The Future of Our Infrastructure

The collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis was a wake up call about the needed maintenance of the country's infrastructure. This article at World Changing discusses the future our infrastructure and concludes that we must rethink our investments in certain infrastructure to fit the needs of the 21st century.

America is falling apart at the seams. Our power grids, our rail system, our roads and bridges, our drinking water and drainage systems, our dams, our ports, our dumps: they're all failing, sometimes in visible catastrophic ways, often in just slow losses of service and usability.

There are three major schools of thought about what to do. The first is the status quo among politicians: do nothing, and hope nothing major happens on our watch. The second is the status quo among many chambers of commerce: rebuild the old systems with updated versions of the old technologies, paying a bonanza to construction and engineering corporations and turning the repaired systems over to private, for-profit utilities. These are both terrible ideas. There is, though, a third way. We might look into this unfolding disaster and see an opportunity for real change.

Most of the infrastructure we use today was designed a century ago: some of it is based on ideas that go back to the Roman Empire. Almost all of it is at best industrial in its thinking. Essentially all of it was designed for a world without climate change, resource scarcity or any proper understanding of the value of ecosystem services. In other words, most of the systems upon which we depend are not only in a state of critical disrepair, they're out-dated and even out of touch with the realities of our century.

As we undertake their repair and replacement, we ought to be thinking like people native to the 21st century. We ought to be imagining systems which aim to provide the end services we want (access, communications, food, water, sanitation) in the most efficient, flexible and sustainable ways possible.

There are many opportunities in Iowa to rethink our infrastructure needs. There is a lot of talk about how to fund road expansion, yet little talk of alternative transportation such as high speed rail. Expansion of broadband to rural areas would be a big boost to economic development in the state. The states waterways are polluted, yet we continue to allow large hog confinements overwhelm them with waste. And finally, as we strive to become the renewable energy capital of the world, we are about to pour billions into two coal-fired power plants.