Is there really beauty in sewage-sludge digesters and landfill sites? The traditional view of our landscape is challenged in a new book, writes Aengus Collins
For increasing numbers of us the natural world accounts for a relatively small proportion of our environment. Most of us live our lives in a thoroughly man-made world. Our day-to-day "ecosystem" isn't one of rivers, trees and animals, but of roads, electricity pylons and cars.
How much of our industrial landscape is familiar to us? How well do we understand its underlying workings? More controversially perhaps, how much beauty can we find in it? These are the questions prompted by Infrastructure, a fascinating book by Brian Hayes on the technologies our everyday lives rely upon.
Hayes revels in the elements of our surroundings that the rest of us tend to filter out. Every page of his book is filled with photographs that glory in the geometry of the man-made world - from derricks crowding the sky above a granite quarry to the fanning out of railway tracks at a freight yard.
But it is sheer breadth of information that makes Infrastructure such a magical read. Hayes details and discusses every aspect of the industrial landscape, from the mining activities that provide the basic materials of modern life, through the energy, transport and communications networks that keep things moving, to the waste and recycling facilities that process all the detritus we generate along the way. These are things that too few of us understand.
Hayes manages to imbue it all with a curious sense of beauty.
Bridges, mines, power plants, container ports - these and countless other facilities that we routinely dismiss as characterless blots on the natural landscape are here lovingly presented as objects worthy of our aesthetic attentions.
"I'm not being naive about it," says Hayes. "But there are interesting questions here. Why do we think of a power-plant as being ugly and menacing, whereas we see a butterfly in a meadow with a sense of awestruck beauty? There are no simple answers, but I wanted at least to probe the questions.
"The basic point I want to make is that not everything we impose on the natural landscape is something we'd be better-off without. The contrast between the hard edges of the man-made and the softer lines of the natural world is very interesting, and removing either would make the landscape less appealing. The spark of human presence makes the world more interesting to the eye."
At the heart of Hayes's book is the sense that there's a deep imbalance between the way we relate to the man-made and the natural aspects of the world around us.
"Having an interest in nature is terrific and important," Hayes says.
'I SHARE THE desire to learn about and to understand nature. But it does seem strangely unbalanced. If you go into a bookstore you'll see shelves full of nature books - field guides to birds and to trees and so on. But most of us don't spend our time in pristine natural environments. Our ecosystem is dominated by the man-made, and I think it makes sense to wonder what it looks like and how it works. If you live in a city, for example, there's a curious blindness involved in not asking where the water comes from, or where the sewage goes to."
I ask whether he thinks people should be educated about our industrial surroundings in the same way they are taught about the natural world. He's uneasy about the idea of telling people what they should or shouldn't learn.
"I'm not in the business of saying people ought to know these things. But I think you can argue that there's a rationale for people to be well-informed about how the basic networks of industrial society work. In a democracy we all have to make decisions about these issues - what are we going to do with our rubbish? Do we need to build a new power plant?" Hayes is a life-long technophile, so he comes to these questions with an acknowledged slant in favour of industry.
That said, he goes to some length to make the point that it's perfectly proper for society to question the role of the industrial sector. He adds, however, that it would be preferable if the questions asked of industry were more thoughtful and considered than is sometimes the case.
A KNEE-JERK REJECTION of industrial development helps no-one, Hayes suggests. According to a waste-incinerator manager he interviewed, the acronym Nimby ("not in my back yard") has failed to keep pace with the increasing depth of public hostility to the construction of industrial facilities. So new acronyms have emerged to fill the gap: Banana ("build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody") and Nope ("not on planet earth").
Hayes focuses almost exclusively on US examples of the technologies and facilities he describes. I wonder to what extent a similar book written in a different region or country would have painted a different picture - whether industrial ecosystems differ geographically in anything like the way natural ones do.
"The basic principles are almost universal," he responds. "The underlying fundamentals don't change. For example, there's a one-to-one relationship between power plants in two different regions, insofar as the same components will be present in both cases.
"But the details may differ, in arbitrary and interesting ways. It's like the plumage of birds from different places - it's part of what makes them interesting, but it doesn't alter how the system underneath works."
Putting his book together has been a labour of love for Hayes. It has taken 15 years to complete.
The initial plan was that Hayes's explanations would be accompanied by an illustrator's drawings. When that proved uneconomical, Hayes decided to use photographs he had taken himself. This decision makes the book much more personal and engaging than it might otherwise have been. One cannot help but be touched by the years of dedication encapsulated in the book's 500 photographs - they speak of 15 years of detours down lonely roads, waiting quietly for the right light to hit a smoke stack, a reservoir, a cooling tower.
'NOW THAT THE book is finished I'm at a loss in some senses," he laughs. "It has left a big hole. For one thing, I've lost my sense of how to travel. For years it became a way of life for me to use every journey I had to take as an opportunity to go and find infrastructure to take pictures of. Now when I'm on a trip, I don't know what I should be doing.
"But I really do want to move on now," he adds. "Industrial landscape is a serious interest, but it's not my only one."
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