Archival photos reproduced in Stephen Halliday’s An Underground Guide to Sewers give us a rare view of these sewers of the past, as they looked to the people who engineered, built, and maintained them.

Most of these photographs—dating from the 1880s to the 1940s—show new construction; the before without the after. Pristine iron bars free of rust, walls too freshly mortared to settle and crack, cement yet unstained by water and waste. Older photos show brick-lined culverts, each brick having been laid by hand.

These images are evocative, sometimes beautiful, appearing like black-and-white outtakes from a forgotten film noir. Storm drains appear as volumes of space, empty by design most of the time. Circular and oval tunnels lead from crawlspaces to caverns beneath reinforcing arches. Concrete corridors and junctions, absent any signage, make one wonder what would have happened if Robert Frost’s traveler had gone underground.

But there’s more to these spaces than their cosmetic wonder. These are, after all, not only sites for the flow of waste; they were also places of work. The men photographed in Victorian coats or Depression-era caps and vests do more than provide scale: they remind us that every sewer tunnel started as a noisy construction site. Imagine the human and mechanical din as rocks were carted or bulldozed away, dozens of workers wrangling stone and earth to fit engineers’ specifications.

Sewers were—and continue to be—the great enabler. As industrialization drew people to the city, those people, in turn, made new demands on water and waste systems. That’s why most of the projects pictured here were at capacity soon after completion. Perhaps that knowledge also imbues these photos with a sense of optimism; designed to solve problems, the sewers continued to work, unobtrusively, from their hiding place, to meet ever larger demands.

With this collection, we get to appreciate today what most people didn’t get to see then. It’s a privileged look at the triumphs of industrial-era infrastructure, but it’s also only one chapter of the narrative. What is left to the imagination is how these underground spaces have since been transformed: the aging materials replaced, the time that’s elapsed, overwriting the glory of a feat of engineering.

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Chicago’s rise was so sudden and so astounding that many observers concluded it must have been predestined by nature or God, a view that echoed the 19th-century belief in the inevitability of American expansion and progress known as Manifest Destiny. In 1880, for instance, the former lieutenant governor of Illinois, William Bross, told members of the Chicago Historical Society that, “He who is the Author of Nature selected the site of this great city.” In 1923, in an address to the Geographical Society of Chicago, a University of Chicago geographer, J. Paul Goode, argued that the city’s location made its growth inevitable. His talk was titled “Chicago: A City of Destiny.”

Nature had, indeed, endowed Chicago with a crucial locational advantage: The city sits between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds, making it possible for people working or living there to travel by boat all the way to the Atlantic Ocean or to the Gulf of Mexico. But geography alone would not secure the city’s destiny: Chicago’s growth, like that of many other American cities, was also predicated on government-led engineering projects—and the mastery of our most essential resource, water. Between the 1830s and 1900, lawmakers, engineers, and thousands of long-forgotten laborers created a new, manmade geography for Chicago—building a canal and sewers, raising city streets, and even reversing a river. These monumental feats of engineering—as much as nature—spurred Chicago’s miraculous growth, and provided a model for other American cities to engineer their way to success.

The promise of Chicago’s geography was immediately obvious to the first Europeans who passed through the site in 1673. Fur trader Louis Joliet and Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette paddled up the Illinois and Des Plaines Rivers, crossing a short, but sometimes terribly muddy land route, or portage, to the Chicago River—which, in turn, flowed into Lake Michigan. Marveling at the route’s imperial possibilities because it connected the Gulf of Mexico to territories north of the Great Lakes, Joliet reported to the governor of French Canada, “we can quite easily go to Florida in boat” by building only one canal. Such a canal would link Quebec to the fertile lands of the continental interior where, Joliet advised the governor, there would be “great advantages…to founding new colonies,” thereby expanding the reach of its lucrative fur trading operations.

The French never undertook the canal or fulfilled their imperial vision. But even without a canal, the portage remained a vital, if often unpleasant, route for fur traders. In 1818, Gurdon S. Hubbard, an employee of the American Fur Company, paddled from Lake Michigan up the Chicago River to its source about six miles inland. At that point, their boats had to be “placed on short rollers…until the [Mud] lake was reached.” For three days, the men slogged through the portage. “Four men only remained in a boat and pushed with…poles, while six or eight others waded in the mud alongside…[and still] others busied themselves in transporting our goods on their backs.” All the while, the men were beset by leeches that “stuck so tight to the skin that they broke in pieces if force was used to remove them.”

