Hey everyone, thank you so much for listening to episode 1 of the Culture Study Podcast. So this is just a reminder that you can get reminders for each week's episodes and show notes and props for our great discussion threads and a lot more by going to culturestudypod.substac.com. That's also where you can become a paid subscriber.
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like so helpful if you rate and review the show. All right, and that's all right, let's do episode 2. I feel like a lot of people have written about infrastructure and a disproportionate number of them have been white men who live in North Carolina and you know, who just don't see it in the same way.
They don't sort of focus on it the same way as I do. So yeah, so it's like obviously I think it's a thing that is of broad interest, but I think it's weird, been trained to think of it as, oh, it's just the engineers, the technologists, you know, the city planners, like anyone with an M.A. and urban studies, like that, yeah, exactly. Yeah, but at the same time, like we're all,
we understand that it's political too, right? Like we're outweighed, so when we hear about flint, we say things like, well, those, you know, they're Americans, like how could they possibly be treated that way? So, so we totally understand that affidavit and it's just thinking about how to put those pieces together. I'm Anne Helen Peterson and this is the Culture Study podcast. I'm Deb Chattra. I am a professor of engineering at a small engineering college outside Boston and I am the author
of how infrastructure works inside the systems of the shape our world. Tell us about your new book. Yes, it's actually my only book. The book is called How Infrastructure Works and in the US to subtitle is inside the systems of shape our world and I'm really delighted to get a chance to talk about it here. So when I said we were doing an episode about infrastructure and we already had this plan to have you on, but it wasn't like public that you were going to be the co-host.
I'm not kidding you, like I dozen people either DM'd me or wrote into the questions to suggest that we have you on. So I just love that like that is so latchable that like you are the person that Culture Study readers and listeners want to hear from when it comes to infrastructure. I mean that is truly delightful and I think I know you know a part of the reason why and it really is because the sort of the familiar perspective on infrastructure is not one that really
intersects with the Culture Study audience. Yeah, you know if we think of it I was like oh it's technological, if we think about it it's like oh it's for the nerds and and of course I don't believe that and there's many ways in which I think it really speaks to the people who listen to Cutter Study. So the other thing that absolutely jumped out at me when I was beginning your book is the story that you use about Wiley Coyote to illustrate the connection between
infrastructure and what we take for granted and culture just broadly. So can you tell us that story? So the so the example I use is a sort of classic Wiley Coyote runs off a cliff, looks around and only then does he fall and and of course gravity is inevitable but where we are
as a society isn't. So we have built these systems that make our lives as we know them possible and we also know that there's a significant sort of cost to these systems and the big one is that all of the energy that we use to make our daily lives possible a significant fraction of that comes from fossil fuels and we are starting to live with the impact of putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A secondary element is all of the actual stuff in our lives comes from somewhere
and we're dealing with the impact of that sort of extraction and disposal part. So Wiley Coyote looks around realizes is a problem and then he falls and the thing I say in the book and I'm going to reiterate is that we don't have to fall right there's nothing inevitable about what
happens next. I think this is a really important point because we often we've really been fed the narrative that climate change and the broadly the environmental depredation of our planet is a bad thing that is happening and our job is to stop that bad thing but also it's like before it's too late and I can't tell you how much I've sort of pushed back against that sort of catastrophic
framing of how to think of the impact of climate change. There is no too late. Every step that we take to try to address and change these things will in fact have an impact right it's not an all or nothing proposition it's not a do it now or never happens proposition it's just going to be the work for a while but the second thing that I really want to get across is that we really get this narrative of our job is to keep bad things from happening and I actually submit that that's
actually no longer the case. The thing that has changed in the last few decades is that and I think you know a lot of people a lot of people kind of know this intellectually and we're still playing out the actual practical consequences of it that if we now have the technology we do now have the
technology to switch to renewable energy and that kind of changes everything in the sense of we no longer have to accept the harms that come the global harms that come with using fossil fuels but we can keep all of the good things that energy makes possible in our lives right that we don't
have to reduce our ability to do things in the world but we do have to figure out how we're going to do it and because most of the ways in which we use fossil fuels and most of the ways we use energy and in fact most of the ways we interact in the world no matter how much it feels like we're
doing it as individuals we are doing it through our collective infrastructural systems and that means if we're going to transform them we need to learn how to transform them together and I think to see these systems around us and this is the part that I that I also really loved as you
said that like if culture is everything that is around us that we don't even really see on a daily basis it's just like the way that we live the things that we like the how we navigate the world like infrastructure is also that oftentimes until it fails if you travel outside the US or even
within the US or within North America we see this right that that these are the systems that are the culture that we just do things this way and then we go somewhere else and it's like holy crap the plugs are different right that's the most that's the most common and familiar example and how do
they right instead of like oh it's totally random that plugs are the way that it's a local planter so it's just like any other cultural differences we notice we only we largely notice our infrastructure when we go to different places I also love in the book how you talk about how you became an
