Thinking Forward: An infrastructure package for nature

All around us the bric-a-brac of a fast-vanishing age littered the landscape. Gas stations, dead malls, extra lanes now emptied of shoppers and commuters. And as we took in all this ugliness, we worried about an ugliness to come. One that might lay still another life-crushing steel and concrete layer over the green and blue natural systems we hold dear. Nature has its own infrastructure. What nature needs is for us to get out of its way and let its systems function in the manner that billions of years of evolution enabled them to do. It would be more than a shame, therefore, if Mr. Biden’s infrastructure planning doesn’t make that connection and instead yields to the easy justification of making long-neglected repairs. 

We need a different kind of infrastructure entirely, one that accommodates the natural world and puts the long-term needs of ecosystems before the knee-jerk urges of all of us so eager to get back to life as we knew it. The Biden administration has an opportunity to meld its new infrastructure proposal with its plan to protect a third of America’s lands and waters. This would improve not just infrastructure but also America’s plan for what infrastructure is for — how it can serve people and the planet while improving our children’s futures. So with an eye toward that, here are a few things we wish the president would consider as we move ahead. 

Precautionary road building. As we’ve learned from our involvements in decades of struggles to reform the commercial fishing industry in the US, successfully managed systems set precautionary limits at the careful end of avoiding long-term damage. We need to take the same approach with road building. More than four million miles of roads and highways lace the nation. 

So before we rush out to fix our crumbling roads, perhaps we should let a lot of them crumble. Let’s favor only those roads that carry significant amounts of public bus transportation or are essential links to getting workers to and from their places of employment. Let’s have more electric vehicles but also focus on making roads work better. And let’s build transport that more feasibly, desirably and efficiently carries electric vehicles. 

Using the already built environment before destroying the natural one. We have already mowed down a lot of nature to make room for our assorted stuff. (See the aforementioned dead malls, gas stations and extra lanes.) In our exuberance to build more green things, we need to focus on updating what we’ve already damaged. That dead mall could be a solar field. (It already has the power hookups.) That agglomeration of gas pumps could be a park-and-ride charging station for commuters traveling farther by train. We must instantly stop cutting down forests to put in vast arrays of solar panels so that utility monopolies can maintain their grasp. A forward-looking plan must heal what is broken before breaking more ground. Which brings us back to our initial premise. What is the point of a country with an infrastructure that seamlessly, silently and electrically flits us from place to place when those places have nothing left for us to see? The infrastructure of America — the guts, if you will — is a certain wildness that is essential to who we are. Without those guts, a new American infrastructure will be an empty package.