turnpikes, roads, harbor enhancements, and, eventually, railroads and water supply systems—drove the national economy, directing public resources and private enterprise toward the support of those projects.
Historical Observation #2
And yet one product of the widespread support for internal improvements, in the nineteenth century, was disillusionment with the whole undertaking. The benefits of these publicly supported internal improvements often had a very limited reach, with some locales and sectors receiving little from these initiatives. Just as important, corruption often structured the relationship between governmental investment and private profit. Of course, a complete and consistent retreat from public investment in infrastructure never came near to prevailing, but disillusionment generated skepticism and reluctance that would remain in the picture and would flare up episodically.
Historical Observation #3
While the building of infrastructure served as the source of innumerable jobs over the last two centuries, those jobs often required the holders of those jobs to work under dangerous conditions, sometimes at the risk of injury or death. Society has plenty of reasons to insist that today’s advocates of infrastructure, whether in development or maintenance, speak honestly about the priority of worker safety.
Historical Observation #4
Building a new element of infrastructure has always been much more appealing and satisfying than monitoring, tending to, and maintaining an existing element of infrastructure. We have no justification for being caught by surprise when we encounter this persistent streak of human nature.
Historical Lesson #5
One extremely important—and extremely evaded—aspect of infrastructure involves the responsible handling of waste. From sewage treatment plants to nuclear waste storage sites, this dimension of infrastructure often slips out of attention—because it carries nothing in the way of the satisfaction, and even exhilaration, delivered by the construction of grand, ornamented structures like bridges and public gathering spaces. The mobilizing of humanists and social scientists to conjure up ways to attribute heroism to waste managers would be a major contribution to societal well-being.
A Weakened Word Pleads for Our Help
Even though it holds a position of central importance in American (and world) history, the word “infrastructure” has always been, ironically enough, at risk of collapsing from its own structural failure. To start with, as words go, infrastructure is strikingly dreary. Despite its crucial content, it is a singularly limp and listless word.
Consider that non-communicative, downright cryptic prefix: “infra,” a Latin root that thankfully has had very little role to play in the English language.
Can you think of another word that starts with “infra”?
Yes, of course, you can!
Infrared.
Which means what?
In a moment of excessive self-esteem, I might be tempted to refer to myself as “well-educated.” But here is a sorrowful admission: if I were assigned to write an accurate and precise definition of the word “infrared,” I would soon find myself pleading for help.
And so, assuming I am not the only one with these deficits and deficiencies in what seemed like quite a good education, I’ll cut short the guessing game and reveal the punchline: the prefix “infra” is Latin for “below.”
So what is “infra” doing, hanging out with “structure”?
In my opinion, it has placed itself there so it can contribute to making the word infrastructure seem dull and opaque, a contribution that “infra” makes very effectively.
If you are not yet on board with my assertions here, take a moment to contemplate the words that fell into company with the prefix “under,” and to notice how much more engaging to the mind and the senses those lucky words are, when compared to the sad words that got stuck with the prefix “infra.”
Imagine if “underworld” had been “infraworld,” if “underground” had been “infraground,” if “undertaking” had been “infrataking,” if “undercover” had been “infracover,” if “underwear” had been “infrawear,” or, most piteous of all, if “understanding” had been “infrastanding.”
To put this another way, I appreciate your infrastanding of what I am trying to say in this “Not my First Rodeo” post, and I hope you will now infrastand why I am so sorry that the word infrastructure got such a bad deal.
And this poor word’s problems in life get weirder.
The best-known and most-often referred-to manifestations of infrastructure are bridges. When a bridge over a bay or river is below the water, it is considered a failure of infrastructure. Below might apply to structures like tunnels, and below might also make a frail effort at asserting that the pieces and parts of infrastructure underlie and support every aspect of human life.
That frail effort does very little to relieve the word’s principal problem.
And what is that principal problem?
Because it is so dull and un-evocative, the word infrastructure supports and affirms the invisibility of the human creations and enterprises it is supposed to bring to our attention. By its sheer dreariness, it affirms the misfortune summed up in the phrase, “out of sight, out of mind,” robbing a vast collection of structures, facilities, and mechanisms of the attention and investment that they deserve—and that they would demand if we were not oblivious.