infrastructure nerd and so much of it as a kid was having some of those differences very visible to you by living in different places for longer periods of time so can you talk a little bit about that yeah so on one hand I was sort of born into it in two different ways so one my father worked
for the local power utility from before when I was born and but the other thing is that I was born in Toronto right at the moment where they were doing this sort of intense investment into infrastructure in advance of a significant change to how immigration was handled so my parents
are part of that first wave of non-European immigration and at the same time they're building you know bringing nuclear power plants online investing in highways and the lake so my parents immigrated from India to Canada so my dad did this I'd be in Canada before joining the power utility
and so like lots of immigrant kids my family would spend summers in India and we ended up in fact living there for about six months when I was nine so going from a place like Canada where I have kind of full stack you know the electricity is just there all the time the water is clean all
the time you really really never have to think about it to a growing city in India where we pretty much expected that there would be brownouts every afternoon right that that what everyone's you know it was it was a little bit early for air conditions as much more common for people to have
evaporative coolers and fans and but even that was enough of a draw on the power grid that everything would sort of brown out we had running water and this is true in many cities of the world we only had running water for an hour a day in the morning and the evening the quality
of the water wasn't really high enough for kids with like Canadian immune systems yeah and so we definitely boiled and filtered a water the water that came out of the tap before we drank it and so it really made visible to me at a really young age that the systems existed at all right it
by seeing two different ones it's why the contrast is what made them visible to me at all and then then you can start getting into the oh it's really different in these two places why is it different yeah my question to start the episode we have a lot of other listener questions but like part of
the reason I wanted to have you on the show too is that I have become really fascinated with local infrastructure specifically since moving to this island because so many different parts like being off of the municipal systems has like made them visible and interesting in a way that they
hadn't been before interesting frustrating all of the different things so we are a part of a water system neighborhood water systems which are they're all over the place I just had no idea because that it always been hooked up to you know like municipal water yeah and our neighborhood water
system is really messed up like some of the pipes were just dug by 20 year olds building trenches like 50 years ago no one knows exactly where they are like you have a group of volunteers who is responsible for it it's wild it is so wild and then like we have a generator lots of people
on the island of generators because we do lose power and then the most interesting thing though to me is the septic systems and you know millions and millions and millions of people are in septic systems which are kind of magical like how they work and how they like they work with the ground and
all of like everything it's so interesting but then they also are a huge liability and like to me a really interesting way to think about the problem of privatized infrastructure so I wonder if you could just talk about septic systems a little bit so you know actually my colleague Professor
Allison Wood is a civil engineer who actually did her PhD work on neighborhood scale septic so we're sort of used to thinking of it as septic systems as either being individual and then once you have a sort of a critical mass of people with their individual systems then it's time to go to municipal wastewater treatment and she was investigating the sort of mid-range scale of septic systems that are neighborhood scale it means that you can professionalize them right that it means that
you can have someone who's responsible for them who can hold them to sort of a higher quality standard than you might be able to do by yourself but as as a not necessarily as a stepping stone two municipal wastewater but actually as an alternative two municipal wastewater and so there's actually two
sort of implicit ideas in there that I want to sort of pull out so one is we have increasing standards for what we think is appropriate for us right like what constitutes clean water and how we deal with our sewage has thankfully right even over the course of my lifetime and I imagine
yours has gotten vastly improved and so you know the EPA was founded right around when I was born I live in Boston which had famously dirty river famously dirty harbor but not really all that unusually so and really over the course of my lifetime I've seen the water supplies around where
I live we get cleaner and cleaner not in fact worse and worse because of concerted efforts to make them better and some of that is technological and a huge chunk of that is actually just policy commitment to do that so you know that subject question it's it's kind of the microcosm version
of this it's being able to say like oh yeah actually we want to have higher standards and we want to have this higher standards it's challenging for people to do it as individuals so we're going to work on it as a community yeah but the second interesting thing that that eliminates is this idea
of what I think of as sort of the scale of the problem so we're particularly in the US we're really used to thinking of infrastructures coming into varieties either you're sort of homesteading to sort of do it yourself I have my grid I have my septic system I have my well I provide for
myself and my household or as is the case of like the vast majority of Americans get their water from only a handful of water supply systems because all the major cities people do not get their water individually right if you live in any city really and certainly if you live in like New York
or LA that account for a significant fraction of the US population right there so this sort of mesoscale neighborhood level infrastructure is a really interesting emerging idea this idea of like what can we do together as opposed to as individuals so that's the sort of idea of neighborhood
scale septic you know there's a group in Massachusetts that looking at neighborhood scale geothermal so instead of having a heat pump it's really hard to put a heat pump in but it actually works better to do it as a neighborhood I'm sure you've heard about micro grids right that having
