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What Kind Of Future - Cheap And Brief Or Strong And Long?
Posted Jul 28, 2008 by Julian Darley
According to one version of the invention of the telegraph, Samuel Morse was let down by some suppliers who used shoddy wire in the underground pipe he had laid between Baltimore and Washington DC. With $30,000 riding on completing the telegraphic link – and $30k was real money back in 1844 – Morse was offered the chance of stringing wires on poles and trees. It was cheap and quick and it worked. Pretty soon, anywhere that wanted fast communications had Morse’s telegraph - along with a lot of poles.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that wires on poles are very ugly and always having arguments with the weather. But they are reputed to be about three times cheaper to install than underground wires. As we enter the long transition, we should be favouring infrastructure that is as reliable and low-maintenance as possible. Farther into the future, we will very likely not have the spare cash – or energy - to keep fixing up half-baked infrastructure.
So we shall be facing a nice paradox: we really ought to be doing things the right way so that they last, but we’ll be nervous and the credit crunch may not go away, so there won’t be much risk capital around for big projects like building different kinds of grids suited to distributed power generation or building a decent railway system in the United States – for instance, one that avoids the curse of railroad crossings, so that roads and rails don’t interfere with one another and has two tracks, so that passengers and freight can co-exist more happily.
The decisions we make in the face of this 'cheap and brief versus strong and long' paradox may have a significant effect on how well or badly society will manage the petroleum decline. This is one of the many places where good government could make a huge difference – most large infrastructure projects need government involvement, from making sensible laws to spending taxpayers’ money wisely. This is a conversation that we should all begin having with national and local governments now.
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Reader Comments
3 comments
Infrastructure: Localized and Personalized
From: Cherenkov, Aug 8, 2008 11:35 AM
Yes, the need for long lasting infrastructure is deep. But, we must remember that the current number of people on the planet, given the descending energy paradigm, will not allow us to build the best infrastructure for everyone. It would be physically impossible: not enough energy, resources, time, personnel, or experts. If you build world class sustainable infrastructure in the United States, drawing to itself without regard to others, you will create the battle grounds of the future.
I think that the idea of building high order infrastructure such as train networks, Internet work stations, and all that will only squander resources. While either of these structural amendments could add to the existing paradigm, the question is how will it work much later, say 200 years down the road, when we are essentially incapable of maintaining these structures?
If that money and energy had been spent with the end result of a de-technologicalized society kept firmly in mind, we might have developed hundreds of thousands of eco-islands, self-sufficient towns that are interconnected with other self-sufficient towns, leading to maximum complexity and maximum resilience. When I say interconnected, I do not think of trains. We would need thousands, nay, hundreds of thousands if not millions of engines and cars, millions of miles of new track, and some sort of high grade source to fuel its operation and maintenance through all of time. Those poor eco-villagers would be frustrated at all the waste and would feel enslaved to that technology.
The goal should not be to save the tech or to save the car. We should look to systems such as permaculture, investing billions in the study of that complex subject. We need first principles which, once instituted, form natural feedback mechanisms which lead automatically towards the right outcomes. Why force people to do anything when doing what works is completely obvious and the right thing to do?
We need mapping and quantification of biomes to determine the best possible cooperation between nature and man.
Imagine the joy created in the implementation this simple process. People would have meaningful, healthy jobs, providing the life needs of everyone.
I fear that it is too late, though. We will find that the mind-sets of the people divorced from nature are too solid and unmovable. The split between nature and humanity is at its greatest for all time. We will again never be this divorced from reality.
Take a few minutes to contemplate that. The next seven generations of leaders will be heading decidedly away from this colossal mistake humanity made.
We are living in truly epic times.
Cheap n' Brief or Strong n' Long
From: Phil Henshaw, Aug 8, 2008 07:48 AM
Julian,
That's a good way to put it, but requires more than wanting the better choice to bring it about. What creates new sustainable systems in nature is the their development process, i.e. the set of accumulative 'feedbacks' that actually build them in a sustainable form. I think that people seem uninterested in learning even the first thing about that is much more of our problem than a lack of will to make earth a good home.
For example, what nearly everyone sees and agrees on is that the earth is suffering from people adding too much to doing and having what they want. The curious contradiction, though, is that there is uniform support and agreement from the right, left, scinentists and greens for the continual growth choice for adding to what people can have ever faster. Our minds are topsy turvy on the basic question. There does not even seem to be any significant public or intellectual community discussion of it anywhere. It’s apparently ‘inconvenient’ to sort that out. It's 'inconvenient' even for the people who recognize the 'inconvenience' of spoiling the earth as a place to live that directly follows from our method of using it up ever faster.
You need to address that. We all need to address that.
Trains
From: Wheeldog, Jul 28, 2008 11:42 PM
I am old enough (72) to have ridden on trains pulled by coal burning steam engines and to have traveled via train from Pittsburgh to Seattle. Frankly, I miss those days. Unlike traveling by air, riding in a train was the highlight of a trip. It was a social and personal experience that fostered a feeling of envolvement with the lands and human settlements just outside the window.