And now for the observation everyone saw coming.
The word infrastructure is in worse shape than the bridges, dams, pipes, roads, etc. that it has been commissioned to represent.
Why should we face up to this problem and try to find a remedy?
Because infrastructure is the most charged and consequential dimension of our relationship to the people of the past and to the people of the future.
Making Our Peace with the Fact that We Are Talking about Infrastructure Now,
and Not in the Past or the Future
A 2021 Travel Advisory
To Anyone Planning a Return Trip to
Nineteenth Century Thinking about Infrastructure:
This Road is Now Closed to Traffic
Meanwhile, to Anyone Planning a Visit to the Future:
The Road to the Twenty-Second Century
Is Still Under Construction, and May Present Delays
The definition of the word infrastructure exists in a strenuous relationship to the passage of time. It has to stay in constant motion, and it also has to keep a grip on previous definitions. Forms of transportation, water treatment, energy generation, and information transmission constantly fluctuate, even as the features of traditional infrastructure persist. As the years pass by, the word infrastructure has to keep returning to the shop to be revised and updated.
And now, in April of 2021, the poor word is being pulled apart in a partisan tug-of-war, and we would be negligent and irresponsible if we did not intervene on its behalf. To maintain and enhance the actual, material infrastructure that supports our well-being, we are obligated to rescue the word from the misery inflicted on it by a pointless political dispute.
Partisans on both sides of this tug-of-war: quit trying to live in either a century that has ended, or a century that has not yet begun. Please return to the century you actually live in.
In the nineteenth century, when it was identified by the term “internal improvements,” infrastructure was entirely tangible and material—roads, bridges, tunnels, etc. We should keep that earlier definition in mind because it serves us as what scientists call a baseline: a state of affairs from the past that we can use to measure and calibrate change. Trying to use a baseline to reverse change and to recreate the past does not work.
Why would I offer such an obvious statement?
Because, as I write, the Republicans who are standing in the starkest opposition to President Biden’s plan for infrastructure are asserting that the nineteenth-century meaning of infrastructure is the tried-and-true definition we should embrace.
To mix metaphors in a disordered way, that horse is out of the barn. In the twentieth century, asphalt-paved highways, airports, nearly universal electrification, much enhanced water delivery systems, and then digital connectivity all forced their way into the definition of infrastructure. Any retro campaign to drive them out of that definition would be as ineffective as it would be exhausting.
So, opponents of President Biden’s infrastructure plan, spare yourselves and us that campaign.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the partisan tug-of-war, Democrats are placing intolerable stress on the term infrastructure by forcing it into a future that may be on the distant horizon, but is certainly not here yet.
Maybe, as the twenty-second century approaches, the word infrastructure is going to expand to include everything human beings do on each other’s behalf: care for elderly people; educate the young; engage with each other in civic community; train, respect, and reward the workforce that produces our shared well-being, etc., etc.
But we’re not there yet.
The road to that future—when this concept of “human infrastructure” might become persuasive—is not currently in place. Laying out such a road, and persuading Americans to travel on it, will require far more in the way of design, engineering, construction, and explanation than the supporters of the President’s plan have provided so far.
Without performing that crucial preparatory work, the President and his allies are stretching the term infrastructure so far that I fear it will snap. And if it were to give way, I cannot think of any way to restore the bedrock vision and faith that has supported so many enterprises and actions undertaken—with essential public resources—on behalf of individual and collective well-being.
So, liberals and conservatives, please reorient yourselves in time. You are actually living in the early twenty-first century—not in the nineteenth century or in the twenty-second century. As a first step in acknowledging the timing of your presence on the planet, please remove the term infrastructure from your tiresome crossfire.
You have plenty of other things to fight about.
A Household Phrase Whose Time Has Come
(Really, It Will Only Take You a Few Tries to Commit It to Memory)
Ten years ago, I launched a campaign to popularize a concept, packed efficiently into sixteen words, that would permit the American people to place themselves in the big sweep of history. My hope was to give these sixteen words the standing of a commonplace or a household phrase, familiar to millions. For the better part of decade, this campaign has not made much progress. I am now well-acquainted with the fact that an enterprise of this sort requires waiting for the right time . . . which seems like it might be now.
