Infrastructure
Subtitle: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Published: September 26, 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 512
ISBN-13: 9780393059977
First sentence: THE RAW MATERIALS FOR BUILDING a civilization are mainly things we dig up out of the ground: fuels such as coal, uranium, and petroleum; the ores of iron, copper, aluminum, and dozens of other metals; stone, sand, and clay for building; and a miscellany of other minerals such as sulfur and phosphates.
Description: Covering agriculture, resources, energy, communication, transportation, manufacturing, and waste, this is the "Book of Everything" for the industrial landscape. The objects that fill our everyday environment are streetlights, railroad tracks, antenna towers, highway overpasses, power lines, satellite dishes, and thousands of other manufactured items, many of them so familiar we hardly notice them. Larger and more exotic facilities have transformed vast tracts of the landscape: coal mines, nuclear power plants, grain elevators, oil refineries, and steel mills, to name a few.