having neighborhood energy generation and storage there's local internet access right to creating small internet systems that then all of these systems can then connect into the larger system so I think of it as we have the kind of the do it yourself model and we have kind of like the large
scale model but there really is a do it together mutual aid model which a someone who lives in a place with a relatively small community that's not connected to the grid I'm sure that is your world in a way that it's not mine because I live in the middle of a major city well you know I live in
Washington state which is very progressive in a lot of different ways in terms of trying to figure out some of these solutions moving forward and some of them I actually don't think are unique to Washington state at all I haven't looked around enough to know but like the way that the county in
particular provides grants for like regular pumping right of septic systems or like we had to replace ours because it's an old old steel septic probably the original like whatever was put in when they got rid of the outhouse here in probably the 50s or 60s and we're close enough to the
water that like you could never put in a septic system where we had like that wouldn't but we were grandfathered in and grandfathering like in my mind sometimes I'm like oh is that just like I don't know allowing people with various privileges to keep those privileges and now I understand it as
they would rather have people do it and get it done and take care of it instead of having the cost prohibition of like oh you need to like put in an entirely new system and pump your poop up hill in order to get it into that system like that would make it so they don't replace it and then the field
fails and then there's all these longs to go effects and so it's one of those cases where I see the government actually thinking in long term instead of short term that is really heartening but I don't know if most people really unless you've dealt with septic system regulations or the county
you know checking to make sure that you've had it inspected or pumped every two years you don't know that that's happening the same way that you don't know that regular maintenance of your um the sewage treatment facility is happening right well yeah it's really easy to see the sort
of penalties and the punishment and when things go badly right it's really hard to see all of the effort made so that things go well into hell of course those efforts cease to happen or otherwise don't work out right so yeah and that's a really great example because it's this idea of
figuring out what is needed by individuals or individual households that can be provided at that sort of state provision level that then protects all the people around that individual right that I mean you know that you don't have good septic for your own benefit right you have
good septic for the benefit of everyone around you not having to do it with your poop I mean you know you're not having to do with it is sort of a side effect but you know it's yeah but it is protecting the water supply it is you know and and it's because we have an incredibly long history of
that not being true yeah yes exactly so this is a great place to transition to listener questions we had a ton about sidewalks and I think that's because it's one of those things that like immediately comes to mind that is super visible like sidewalks and roads when it comes to infrastructure
so we're gonna play two questions back to back okay that first is from Jennifer and our producer melody is going to read it sidewalks what makes them more walkable or less so why do cities not invest more in helping their residents and others walk safely and comfortably and then we have
this one from Kelly my town is up in arms about sidewalks and who pays to maintain them just outside of town the tax of very municipality doesn't have any sidewalks leaving kids walking on narrow shoulders home from school families on the side of busy roads on the way to the park and
employees trudging over drainage ditches just to get to work it's dangerous and disheartening I'd love to know more about the history of sidewalks where the money comes to maintain them put them in and how I might advocate to add more all right so where do we want to start here do you think
maybe the history of sidewalks would be a good place to to get into this so I'm I'm sure it is and that is definitely not a thing that I feel like I'm at all an expert on I know there's a new book by Henry Graber called I want to say pave paradise that is about the issue of cars
and how cities sort of got taken over for cars but I do think there's there's sort of a some broader ideas that right then this idea of when you have things like this who's benefiting who's paying the costs right and who's being harmed so that's kind of the first piece of it right that and then
the second piece of that is this idea of how do we see or how do we think about those benefits and I think there's some really sort of deep human things here right I think there is humans are much better at loss aversion than we are at seeing the possibilities of new things
so and you know I live in Cambridge Massachusetts which is of course famously progressive and has had an enormous amount of reshaping of the roads of the course of the last kind of five to 10 years and there's more planned I'm unusual I suspect that I am someone who commutes by car
and by public transit and by bike pretty much every week yeah and so I let me tell you you know I'm a pedestrian most of the time I'm also like I drive I work at a engineering college out in the suburbs so I drive out there and you know I will happily bike around the city and if I'm
working if I'm working at home I'm often working not at home but like at a library or elsewhere in my bike so I've sort of seen this development right I've seen it from from the point of view out of the pedestrian and as a driver and as a cyclist and I've served seeing even in a place like
Cambridge I've seen this sort of fights over it and I think a chunk of it is that it is super easy to see what you're losing when you do this and it's very very hard to imagine what the benefits will be before they happen so that's the first thing the second thing is all of those
benefits and in fact many of the harms are not things that we can easily put a dollar value on it's like how do you put like I like I too have walked in places that had no sidewalks and I've been walking at the side of the road because I'm used to walking places and so you know I'll be
out somewhere in the suburbs and it will not occur to me that there will not be sidewalks by the side of the road and that maybe I can't comfortably walk to where I'm going it is impossible to put a dollar value on how dangerous how disheartening it is to be trudging along the side of the