Here is the premise that brought these sixteen words into alignment with each other:
Over the last century, the majority of Americans have been living in an unusual relationship to material reality. When we want water, we turn on a faucet. When we want light, we flip a switch. When we want warmth, we adjust the thermostat. These services appear when we summon them.
Even though these arrangements seem utterly normal to us, they register as a very weird state of affairs when considered over the millennia of human existence.
And now I present the phrase that sums up the last century:
The Era of Improbable Comfort
Made Possible by a Truly Astonishing but Taken-for-Granted Infrastructure
Initially, this phrase may seem hard to remember, but if you say it at least three times (without looking at it), it will stick.
And it should stick in our minds for one very good reason: the “taken-for-granted” part is now winding down.
As this sense of security peters out, the time is ripe to ask ourselves, “What would we like the next era to be? Can we conjure up a stance that will position us between a sense of crisis and the expectation of predictability, between alarm and inattention?”
If we are to have any success in answering those questions, here is our clearest priority: We must all put our shoulders to the wheel to improve the relationship between engineers and society.
Engineers have been the key figures in creating and maintaining the Era of Improbable Comfort Made Possible by a Truly Astonishing but Taken-for-Granted Infrastructure. But the stance of society toward engineers got stuck in the habit of taking them for granted, expecting engineers to supply their fellow citizens with services and commodities in a reliable and affordable way, while minimizing environmental disturbances, or at least keeping them out of our view. In other words, society said to engineers, “You had better keep those commodities and services headed our way, but you had better not make a mess in producing them.”
I have achieved an impressive and lasting success in encapsulating this problem in doggerel verse:
A Failure to Communicate
Though we would never want to be catty,
Engineers have made nature ratty.
As they fill all our needs,
We bombard them with screeds,
Which for some reason drives them all batty.
This limerick, actually, offers another variation on a baseline, permitting us to calibrate and assess change as we move toward a better conversation between society and the engineering profession, working together to weigh the costs and benefits of old and new technology, with a far clearer anticipation of the consequences of our requests and demands.
For years, I have been proposing a very pleasant action plan to pursue this goal. The Limerick Plan consisted of imposing an innovative regulatory requirement: No dinner parties can be held unless at least one engineer is invited and asked to speak, in the course of the evening, on the elements of infrastructure that made these social gatherings possible.
Even though Covid-19 derailed the Limerick Plan, it could be ready for reactivation soon, and for a major expansion of scale.
Hold the occasional dinner party, but move on to the restoration of receptions, cocktail parties, icebreakers, and meet-and-greets! For a few minutes at those gatherings, invite two of the guests—the engineer and the historian—to coax everyone into a recognition of infrastructure. Here is a draft for the remarks to be given at these gatherings:
Please, everyone, replenish your plates of appetizers and refill your glasses. But while you do that, think about the trucks that brought us these snacks, and the roads over which those trucks traveled. Think about the irrigation systems that provided the water that grew these strawberries and blueberries and fresh veggies. And, while you’re at it, notice that it is dark outside, but the lights are on in this building, and you are not going to collide with each other on your way to the refreshments table. Yes, all of us are now complicit in an energy chain that may have started at a wind turbine . . . or at a coal mine or a natural gas well. If you are holding a glass of water or a festive beverage chilled with ice, or if you want to wash your hands before you get a snack, then think about the network of dams, reservoirs, tunnels, pipes, and treatment plants that made it possible for you to have such a satisfactory and satisfying relationship with faucets. And don’t forget the roads that brought you to this party, and also the digital devices that let you know the party is happening. What we have said to you now may cause you to feel a little guilt. But redirect that guilt toward paying full attention to what infrastructure means at this moment in time, and what it might mean in the future.
It’s too early to send out the invitations.
But it is surely time to start planning the party.
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Photo Credit:
Banner image courtesy of: Pixabay
Buffet image courtesy of: Pixino