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The ghosts in the machines: why does the industrial landscape seem so alien and forbidding?
Natural History, Sept, 2005 by Brian Hayes
One winter afternoon a few years ago I was standing by a highway outside Gallup, New Mexico, admiring the scenery. The vista before me was a classic of the American West: red sandstone buttes rising from a valley floor, made redder still by the setting sun. It was the kind of landscape we all know from films and paintings and postcards. But this particular vista had something more. In front of the cliffs--and in fact rising to greater heights--were several cylindrical spires that I recognized as petroleum distilling columns, the kind of equipment that dominates the skyline of oil refineries. Off to one side were dozens of gleaming white storage tanks, some of them spherical, some lozenge shaped. The towers and tanks belonged to a plant for converting liquefied petroleum gas into propane and other products.
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Many viewers of this scene would consider the industrial hardware in the foreground to be an intrusion, a distraction, perhaps even a desecration of the landscape. But it was the propane plant, rather than the scenic buttes, that had induced me to pull off the interstate and pull out my camera. For the past twenty years I have made a project of documenting the industrial artifacts that are so much a part of the modern landscape--from the most mundane bits of infrastructure (fire hydrants, manhole covers, traffic stoplights, utility poles) to those titanic installations that transform the terrain (landfills, mines, power plants, steel mills). Often I find myself making a pilgrimage to places that other people go out of their way to avoid, and I struggle to get an unobstructed photograph of the very things that everyone else tries to crop out of the frame.
At Gallup, I found the propane works interesting and worth a stop, but even I had to ask: Why here? The man-made elements of the scene--the cylinders and spheres and other simple geometric shapes--seemed to clash with the softer natural landforms, as irreconcilable as stripes and plaid. Couldn't they have found a better place to put all that? History may provide a partial answer. The plant, at the terminus of a pipeline that originates ninety miles to the northeast, appears to have been located for convenient access to major east-west routes over which the gas products can be distributed--the railroad and Interstate 40. Before the highway and railroad were built, a stagecoach line followed the same route, which crosses the Continental Divide. Running parallel, thirty miles to the south, is the scenic road, State Highway 53, also known as the Ancient Way. That route follows a trail that, centuries before the arrival of Europeans, connected the pueblos of the Zuni and Acoma peoples. In other words, this landscape has been put to human use for a very long time. Still, the petrochemical gear seems to fall into another category, not just more conspicuous than earlier signs of human habitation, but also more menacing.
The clash of values goes beyond aesthetics. After all, everyone knows that nature is good and good for you, whereas industry is ugly, evil, and dangerous. The mention of nature brings to mind majestic landscapes: the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite. The mention of industrial technology brings to mind a long list of disasters: Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Bhopal, Chernobyl. In the presence of nature we hold our breath in hushed reverence; in the presence of industry we hold our nose.
It was not always thus. A few centuries ago, nature was often portrayed as savage, hostile, and cruel. Mountains and forests were barriers, not refuges. The lights of civilization were a comforting sight. We took our charter from the book of Genesis, which grants mankind dominion over the beasts, and we felt it was both our entitlement and our duty to tame the wilderness, fell the trees, plow the land, dam the rivers. In the most extreme version of this ideology, everything on the planet was put here explicitly for human use. At the opposite extreme, today, the Earth-first faction urges us to treat the entire planet according to the campsite ethic: carry out what you carry in, and leave no trace of your passage.
The crossover between those two sensibilities seems to have come sometime in the nineteenth century, when millions of people were leaving behind a rural life for jobs in factories, mills, and mines. That was the epoch when Henry David Thoreau decamped to Walden Pond (but couldn't escape the locomotive's whistle), and when John Muir became a voice crying out for the wilderness. At the same time, however, others were still celebrating rather than lamenting the conquest of nature. In 1887 the American writer William Makepeace Thayer published an exuberant travel guide, Marvels of the New West, whose title page promises "marvels of nature, marvels of race, marvels of enterprise, marvels of mining, marvels of stock-raising, and marvels of agriculture." Five of those six marvels refer to products of human activity (the "marvels of race" are archaeological relics). Even the chapter on marvels of nature bears a strong human imprint. The engravings that illuminate those pages show canyons, peaks, and craggy rock formations, but there is very often a railroad line running through the middle of it all.
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