By the 1830s, Illinois officials, inspired by the success of New York’s Erie Canal (1825) and the Ohio and Erie Canal (1832), began construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which was designed to harness gravity to siphon water out of the Chicago River—effectively reversing the river’s flow so that it went away from, rather than into, Lake Michigan. The bold, costly plan called for making a “deep cut” channel through very tough clay called hardpan. The state began construction in 1836. Within a year, though, the Panic of 1837 struck, and by November 1841, Illinois had largely stopped work on the canal. By 1842, the state’s debt was $10.6 million and annual interest payments were $800,000. The canal—along with spending on a railroad and the failure of the state bank—had plunged Illinois into ruin. In 1843, the state abandoned the canal project, having already spent $5.1 million dollars.

The Chicago River in 2015. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Real estate investors, who had a lot to lose if Chicago’s growth stalled, urged the state to resume canal construction. New York City land speculator Arthur Bronson and a group of Chicago boosters found lenders who were willing to provide the state with an additional $1.5 million to complete the canal. The lenders had one condition, however: To cut costs, the state had to abandon the deep cut for a cheaper, shallower channel. Instead of using the “deep cut” channel and its gravity-fed system to reverse the flow of the river, engineers would use pumps to push a smaller volume of river water into the canal without forcing the river to reverse its course. Crews began digging again in 1845, completing the project in 1848.

Just as Joliet had imagined, the canal transformed Chicago into a major center of trade. On April 24, 1848, the first cargo boat to arrive in Chicago by canal, General Thornton, hauled sugar from New Orleans through the city on its way to Buffalo. In its first decade of operation, the canal carried a staggering amount of freight: 5.5 million bushels of wheat; 26 million bushels of corn; 27 million pounds of pork; 563 million board feet of lumber. With the canal—and later the railroads—Chicago became an increasingly attractive location for manufacturers. Cyrus McCormick, for example, moved his mechanical reaper factory from Virginia to the banks of the Chicago River less than a year before the canal’s imminent completion.

While the canal established Chicago as a major city, it also created problems whose solutions required still more engineering. One such issue arrived on April 29, 1849, when the John Drew, from New Orleans, carried cholera into the city. Within hours of the boat’s arrival, its captain and several passengers died. The disease spread rapidly throughout the city, sending physicians rushing from patient to patient to soothe fevers, cramps, and diarrhea. One-tenth of the city’s 29,000 residents contracted the disease and 678 died.

In swampy cities like Chicago, waterborne diseases like cholera thrived. By 1854, the city had survived epidemics of cholera, typhoid, and dysentery, killing as many as 1,500 people at a time. Though scientists had not yet identified the germs that caused these diseases, even casual observers understood that illness spread in places with poor drainage. In 1850, the newspaper Gem of the Prairie observed, for example, that parts of Chicago were “quagmires, the gutters running with filth at which the very swine turn up their noses.” From the “reeking mass of abominations” beneath the plank streets, the paper contended, “miasmas wafted into the neighboring shops and dwellings, to poison their inmates.” The only solution was “a thorough system of drainage.”

So, in 1855, officials mounted a dramatic attempt to rescue their city with another massive engineering project by hiring Ellis Sylvester Chesbrough, an engineer renowned for his work on Boston’s water system, to raise Chicago out of the muck. First, Chesbrough laid the sewers above the streets, positioning them so that gravity would carry their contents into the Chicago River. He then filled the streets with dirt, covering the sewers and elevating the city’s thoroughfares as much as eight feet above the buildings that flanked them. Many Chicagoans built staircases from the street down to their front doors. Others raised their structures—more than 200— using jacks.

As Chicagoans hoisted their buildings and the city began growing anew, Chesbrough’s sewers flooded the river with waste, causing new problems. The Chicago River flowed directly into Lake Michigan, the city’s source of drinking water. Initially, the volume of sewage was small and lake water diluted its polluting effects, as Chesbrough had calculated. But, when Chicago’s population tripled from 100,000 in 1860 to 300,000 in 1870, the amount of feces, chemicals, and decaying animal matter making its way into the waterways multiplied. The putrid smell of the river became unbearable and pollution began to flow into the city’s drinking water.