road or crossing drainage dishes and so we don't really have a very good vocabulary to talk about that and to make decisions around that we kind of have one metric which is like what is the economic cost of this or what is the economic benefit of this and we're we haven't and the reason why I'm
bringing this up is because I think this actually applies to infrastructure broadly right that most of the benefits of it and in fact many of the harms are not things that can be described in dollar terms and we're we're I feel like we are learning or are most likely relearning sorry
the other way around I'd say relearning because we built this infrastructure in the first place but I think ultimately we are in fact learning the vocabulary for how do we articulate these benefits these harms and how do we negotiate with the people who live around us about what we're going to do
and how we're going to do it yeah it makes me sad that I think one of the the pieces of that vernacular now for communicating that is pedestrian deaths and encyclist deaths and that that is not like that's it's either cost benefit analysis or it's taking those sorts of incredibly stark
and tragic manifestations of the lack of safety that that occurs when you don't have sidewalks or when you don't have good apparatus apparatus for crossing the street what's the word for like um like along um a strip mall kind of area in a suburb where you have like four or six
row or like lanes and they're called like super roads or roads or something like that like they're just like yeah I don't know that I don't know the term of art and like you I find myself like when I would be going to some random place to report and I
oftentimes going to run in the morning and yeah you look at the little map and you're like oh I could go here and then oh you can't you're you're in the drainage ditch right or the other way that I could always tell almost like the politics of an area was when I would get to a crosswalk and
is the crosswalk engineered so that it only shows the walk sign when someone presses the button or is it engineered to actually move between the two like acknowledging that there will always be pedestrian there yeah or is the pedestrian the exception to the rule and actually the one I
was really noticed is when you can only cross the street on like one side so you have to like cross over to the other side and it's like what the hell like everyone else in the car like it doesn't cost them any time or energy right but it cost me I'm often again I also run for a run
right it costs me time and energy to have to needlessly cross the street in order to cross over or to cross back or whatever and not to stay on my side of the road yeah all of those things make it very very clear to pedestrian that you are in fact second-class citizens on our shared roads
right that we're all using and even something too like I remember reading a big piece about curb cuts in New York City and how difficult they are for people who are in mobility devices but also for people who are pushing strollers and but that they're there for parking right like they're
there so that people can pull in and then block the sidewalk and they're just like and it the preferences for the individual there and so sometimes I think it gets to this like larger ethos which is in some ways the contrast between like political ends of the spectrum which is that like
do I care about things that don't benefit me personally but but will benefit people who are not like me or people who are not related to me or do I only care about things that personally benefit me do I only want to fund things that will personally benefit me yeah how do you think about that
I mean so one of the things about infrastructure system so I I mean infrastructure means a lot of things to a lot of different people but I really focused on you know my back when it's engineering I really focused on these technological networks right so this is sort of classic utility so
transportation as we've been talking but also like water and electricity and telecommunications right these sort of these sort of networks so the thing about these as networks is that broadly they're that we use these to bring things to where we use them so it could be information
it could be energy it could be some like food it's like supplies or it means we're moving our we're moving ourselves around right transportation the thing about this is that we I mean we all have bodies that exist somewhere on the planet right and we're super like a really dumb thing to say
but it's in fact true and if we build out these networks then we are in a relationship to the people who live around us in these networks whether we know them or not whether we have anything in common with them or not I mean this is the sort of truth about living in a city is that you're
in a relationship with everyone around you because of these infrastructural networks because you have a body that is present in this city yes so that's where the like oh you don't really care about other people it's like I'm sorry but if you are in some if you're on the same network
then you have something that you have shared in common with the people around you and it actually it's actually worse than that right it's not even just the people who live around you it's these I mean these networks are essentially global now right so we can do things in some place
that affects people that we may never meet on you know the other side of the country or in the other side of the planet and we are in a relationship with those people so and I you know I think of and actually I think of this as the idea of infrastructural citizenship right that we have
we have our passport that says where you're allowed to live but ultimately we have this deep relationship with the people who share the land on which we're currently living today but also into the future and so we kind of don't get to say well I don't really care about these other
people it's like you're you're in a relationship with them whether you like it or not and I you know I always really like the idea of politics as what you get when you have a sustained relationship with people that you can't easily walk away from right that you have to decide how are you going
to work together on things it's not it's not about you know political parties it's not about voting it really is it's a sustained relationship you can't easily leave and that is really true of where you live or where you are right that you don't get to get out of this relationship
just because you decide you don't like your neighbors or because you want to try to live by yourself you're on the same network you're sharing the same space this is this really is the challenge right to figure out how to work across any of those divides fortunately broadly people do actually
