The ghosts in the machines: why does the industrial landscape seem so alien and forbidding?

Natural History, Sept, 2005 by Brian Hayes

But one effect is clear: the depopulation of the industrial landscape has made it seem an otherworldly place, disconnected from our everyday lives.

Farms, mines, factories, mills, and ports were not always such lonely places. Millions labored there. Today, in contrast, most of us do our work in offices, stores, restaurants, hospitals, or classrooms. Only 8 percent of U.S. jobs are classified as "production occupations," a category that takes in everything from assembly-line workers and machinists to nuclear reactor operators. (The category doesn't include farmers, but they have almost fallen off the charts anyway, making up less than one-half of 1 percent of all workers.) Few Americans of the younger generation have ever seen the inside of a coal mine or a steel mill.

The changing geography of industry has added to the sense of isolation. Industrial districts were once planted in the heart of the city--or else the city grew up around them. The automobile assembly plants in Detroit, the flour mills in Minneapolis, and the stockyards in Chicago were all urban institutions. The steel mills of Pittsburgh and Cleveland were surrounded by the homes of the people who worked there. New York City's garment district was in the middle of one of the most densely populated neighborhoods on the continent.

Today, by mutual consent, industries get as far away from people as they can. The "industrial park," a term whose linguistic oddity has worn off over the years, is explicitly designed to buffer factories and warehouses from residential areas. Or consider the new generation of automobile manufacturing plants, such as Toyota's immense factory near Georgetown, Kentucky: they are miles out in the countryside, off by themselves, with only a few farms for neighbors. Baltimore's Inner Harbor is another instructive example: The wharves of the neighborhood were once the economic engine that drove the rest of the city. The area is still a moneymaker, but the wharves have been replaced by hotels, restaurants, a convention hall, a ball park, and an aquarium. Baltimore remains a major port, but the ships unload in newly built facilities situated miles from the Inner Harbor.

It's a familiar refrain: people want electricity but no power lines, gasoline but no refineries, cell-phone service but not the cell-phone antenna tower. I once spoke with the aggrieved and exasperated operator of a stone quarry. When he began digging his pit, it was on the distant outskirts of a city, but it had since been engulfed by suburban development. Nearby homeowners wanted to shut down the quarry because of the noise, the dust, and the truck traffic. The owner objected that he was there first, indeed that stone from his quarry had built the foundations of the houses. The new residents' intolerance was unfair and irrational, he complained.

The manager of a garbage-burning incinerator told me that the acronym NIMBY, for "not in my back yard," has been superseded by the more extravagant terms BANANA ("build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody") and NOPE ("not on planet Earth"). Needless to say, there is another side to the argument, starting with the principle that people should have a voice in the decisions that shape their own environment. On a local scale, decisions about where to build landfills, sewage plants, and highways are a severe test of the democratic process. More often than not, the nastier bits of infrastructure wind up on the poorer side of town. The same thing can happen on a national or global scale, when richer cities or countries find ways to export their wastes and other problems.