It was time for more engineering. In 1865, Chesbrough and state officials decided to manage Chicago’s water pollution by enacting an old proposal: making a deep cut through the Illinois and Michigan Canal and, this time, actually reversing the Chicago River and sending the city’s sewage down the canal, away from Lake Michigan. After six years, on July 15, 1871, throngs of people crowded the riverbanks to see workers chop down a temporary dam separating the river and the canal. The onlookers threw pieces of straw on the river and watched as they slowly began to float toward the canal, and away from their drinking water.

Ever since, Chicago has continued to grow, and most of the time, its river has run backward. In 1900, the Sanitary District of Chicago, a regional government agency, completed the new, deeper Sanitary and Ship Canal, which has largely kept the dirty Chicago River running away from the lake, even as the metropolitan area has grown to 9.5 million people today.

The reversal of the river marked a crucial juncture in the story of Chicago’s miraculous rise. It was the culmination of a series of great engineering projects orchestrated by the state that created the conditions—sewage, drinking water, and a route between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins—for Chicago to become the great industrial metropolis Carl Sandburg described in 1914: “Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.”

Chicago’s history confirms the old adage that geography is destiny. But the city’s experiences also suggest that geography is not just a fixed fact of nature, as Bross and Goode had implied; geography is also something continually made and remade by people and governments, a thing as fluid as water itself. Chicago’s model of growth—based on government-led water engineering projects—was duplicated by other cities—such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas—in the 20th century. This history of engineering-led growth in Chicago and other cities is both inspirational and a cautionary tale for our current age, when climate change demands that we engineer our cities to keep rising seas at bay. If geography is destiny, Chicago’s history offers the hope that fate is still partly in our hands.

The post How Chicago Lifted Itself Out of the Swamp and Became a Modern Metropolis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On May 24, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge—after 14 years of construction—was opened at last. The mayor of Brooklyn, Seth Low, had declared the day a public holiday in his city; on the New York side, there was a “strong expression of sentiment” in favor of closing the Stock Exchange early. The president of the United States, Chester A. Arthur, along with future president Grover Cleveland, governor of New York, made a ceremonial crossing from New York to Brooklyn, which at the time were two separate cities that soon would become one. That night there would be a fireworks display of terrifying grandeur, 14 tons of explosives let off from the bridge itself, serpents of fire, flowers of fire, showers of fire.

Then there were speeches, including two giving thanks to the Roeblings, the German family who had built it.

First to be praised was John Roebling, a German immigrant who had conceived the bridge—but had died suddenly in 1869, before work had even begun. Then came a nod to his son, Washington, born in the United States, but who had grown up in a German-speaking community, not learning English until he was 11.

Washington Roebling had taken over the immense project at the age of 32 and had, in the words of the politician-industrialist Abram Hewitt, “braved death and sacrificed his health to the duties which had devolved upon him, as the inheritor of his father’s fame, and the executor of his father’s plans.”

The prominent clergyman Richard Storr rose and said: “It was not to a native American mind that the scheme of construction carried out in this bridge is to be ascribed,” he said, “but to one representing the German people . . . the skill which devised, and much, no doubt, of the labor which wrought them, came from afar.”

Washington Roebling—in his foreign heritage, his ingenuity, and his longevity—defined as much as anyone what it meant to be American, at least in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in 1837, in western Pennsylvania when it still was the frontier, he died in 1926, in the Jazz Age. He was not only an engineer but also a scientist, a musician, a linguist, a husband and father. He served four long years in the Union Army during the Civil War, promoted from lowly private to colonel by the war’s end, and was known as Colonel Roebling to the end of his days.

His name is mostly forgotten, but he made an American icon: a bridge that has served New York’s commuters and tourists and lovers for nearly 150 years while inspiring poets and painters and photographers from Hart Crane to Georgia O’Keefe to Walker Evans.

Washington’s father John had been born in 1806 in Saxony; Johann August Roebling was his name until he emigrated to America in 1831. He trained in Berlin as a surveyor and an engineer, but Prussian bureaucracy stymied the ambition of this visionary and energetic man, and he resolved to make a new life for himself across the ocean.

He would do all that and more. In 1842 he patented a design for making rope from wire, a development that made his, and his family’s, fortune. Wire rope would be the foundation of his great engineering works, not least his suspension bridge across Niagara Falls—strong enough to carry a locomotive—and the John A. Roebling Bridge across the Ohio River, which still connects Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky today.

John and his brother Carl were two of the 150,000 people who left what we now know as Germany between 1831 and 1840. They acquired land in western Pennsylvania; they and their fellow immigrants swiftly built a lovely little town, still intact today, which they called Saxonburg. It was here that Washington was born, and where he lived, in a wholly German-speaking community, until he went to school in the late 1840s and learned to speak English.