I you know everyone says oh no one cares about infrastructure nobody really you know nobody like you like and I think I think that is a hundred percent not true I think that yeah absolutely yeah I think everybody cares deeply about infrastructure many people really love infrastructure
and certainly no matter where people sit on their their sort of political divide there is an understanding that infrastructure serves many of us well and what we really want is to serve more of us better I mean if anyone tries to say that no one cares about infrastructure I invite them to
come to like any dinner like family gathering it's particularly here in the west where people talk about roundabouts right because there's more roundabouts now and those are real problem this is a good segue into talking about cars which I think is another thing that people care a lot about
and sometimes don't know how to extract themselves or how to like affect change in this larger system so this question it comes from Vivian how do we undo or evolve the car dependent country we've built I've been thinking about this for several reasons both societal and personal
kids unable to experience the gleeful independence of walking to the corner store to buy a juice or candy and the mental health crisis this has contributed to in teens my kids can but millions cannot there is literally nowhere they can walk safely a culture in which pedestrians are blamed for their
own deaths a giant car arms race leading to ever deadlier collisions a sedentary lifestyle that many cannot escape from lonely seniors who are too old to drive but have no access to public transit the fact that a major reason parents take their kids to Disney world is because it's a place their
kids can walk around safely that is all these things I feel it and how in just to kind of get a started here how car dependent is the United States comparative to other like where are we on the spectrum are we the most car dependent first of all I don't know if we can I want to talk about
the United States as a whole as like the most right yeah so I mean I would say that the I mean this is I you know I grew up outside the United States and I've spent time outside the country and I always say that the US is 50 different countries in a trench coat which is one that's hard for and
actually it's probably more than 50 I mean if you like Eastern West Washington yeah in Washington yeah are not one of the same place so but in particular you know because of the sort of distribution so like if you live in New York if you live in New York City and you don't have a car
and you never need a car versus large parts of the United States where that's not true and that's true of other places too right that's not specific to the US so they're up you know it absolutely I don't know I don't know if it makes sense to say like we are the most car dependent country however
it is absolutely true two things are absolutely true one is many of our cities can really only be navigated by car right that it's like significantly easier faster less expensive to get around by car it might only be possible to get around by car than for then it is in other places and that's
particularly true when you think about interest city travel right that is very very hard to get across the United States but without either driving or flying right there's those are pretty much our options there's not a lot of train there's very little sort of public train I mean flying
mass transit right it's just not public it's privatized although again you know we know that airlines are also support you know have been supported in various different ways so I think many of us understand that we live in a society in a culture that is deeply dependent on cars and I think
many people also realize that this was a choice right that this is not a thing that happened naturally it was an actual decision that was made by many of our forebears who decided that they wanted to live in a world where people had access to in theory their own private you know
the freedom of having their private vehicle that they could leave when they want to leave they could come home when they want to come home cars are actually kind of amazing for that yeah yeah the problem of course is when you sort of build everything around that and one of the ways I think
of it is that cars do not scale that if you have more people closer together cars just get worse right as I mean that's basically what traffic jams are I sort of joke and I can get anywhere in my car at any moment as long as the thing I do not want to do is go downtown into downtown Boston
or rush hour in which case I will like just walk to the subway and so and that really gets across this idea the public transit scales as people get closer together and we've sort of committed to one and not committed to the other and the fact that you know had have uncommitted people talk
about this in LA it's like oh LA had to you know had all these street cars that's true of many places right because that was the only option to to move around before people we had this sort of easy widespread access to fossil fuels but like as Vivian noted that ability to access that freedom
that comes from having cars is by no means evenly distributed and certainly you know every one of us if we're a driver if we're like I'm happy getting around in my car at some point in our lives that is going to become no longer true right like we're all going to age we're all going to lose
our capacity there's going to be a moment where we're going to be like I cannot no longer drive safely that is also true of everyone under the age of 16 that is also true of everyone who for whatever reasons of sort of disability or sort of non-standard ability cannot drive safely we already know
that this approach does not serve large suites of our population and in fact as I said if you feel like you're well served by your car today someday you will not be well served by being expected to drive everywhere so then the question is well what you know what do we do
about this right how do we start moving over and I think that there really has been the sort of widespread awareness that this is the thing we want to change and one really great piece about it is that this isn't a an all or nothing proposition and particularly because we have access to things
like you know just in time transit so I think about like public micro mobility like Los Angeles has been experimenting with sort of small scale buses that don't necessarily have fixed routes that are kind of halfway between a bus and an Uber which wouldn't have been possible before people had
