Posted on Thursday July 29th by The Infrastructurist | 1,070
Scott Huler is the author of “On the Grid: A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems That Make Our World Work.”First, let me explain how I roughed up the Amish.
When I discuss On the Grid, my book tracing and marveling at our infrastructure, at least one person always complains that I don’t spend enough time talking about going off the grid. My usual rejoinder is that outside of sub-Saharan Africa and the Australian outback, I don’t think you can go off the grid in any meaningful way. All your consumer goods, your roads, your culture, the books and websites you consult to tell you how to get off the grid, are brought to you by the grid.
Then a caller to a radio show asked me about the Amish. I made some lame rejoinder about the Amish taking the train – our oldest industrial grid – from their farms to Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market to sell their wares, or driving their horses and buggies on nice roads paved by asphalt or concrete. That’s true enough, but let me back off: the Amish get a bye. If they want to say they’re off the grid, I yield.
Otherwise, if you tell me you’re off the grid, I’m going to laugh at you. On the Grid was included recently in a newspaper book review roundup under the headline “Going Off the Grid,” which is funny because I overtly claim that nowadays you just can’t do that.
And the grid means more than electric wires; if I learned nothing else in tracing all those systems, I learned they’re inseparable. Try treating water without electricity; try generating power without water; try doing either without digital communications. And try managing digital communications without air conditioning and the power to run it. It’s all part of the same enormous web. And we’re all part of it.
I found myself on a radio show one day with someone who wrote a book about going off the grid, and before even going on the air he told our host he didn’t wish to be identified as speaking from the United Kingdom. He was in London, the host was in Massachusetts, and I was in Raleigh. We spoke to one another as though we were in the same room – and he was arguing against the grid. I’ll leave you to determine whether there’s irony there, though I’ll point out that data centers, filled with the computers and air conditioners that run the communications grid, are enormous industrial users of grid power.
I’m not against sustainability – I’m for anything that saves resources, improves systems, and may save our planet before we fry it in its own petroleum-based oils. But driving your grid-produced pickup to get your grid-produced lumber at a big box store, driving on grid-paved highways to your mountain acres whose streams are protected by multiple layers of grid-powered government, and then using your grid-supplied plans to build a windmill to power your grid-produced computer as it gathers its information from grid-produced satellites? And then pointing at your windmill and your satellite dish and your septic tank and saying, “Look at me! I’m off the grid!”
I don’t buy it.
Again: Use less, burn less, waste less, I’m for it. Smart grid? Sure, whatever that turns out to be. Let’s make it, invest in it, do it. But unless you’re spinning your own cloth and making buttons out of clam shell – and not using grid-produced sandpaper to smooth the edges, mind you – you’re no more off the grid than President Obama.
Of course one of the vital questions facing our various grids is how to pay for them, and the numbers are ugly: The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates we’re some $2.2 trillion behind in keeping the grid functioning, and the Urban Land Institute notes that while the Chinese invest 9% of their GDP on infrastructure and European nations spend around 5% of theirs, in the U.S. we spend only about 2.4%, and it shows. Even in times of multibillion-dollar stimulus packages, nobody wants to spend the money to get us back up to speed.
A friend describes the neighborhood power grids or personal water treatment facilities espoused by some post-grid apologists as gated communities of the grid: My friends and I are all right, Jack – don’t be improving the whole thing at my expense. Another friend, a writer about architecture, said simply, “it comes down to whether or not to trust the idea of community, and at some point you just have to.” That is, we share this grid, and we rise or fall together. We either keep it up – together – or watch it collapse.
The grid is who we are right now. And if you tell me your grid is an island, I think you know what I’m going to say.
No comments:
Post a Comment