It was around this time too that John Roebling’s wire rope business outgrew rural Saxonburg; he bought land in Trenton, New Jersey, just then becoming an industrial center, well-situated between Philadelphia and New York. Washington would later note that the land his father bought in Trenton for $100 per acre was worth $22,000 per acre in 1894. Eventually, wire made by John A. Roebling’s Sons company would be incorporated not only in suspension bridges such as the George Washington and the Golden Gate, but also into the Wright Brothers’ and Charles Lindbergh’s airplanes. The wire also made it into nearly all of Mr. Otis’ elevators. This is the stuff of the American dream—a dream, like those of so many, with immigrant roots.

Washington was born an American, but raised in an immigrant culture. His father had chosen America, though John understood too that it was not a perfect place. He saw that, in his own words, “the all-disturbing European” had displaced a native population; he despised the evil of slavery, and Washington would join the Union Army in the earliest days of the war to fight against that evil. (Washington’s name was not as patriotic as it sounds. He was not named for George Washington but for a fellow surveyor, Washington Gill, whom his father met in his first years in the United States. Washington always disliked his mouthful of a name.)

For all his life, Washington worked with men who had come from afar to be Americans; these were the men who built the Brooklyn Bridge. William Kingsley, a wealthy Brooklyn contractor who promoted the project, had been born in Ireland; as had Thomas Kinsella, editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the newspaper which ardently supported the bridge and Washington Roebling’s work. Wilhelm Hildenbrand, one of Washington’s most loyal and talented assistant engineers, had emigrated from Germany in the years after the Civil War; before his work on the Brooklyn Bridge he had designed the great train shed for New York’s Grand Central Depot (demolished in 1903 to make way for the structure that stands now).

And, as Richard Storr had so correctly remarked at the bridge’s opening, the men who worked in the deep foundations of the bridge, who cut the stone and set the great cables in place, who did the most dangerous work on site, came from all over the world. How many men died during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge? It is hard to settle on an exact figure, since records were not kept in the same way they are now.

In the rolls of the dead we can find James McGarrity, born in Ireland, who died in 1871 when a derrick collapsed. William Hines died in the same accident; he was Scottish by birth. Peter Koop, born in Germany, was 20 when he died in 1873; his foot got caught in some machinery. Harry Supple, a rigger renowned for his high-wire feats on the cables, was born in Newfoundland and had been a sailor; he died when a strand of cable snapped in 1878 (as Brooklyn historian Maggie Blanck has written about in detail).

Washington Roebling himself was very nearly a casualty. The towers of the bridge were built using “caissons,” chambers of compressed air sunk down into the river’s bed. Men, including the chief engineer, who worked in these chambers were stricken with “caisson disease,” now called decompression sickness, its cause not yet understood. During the worst years of Washington’s illness, his wife, Emily Warren Roebling—whose own family had come to America on the Mayflower—would become the de facto project manager for the bridge, and she is rightly honored with a plaque on one of the great towers.

The great East River bridge remains a monument both to the men who lost their lives, and to the engineers who envisioned and built it. It demonstrated that an audacious and beautiful bridge could be constructed in the aftermath of a dreadful civil war, an embodiment of unity and progress in steel and stone.

John Roebling often told his oldest son that his success would never have been possible in Germany. John’s newfangled rope enabled the construction of a suspension aqueduct in Pittsburgh in 1844-45, his first big engineering success.

In recalling his father’s breakthrough, Washington later wrote: “The dignity and pride of the supervising engineer would have ground down the ambitious attempt of the young engineer in even proposing such a structure which had no precedent America was the goal which all young men aimed to reach then as well as now.”

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Such a statement would have been politically unthinkable 10 years ago.

Until fairly recently, the dominant idea was that current-generation wind and solar power, coupled with energy efficiency, would play the lead role in stabilizing the climate. This cornerstone of thought among liberals and greens was summed up in Al Gore’s oft-repeated dictum that “we have everything we need now to respond to the challenge of global warming … we have all the technologies we need.”

Much of the rest of the conventional wisdom on climate flowed from the insistence that no new technology would be needed: The size and scope of the challenge was defined not by realistic projections of energy demand or what could be accomplished with efficiency, but by the amounts of energy renewable technologies might be able to produce. The belief was that putting a modest price on carbon could tip the market balance between dirty fossil fuels and readily available clean renewables. Corrupt vested interests were said to stall the dawn of the new energy age.