cell phones right there's like new possibilities for how we can create share transit systems that didn't exist in the past having said that like I I'm 100% in favor of like interesting real transport I like the idea of I'm just going to like sit on a train and look at the window
or work and not actually have to pay attention to driving the entire time I could do something else but the nature of networks is that they are connected right so it's like if you can figure out how to make changes to your local environment then that can happen kind of everywhere and all the time
and then those systems connect up so it doesn't have to be like we're going to have a giant this is the new thing that's happening for a lot of it on the day to day level like that's you know that's the getting a kids to school piece of it that's not the like how do we connect up cities across
three thousand miles of continent answer but they're you know they're really closely related right so seeing the new possibilities and thinking about how do we build out these networks yeah I see this in the Seattle light rail which like there was I always wondered if there was ever going to
be the political will to to actually do a light rail project after the disaster of the monorail project in the early two thousand and I love it I love it so much like it is so incredible to get down to the airport if you're going to any sort of sporting game like people actually use it
and the beautiful thing is that it keeps expanding and it's going to keep expanding in so many different directions and part of the reason they're able to master that political will to do it is because it's working right it's a virtual circle yeah it's not perfect there's still needs to be more
there needs to be a much better bus system that connects to it like but you got it like sometimes I think that there's a reticence to start somewhere right there's just this like oh we'll build it no one will come like and it's not kind of like there's a defeatism almost instead of like we got to
start and then we'll keep going and you know this is where I feel like I'm a giant nerd because I do feel like the data is really compelling that public transit in particular is a virtual circle right that if you build it that people start using it and then it actually becomes because public transit
does scale in a way that cars don't right the more people who use it the better it works and then you can like afford to invest more you can have more like you know more admirutes and even if it's just like we're going to have more buses or you're going to have like mini buses right if you just
start somewhere you can sort of get that flywheel going and you know some of us you know you're sort of describing direct experience with this certainly there's a huge amount of data on this right about how the systems work and that it really is a virtual circle right it really is not let's see if you can get the political will and we're going to build this it's like you if you just sort of get subtraction and get going on it public transit is the thing that is genuinely sort of
appreciated use becomes increasingly valuable as more people use it. So our next question I am fascinated by I had no idea this was happening it's about rural infrastructure and it comes from Caroline. I live in Vermont and my local utility has started to give some customers large Tesla home batteries as a way of preventing outages which can be pretty common particularly in more
rural parts of the state. So people around here are pretty excited about this approach and from what I can tell it's relatively unique and I'm just curious about whether this is a feasible
way of dealing with outages in other parts of the country as well. I think of this as sort of like a resilience question right a climate resilience question other in terms of like okay if this is something that we're going to have more of we're going to more power outages because you can only make a grid so sustainable to weather outages what are we going to do so that people aren't in crisis
what do you think about this. So I actually think that just one piece of it the most kind of immediate piece of it is we have these power lines we get snowstorms you know at some point this year you're going to have a power outage and we know that if you have batteries it'll help you weather
that an outage. So natural disasters are different than extreme weather events right there it's become the natural disaster because it interacts with human despite the name because it interacts with human systems and most commonly it's a natural like what the severity of a natural disaster
is that our basic infrastructural systems were disrupted and it's like how long does it take for them to go back come back up again right and it could be a snow day where you can't drive but everything else is working just fine or it could be like you have a two week long block out right like in the wake of you know in Hercumaria where some places didn't get power back for a year
or even some like Hercum Sandy right where there is like every system was disrupted. So basically starting to say like look there's always going to be extreme weather events but we're going to figure out how to make individual households resilient so we'll put batteries in but there's
actually more to it than that so the thing about having batteries is I think of batteries in the house batteries everywhere really grids go batteries as buffers that right now we pretty much produce electricity on a sort of a moment by moment basis that we know roughly how much energy
actually we know often quite exactly how much energy is going to be used on one hand and we have natural gas or coal or other power plants and you know they really operate like a car right it's like if you need more power you put your you put your foot on the accelerator you put more fuel
into it you get more power out and you can match these two things unfortunately there's no equivalent of an accelerator for lots of forms of renewable energy for you know for like sunshine or wind and of course it is possible to have there's a I was a dunkelflout of the German word for
dark doldrums right when you have a cloudy and windless day so neither your solar nor your wind generation is really working so instead of trying to do this like hyper optimized match demand and supply we can instead built in built in buffers right and so giving everyone batteries
is essentially putting in a grid scale energy storage network you're building in resilience even on days that seem like perfectly fine days right not emergencies because it just means that you can smooth out the variation in supply so that everyone has access to energy that they need because
there's a sort of built in buffer in fact you can get even more clever if you've heard about things like the smart grid you can use it to sort of you know if you know that a lot of people are going to use electricity in the afternoon for example on a hot day in the summer where everyone's
