Sprol

We live life at ground level. Recognizing that, here are photos taken today that seemed related to the topics we cover, including sprawl, land use, pollution, and as one reader puts it ‘everything you can see from space that’s bad’.

While strip mining and power generation are easy to spot from the air, some of the aspects of the way we’ve changed our environment aren’t visible from space. You can probably see a few of from where you’re sitting right now, though. Wires. They’re everywhere, and they’re ugly.

Now before I get more snarky emails about Gilligan’s Island style coconut bamboo bicycle contraptions to power my powerbook, I realize how important reliable, US-style, 24-hour, reasonably safe household electricity is to everyone’s lives. I love electricity, okay? I think it’s probably the greatest bargain in world history.

The transmission systems that we’re using for moving electrons, the power lines and phone lines and cable tv lines and alarm system lines, streetlight wires, telephone poles, the overhead electric lines, it’s all hideous. I understand that in some places all this stuff is buried underground. In these photos, it is not.

These artificial trees and their branches, polyethelene coated cables, tend to outcompete the natural trees. If any leafy branches encroach they are efficiently excised by PG&E. Any dead trees are removed within 24 hours. Nothing may disturb the wires, break the connection.

PG&E is like a big tree pruning company that happens to provide electricity. They are legally required to carry out this war on the trees by the state of California.

The wires themselves are, after all, very dangerous. You have to treat every downed wire or line as though it were a potentially lethal live wire.

Actually the connections are breaking all the time, requiring frequent maintenance. Exposed to the elements, these conduits are hardly resilient. Perhaps that’s the point, for quick access and maintenance. Lots of maintenance.

"A line, or straight line, is, roughly speaking, an (infinitely) thin, (infinitely) long, straight geometrical object, i.e. a curve that is long and straight. Given two points, in Euclidean geometry, one can always find exactly one line that passes through the two points; the line provides the shortest connection between the points. Three or more points that lie on the same line are called collinear. Two different lines can intersect in at most one point; two different planes can intersect in at most one line."

All these wires also cause this hideous visual pollution that acts like a kind of interference across everything you see. The scary part of it is that most of us don’t even see these lines and wires consciously any more. Your mind just edits them out for you. The power of the telephoto lens is that it can squash perspective over a long distance, editing things out to present the existing in a new context.

Everywhere you go doesn’t need to look like this.