With all of the talk of cheap solar, Tesla Roadsters, and nuclear startups, it might be easy to miss the massive shift that has taken place in the climate conversation. But make no mistake: A decade ago, climate change was seen far more as a moral and political problem than a technological one. Obama’s framing of the problem sits in stark contrast to Gore’s, and points the way to a new, more constructive era of climate politics. It may even draw conservatives back into the conversation.

Like all paradigm shifts, this one didn’t happen overnight.

In the late 1990s, Martin Hoffert of New York University led a scholarly exploration into the need for innovation and “breakthroughs” in zero-carbon energy. His initial paper in 1998 and a follow-up in 2002 established the breathtaking size of the climate challenge. Hoffert and dozens of well-credentialed co-authors drove home the point that to scale up clean energy sufficiently, the world needed to complete at least one new industrial revolution in half the time it took to complete the first one. We simply, they wrote, don’t have the technology to make that happen.

Science—physical and social—backed this message up. Scholars at Oxford and the Pacific Northwest National Lab wrote convincingly about the need to focus on technology, not regulatory caps and timetables, throughout the 1990s. Physicists and engineers at Caltech and elsewhere popularized the immensity of the “terawatt challenge”: the idea that the world needs to at least double our energy production while reducing fossil energy consumption to zero.

Political scientists argued consistently for “pragmatic” climate policies: goals that could be pursued from multiple motivations and ideologies. Cultural cognition researchers showed that environmentalists’ moralizing, apocalyptic framing of climate change was doomed to failure.

While we think of climate change as the most partisan of issues, the new innovation consensus gathered influence in support of investments in clean energy technologies through an unlikely affinity between liberal, centrist, and conservative think tanks ranging from Brookings and the Breakthrough Institute (where I am a senior writer), to the conservative Manhattan Institute, as well as Republican senators such as Lisa Murkowski and Lamar Alexander. The cross-partisan appeal resonated with the business community, and the American Energy Innovation Council—headed by Lockheed’s Norman Augustine and Xerox’s Ursula Burns, among others—advocated a manifold increase in U.S. public and private investment in clean energy technologies, from renewables to energy storage to carbon capture to nuclear power.

All this talk had an impact. President Obama has been busy enacting the recommendations made by innovation advocates for years. Between 2009 and 2015, the federal government invested over $150 billion on clean energy. And while 2009’s Copenhagen talks failed to produce much, this year’s climate talks in Paris have adopted a much more bottom-up, technology-focused approach to emissions reduction strategies.

Still, despite laudable progress in wind, solar, batteries, and electric vehicles, Hoffert’s warnings sadly ring true: We still do not have all the technologies we need to address climate change.

Fortunately, as the world watched the climate policy happenings in Paris this week, Bill Gates announced the formation of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group of individual and institutional investors determined to fund the R&D needed for next-generation energy technologies. In parallel, world leaders announced Mission Innovation, a commitment by 20 national governments around the world to double public spending on clean energy R&D. In context of the two decades of progress on energy innovation, this is tectonic.

But we must be sure to not simply throw more money at the narrow, moralistic set of solutions that has been dominant for two decades. Progress will be achieved when we admit we don’t have all the technologies we need, and embrace a broader, more pragmatic portfolio of approaches. The Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Pritzker Innovation Fund in particular have been consistent in supporting a more diverse set of solutions. That means more than just renewables and efficiency: Nuclear power, supercritical fossil power plants, fracking, and carbon capture are a few of the less popular technologies that must be on the table. It also means more than just mitigation: Adaptation to climate impacts and perhaps even geoengineering (deliberately engineering the climate to counteract human-caused global warming) must be considered.

The Breakthrough Energy Coalition and Missions Innovation recognize something that climate partisans and environmentalists have often denied: We are headed towards a high-energy future. As Gates wrote this month, “in 30 years the world will consume much more energy than it does today.” In order for all the world’s inhabitants to enjoy Western lifestyles by the end of the century, global energy consumption will need to at least triple if not quadruple. Such an imperative implies that environmentalists’ laser focus on wind, solar, and energy efficiency is not enough; nuclear power, carbon capture, and other less-chic technologies will be required, and perhaps even form the backbone of this century’s energy systems.

Decades of sustained effort went into building today’s energy innovation consensus. It’s nice to see how far we’ve come.