running the air conditioners you can use this battery storage to kind of arbitrage like when are you generating energy and when are you storing it and when are you going to use it so as the systems get smarter and the they talk to each other and they talk to the utility you can start
doing all of the things that we sort of talked about during when we have renewable energy which is having a smart grid really bring it to bear centers and communication and instead of having this sort of just in time grid yeah we can start doing having the system that works that makes
renewable systems really work so yes the immediate thing is you will keep your power when there's a snowstorm but the actual long term goal is we have a robust and reliable fully renewable energy grid I love this this is making me think about it so different and it's so much better than my
propane power generator right like yeah like on many different levels yes um but that makes so much sense and I hope that this really answers um Caroline's questions so our next one is about infrastructure that you don't necessarily see or participate in directly this is from Kira
and Melody's gonna read it as well almost every waste water treatment plant in the coastal United States is built near sea level most of them are aging, resting, corroding is the United States going to systematically replace these plants or are we waiting literally into a murky
new era where we are going to need new landscape systems to clean waste water well so first of all wastewater treatment they are of course at sea level for a reason which is that water and also waste flows downhill and so it means that you so I live in Boston where there's like a single
giant plant called the deer island wastewater treatment plant that's across the harbor like across the channel from Boston Logan which are both built out sort of in Boston Harbor um and so yes there are pumping stations but broadly you know everything just you know if you'd be flush to toilet or water goes down the drain everything just can take a very downhill so yeah they're typically built at the lowest point around which is sea level um whereas of course our clean water comes from
the highest point around and then flows downhill so it comes in New York City it comes from up the Hudson River in San Francisco it comes from the Hetchche reservoir in the Sierra's and so forth there's no getting around the fact that physical systems decay over time right so one way or
another we're gonna have to do something to make sure that these stay up and running right and that means maintaining them repairing them as they break down um it means replacing them as they need to be replaced it also which is I think cure is alluding to here um because they're on they tend
to be at sea level if sea level rise is going to become an issue where you live figuring out how to harden them against storm surge hurricane and so forth it's going to be a big issue there's no there's really no getting around the fact you know I already alluded to the fact that
because we tend to use energy through fossil fuels and through these shared systems and our infrastructural systems are powered that means that they are the major way in which we yes individuals contribute to climate change they are also the systems that are going to be the most
affected by climate change because they move things around the landscape right so whether it's you know electricity being brought to our houses or whether it's used to be taken away from our houses if the landscape in which they're embedded is changing and in a future that looks very
different the next hundred years is going to look very different than the past 100 years no matter what we do no matter how well we sort of mitigate um climate change at this point that it means we're all going to need to figure out how to do with that and we're going to need to bake that in so one
of the things I also say is that if you live in North America in particular if you I mean if you live in the United States if you live really anywhere in the developed North like we we are the richest civilization that has ever existed in human history right like our history as a species
and no matter how you could imagine that right whether it's money and I personally think of it in terms of energy not dollars right like in terms of what we can do what we can do together our sort of level of technological sophistication our level of agency our level our ability to
cooperate together there is absolutely no reason why we cannot decide that we will build wastewater that works for us in 50 or 100 years right that we can build elected now you know I do not remember this are too young but like Jimmy Carter during the height of the oil crisis told everyone
that you should turn your thermos that down and wear a sweater and like that's not the future right it used to be that if you wanted to have access energy it had to be through fossil fuels that's not the case anymore yeah so it really is the political question of how you know allocating the money
that we have two things that are genuinely meaningful to all of us like adequate wastewater treatment we have like air conditioners on the steering wheels of our cars we have figured out how to do that we could figure out how to update our wastewater treatment like there's all of these
like frivolous or like wonderful things about being an incredibly smart point like we're at this point in our civilization where we can do so much we just have to make sure that we include that in the so much you know there's that standing joke about like oh like we were promised jet
packs in the future it's like we actually kind of have jet packs right that's what a lot of the cars are they're like you as an individual have access to all of this energy to like go around and like move around and do stuff it's also kind of weird and dangerous for yourself and for the
people around you but like we we're really good at doing that at an individual level but you know the future I was promised had trains right like I want jet packs and the future I mean I'll you know utopian visions of the future like people don't generally have jet packs what they
generally have is like public transport right and so I want that future for a bunch of reasons and we we you know we figured out a lot of the individual technological sophistication right like I think my iPhone is amazing right I think that electric cars and like cars generally are kind
of amazing but figuring out how to put the the emphasis on the other side right for these collective systems is the thing that we are not very practiced at and I think a chunk of that is actually part of the reason why I wrote this book is to give ourselves some visibility into the systems as
