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

Natural History, Sept, 2005 by Brian Hayes

As industry retreats to the margins of society, queasiness about technology is fueled in part by people's isolation from the means of production. Because the mills and factories and power plants are places we never enter, they begin to seem alien, exotic, mysterious--and often sinister. We don't know what goes on behind the chain-link fence of a refinery or a smelter or a paper mill, or what comes out of the smokestacks, and therefore we suspect the worst. The owners of the plant--and often the workers, too--feel besieged by a hostile and uncomprehending public; they respond by closing the gates and building the fences higher. Their secrecy, naturally, tends to confirm public suspicion that they must have something to hide. And maybe they do. It is a spiral of distrust and animosity.

Perhaps there is still some hope of reconciliation, but it will take a while. Not all industrial artifacts evoke fear or disgust. Lighthouses, for instance, have a certain romance about them, and Dutch windmills are considered highly picturesque. Tugboats have inspired cheerful children's books. Railroads have their rail fans, who prowl the freight yards like paparazzi. Some of the old water-powered mills along New England's rivers, where generations of workers toiled for paltry wages, have been turned into upscale restaurants and shops. Quaker Oats mills and silos in Akron, Ohio, have been converted into a hotel. A former steel mill in Duisburg, Germany, has been converted into a new kind of industrial park--one where children play among the ruins of blast furnaces.

Those examples suggest that fondness and quaintness come with age--or better yet, with obsolescence. Hence that propane plant outside Gallup may look rather different to future generations. In fifty years--or maybe it will take 150 years--we'll be looking back on the brief but glorious age of petroleum in the same way we now" look back with both horror and nostalgia on the age of whale oil. Those towers and tanks beneath the red rock buttes will be lovingly restored as historical artifacts; the buttes would look bereft without them.

This article was adapted from Brian Hayes's forthcoming book, Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape. Copyright [c] 2005 by Brian Hayes, and used with the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.