The post The Dramatic Shift in Our Climate Thinking appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On Saturday, E3 will be cordoned off by layers of security before undergoing a controlled demolition. The monumental caisson (engineering parlance for an underwater concrete sarcophagus) will be encircled by a curtain of bubbles to dampen the destructive shockwave caused by 600 demolition charges. This will happen in the midst of extreme scrutiny from environmental watchdogs, while convoys of boats measure water quality, marine mammal movements, and underwater acoustics. When the six-second explosion is complete, the last great reminder of the “greatest engineering feat of modern times” will disappear under 50 feet of Bay brine.

We mourn the loss of great works of architecture like Penn Station and decry the wanton destruction by Islamic fundamentalists of Palmyra or the Buddhas of Bamiyan; we know that something beautiful and great has been lost forever. When a bridge is taken down, it rarely makes the papers. Bridges, as some engineers will tell you, have one function: To get you from Point A to Point B, safely and efficiently. Form following function, sometimes without the form.

We should take a minute to mourn the passing of “Old East.” It was a true workingman’s bridge: “It’s rivets, it’s steel. It’s dirty at times. It’s a means to an end, to get by. You’re working and you’ve got to cross this thing, but it’s still looking out for you. It’s taking care of you. … It’s a blue-collar bridge,” said Richard Mooradian, a structural steel welder on the former eastern span for Caltrans, who was interviewed by UC Berkeley historians for the Bay Bridge Oral History Project. In fact, it is—was—comprised of 650,000 pounds of rivets. The 22 million pounds of steel was, at the time, the largest steel order ever placed in the U.S. By the mid-20th century, the rivets and I-beams of the cantilevered Old East were supplanted by high-tension bolts and pre-stressed concrete.

Rivets on Old East

In 2013, just prior to the dismantling of the cantilever structure above Pier E3, I made a night-time journey to photograph the beauty and art in the old eastern span. I crawled up into the girders to photograph a bridge that is far from a quotidian means to an end, but something more transcendent: poetry, a spiritual relic, even somewhat alive. I’ve been exploring the deepest, tallest, and largest manmade structures in the U.S.—from Cold War missile sites, to the highest cranes in San Francisco, to manufacturing facilities for everything from paper to concrete for the past fifteen years. In the rivets of Old East I saw an inherent beauty; combined with the gusset plates, girders, and I-beams, now long gone, they were a vocabulary that many engineers could read like a verse of Shakespeare or passage of E.M. Forster.

And if we imagine engineers as poets, then cantilever bridges like the Eastern Span are the iambic pentameter of civil engineering—common and underappreciated, meant to have a lifespan in the centuries and withstand the heaviest weight loads and winds in the world. Though often denigrated for their erector-set appearance, cantilever spans have survived intact since the 1880s for a reason: None have collapsed due to natural causes.

In February of 1968, a military plane crashed into the cantilever section of the Bay Bridge’s eastern span in heavy fog, leaving only a few blackened and bent pieces of I-beam. Even the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake did not really provoke a “partial bridge collapse.” A deck at Pier E9 succumbed to the 7.1 temblor at an awkward connection between two truss decks—but the cantilever structure itself held strong.

Until its demolition, the Bay Bridge was the world’s most diverse, concentrated collection of bridge types. And it held the title as longest bridge in the world for decades. When the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed steelworker Al Zampa about his favorite bridge in 1986, he replied, “Bay Bridge. Jesus, look at her. Two suspensions end-to-end, six different kinds of bridges, 8 ¼ miles long, deepest piers in the world. We lost 24 men; we dangled up there like monkeys driving shot iron. No net. You fell, that was it. They thought we was all crazy.”

When it was complete, Old East had a spirit and life of its own, sometimes expanding and contracting up to 12 inches due to differences in temperature and load. “Have you ever been on the bridge?” Mooradian rhetorically asked the Berkeley historian. “It has a heartbeat. They all have a heartbeat. They’re all different. They all bounce and move in a different way, and that’s the heartbeat.”

East Bay truss span

The Bay Bridge was also the site of an improbably spiritual awakening that became part of the area’s intellectual history. In 1974, Gary Warne was climbing on the bridge when he had a revelation. “Once I was on the bridge I was greeted by moonlight on still waters and the skyline of the city diminutively reduced to scale on a plywood board, ready for display,” he wrote in his seminal essay “Carnival Cosmology.” “The bridge was obviously a jungle gym made to climb rather than drive over: The cars just using it for the in-between times. … It was then that I was first struck with the feeling that we were here to play, if nothing else, here to play with the world and other people.” That distinctly local exaltation of conscious play became the basis for Warne’s Suicide Club, which was an inspiration for the Cacophony Society and Burning Man, even though Warne himself died in 1983.