collective and as non-monetary right as as having value that is not economic as having harms that can't be measured in dollars okay I think this is a great way for us to do our last question which I think offers us even though it's a little bit pessimistic a way to be optimistic this is from
Claire and Melody's going to read it is it the case that large scale infrastructure is no longer politically viable to build my partner and I were discussing this the other day whether large works are somehow publicly unpalatable and politically infeasible are small or comparable investments
in different communities necessary to move funding or projects along politically so the first thing I'll say in response to this is that I am so thrilled that we have a large scale infrastructure project that is about to start on our island which is that we are getting an electric ferry
to replace our ferry that is from 1962 and it's been a huge process that has involved the community in terms of like applying for the national grants that have a lot and we have matching dollars from the county and all of this stuff it's going to take a long time it's really complicated
because there's eel grass and we have to replace some of the docks to put in the electric stuff but like I was in Norway a couple of years ago I saw these electric ferries they feel like the future it is going to be fantastic and it is a huge large scale infrastructure project that was made
possible not their individual politicians but through community might and so I wonder if that's maybe a way for us to start talking about this and in fact you actually alluded to applying for grants and getting sort of support right so I I really love does a development economist
Marcia Sen who worked with pretty much the poorest communities on the planet right he worked in places like India and he said that wealth is a way of providing us the freedom to live the kinds of lives that we have reason to value and one of the reasons why I love that is because on a day to day basis and this became extremely clear to all of us who stayed home during the pandemic our freedom to live the kind of lives that we have reason to value does not in fact come from wealth
it actually comes from shared infrastructural systems right that that make it possible to do something other than spend our time doing that and so you know you really highlighted something there where the other key piece of this is the kinds of lives that we have reason to value right there is no
one size fits all entered to that solution so you sort of describe this as we all got together we understand like what needs to be done we got some external funding and that really highlights the idea that there doesn't have to be a single top down approach but it really is useful to basically say
there is funding available but we're not going to say this is how you need to use it we're going to say you as a community can decide what you have reason to value and then the all-purpose facilitator in you know sends term of wealth can then be allocated to you to make that possible
doing this work well is never going to be easy right it is how do you balance not just the human actors who might have different priorities but how do you balance things like the natural effect the new topic of the ill grass and this sort of technological questions about the dogs right how do
you balance those types of externalities and harms but the flip side is these I think such really down these are solvable problems yeah right a non-solvable problem is um you know do you have to violate the law of thermodynamics right and solve a problem is you have to figure out how are you
going to build this so on the one hand like even if though it is politically challenging to do lots of things especially big things politics can change enough people can say we actually want to live in a different kind of world that's how we live in a different kind of world right that's
what politics means that's how it happens at no point is anything sort of taken for granted at no point is anything a foregone conclusion what is absurdly impossible today is our social norm tomorrow and that's the thing that I think we're starting to see happen right I see that in the
questions that people sent in I see that when I look at different projects that are happening right and they're happening we sort of live in the monolithic world where there's like oh we know we know what climate change is we know like it's really hard to have cars it's really hard to see
all of these diffuse distributed changes that are happening everywhere that are about making this better world but those networks those people those diffuse you know systems are growing and they're multiplying and they will connect together and then it will go from being impossible
to being inevitable yeah yeah that's the very felt impossible and now it isn't inevitable that is how I feel about it so this is a great place to end this has been a fantastic conversation all of your huge fans that I think are going to be very excited and also I'm sure that there's
gonna be a lot of new fans out there too if people want to find more from you on the internet where can they find you I have a newsletter called MetaFoundry I'm Deb Cha in various places I think like a lot of people my social media is highly transitional right now yeah and more than you know
more than anything there's I mean how infrastructure works captures a lot of these ideas I actually love that my friends describe it as like distilled Deb like cask strength Deb is what one of my friends put it as so you know that's certainly the place to go for sort of deeper deeper
ideas in this and you know the book really ends with what I think of as a set of heuristics for how to think about these changes there's no algorithm does no checklist there's no right answer but certainly there are some principles and so that's I think more than anything else what I would encourage
people to engage with and I would say if you liked this podcast if someone listening like says podcast they will love the book so please go check it out wherever you get your books and thank you so much for hosting me I really appreciate having the opportunity to talk to you
and to talk to your listeners if your paid subscriber stick around because we're about to do the triple ace segment also known as ask and anything and this is a paid subscriber benefit it's really fun and this week's question is an awkward front question thank you so much for listening to
the culture study podcast be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcast we have so many great episodes in the works and I promise you don't want to miss any of them we're getting ready to record an episode that is all about the Mean Girls trailer not about the movie but the trailer for the
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