In fact, the bridge has been seen in spiritual terms since its opening on November 12, 1936. It was hoped that the bridge would not just join two great cities, East and West, but also unify “the hearts and goodwill of men.” The opening events lasted five full days, and they included 200 planes flying in perfect mass formation; fireworks releasing parachutes with American flags; President Roosevelt activating a switch to signal the procession; the release of a thousand pigeons. The governor of California cut a golden chain with an acetylene torch.

When the final scraps of steel exit the Bay, there will remain just a few pylons of the old causeway at a soon-to-be-created Gateway Park in Oakland. Parts of it—about 1 percent—will be reincarnated as park benches, lamp posts, bus shelters, gazebos, and other public art projects under an agreement with arts organizations in Oakland.

No doubt someday I’ll have feelings for the new bridge, but now it lacks the imprint of time and the memories and ownership that can only come through the rituals of working, reflecting, remembering, and playing. Mooradian knew how he would respond when asked about the new Eastern Span, “I don’t pay attention to it. I just don’t. It’s not mine. I have no thing with it yet.”

The post Mourning the Loss of a True Workingman’s Bridge appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

ASU science education scholar Dale Baker said that there are three reasons the country is lagging behind. She warned the crowd at the Hotel Congress in Tucson that they weren’t going to like the first reason: “We have local control.” Higher-performing countries have a unified curriculum run at the federal level—rather than by locally elected officials. The second reason, she said, was that teachers in other countries are better prepared: Elsewhere, more than 60 percent the training teachers receive is in their specific content areas. And the third reason, she said, is that education funding is more equitable in other nations.

However, Linda Rosen, the CEO of Change the Equation, said that the U.S. has long been in the middle of the pack—since the 1960s—when it comes to science and math test scores. But we still had enough scientists to put a man on the moon and to sequence the human genome, she said. Nonetheless we need to up our STEM game: Today, more occupations and jobs require science and math backgrounds than ever before.

The Common Core—a new set of national education standards designed to replace states’ varying benchmarks—are poised to change how STEM is taught around the country. But the panelists disagreed on whether this is a good thing.

Baker cautioned that the Common Core emphasis on reading and writing means that students will be doing less science.

But Tucson Unified School District science program coordinator Joan Gilbert said she is “hopeful” about the Common Core. In Arizona, state standards are “very, very foundational, and there’s so much more we can do with our kids,” she said. Plus, integrating science, math, and writing means that we are preparing students to better communicate ideas.

How big a hurdle, Huicochea asked the panelists, is funding?

Money is “critical,” said Baker; laboratory equipment, for instance, is necessary to advance science. But, she said, U.S. teachers’ salaries are comparable internationally.

Rosen agreed, noting that it’s important to put funding in the right places. Teachers who are surveyed generally say they’ve gone into the profession not for the money but because of the value it brings to society.

Gilbert agreed that putting money into facilities and equipment is important; she said that many of the teachers she meets in Arizona pay for their classroom materials out of pocket. But teacher salaries can also make a difference: “We are having a terrible time recruiting and retaining teachers,” she said.

Baker said that respect is an issue for teacher recruitment. In other countries, teachers are highly respected; in the U.S., however, “it’s not a status profession.” She said that if we gave teachers more respect, more people would step up to become teachers.

We also need to recognize that the route to the profession has changed dramatically, said Rosen. When she started her career as a high school math teacher, there was just one way to land a teaching job—earn a degree, then get licensed by the state. Today, we’ve created all sorts of alternative pathways to certification. At the same time, young people are changing jobs and careers much more frequently than in the past. Most teachers, she said, stay in the classroom for five years or less—and we need to recognize that we can still benefit from their passion, knowledge, and expertise in that limited amount of time.

Baker cautioned that it takes five years to develop the needed expertise—and that this kind of turnover is problematic. But, said Rosen, this kind of churn has become typical in many different professions—and needs to be accounted for.

Only 16 percent of American high school seniors are interested in pursuing STEM careers, said Huicochea. How do you raise their numbers?

Start early, said Gilbert. We need to think about STEM even at the preschool level—an age when kids are naturally curious about the world. And, teachers at all grade levels should show students how theories work outside the classroom. “Kids are hungry for real problem-solving skills,” she said—whether the problems are in their backyard or halfway across the world. Teachers can use that hunger to their advantage.

It’s not just about policy, however; the country needs to make changes in our attitude toward STEM education as well.

Baker said in other countries, being good at math and science is not seen as an intrinsic characteristic. “We have to change our culture and perception of who’s good at STEM,” she said. “Anybody can be good at STEM.” Every person who votes on a ballot initiative needs to be STEM-literate, she added.

Baker also spoke to racial and gender disparities in the STEM fields. A lot of STEM professions maintain “a very, very masculine culture,” she said, where women feel “uncomfortable and unwelcome.” And non-Anglos must contend with stereotypes that tell them they don’t belong in a particular field or can’t do a particular kind of work.

Rosen said that it’s helpful to disaggregate the STEM fields in addressing this kind of issue—60 percent of biology majors, for instance, are women. But the number of women in computer science has gone down in recent years.

So what can the U.S. learn from other countries’ STEM success, asked Huicochea.

Rosen said that question might not be as helpful as it seems. When she worked for the U.S. Department of Education, she recalled meeting officials from high-performing countries who were still jealous of American innovation. “‘We can whip your pants on assessments,’” she said they’d tell her, “‘but we don’t have any of your creativity.’”

The post Why Isn’t America Awesome at STEM Education? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Faced with discouraging stats—U.S. students can’t seem to crack the global top 20 in math and science proficiency—a little humor goes a long way. “Blow Minds” sums up its project as goofy nationalistic rivalry: “You can help in this mission to grow smarter as a nation and stop us from getting bullied by that smarty-pants Finland.”

But does the U.S. need to look more closely at other countries like Finland to figure out how to better prepare American students for careers in the STEM fields? Or does this country already have the resources and the methods it needs to compete globally in STEM education? In advance of the Zócalo/Arizona State University event “What Can Other Countries Teach Us About Teaching STEM?”, we asked experts in education theory and strategy: What country can the U.S. look to as a model in improving science and math education?

The post Do We Really Need Finland to Teach Us How to Teach STEM? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My studies and those by others, as well as the experiences of nations such as Singapore, Australia, Israel, and many European countries, show that water reclamation, water recycling, and reuse—which currently accounts for under 10 percent of the water Americans use in most regions—could reduce up to 30-50 percent of the country’s water use. This is important for a number of reasons.

Water and energy are inextricably linked, and there is an urgent need to reduce the energy cost of water delivery nationwide, which accounts for a significant portion of energy usage in many communities. In California, for example, 19 percent of the electrical energy and 30 percent of the natural gas we consume is water-related. America’s water infrastructure is also aging, and requires costly upkeep and retrofitting. Meanwhile, agricultural sustainability in the Western U.S.—and throughout the country—is threatened by population growth, increased demand for crop production (for both food and biofuels), shrinking freshwater resources, increased soil, groundwater, and surface water salinity, increased security concerns, and diminishing fossil fuel resources.

But there is one water resource we’re underutilizing: seawater. Reverse osmosis (RO), the leading technology for seawater desalination (as well as for brackish and river water), is both simple and scalable.

RO membrane technology separates and removes dissolved salts and impurities from water through the use of a semi-permeable membrane. In the RO process, high-salinity water is forced by pressure through a membrane that rejects salt ions; high-purity water is filtrated out. This process has been around for a half century: The first viable membranes for water desalting were developed in the early 1960s at the School of Engineering at UCLA, which then commissioned the world’s first reverse osmosis plant for brackish water desalination in the Fresno County city of Coalinga. It is estimated that, in 2011, the capacity of desalination plants around the world (either in production or under construction) amounted to about 80 million cubic meters/day with over 17,000 desalination plants in 150 countries. The global desalination market is estimated at approximately $18 billion, but that figure could rise to as high as $30 billion within a few years.

Critics contend that reverse osmosis desalination requires large amounts of energy. But so do our home refrigerators, air conditioners, and washing machines. The real issue is the cost of water desalination relative to other available sources. For example, bottled water costs range from $1 to $3 per liter in the U.S., depending on the brand and location of purchase. In comparison, seawater desalination costs can be as high as about $0.45 per 100 liters and about $1.50-$2.00 per 1,000 liters for large-scale production. Of course, the above cost does not include conveyance of the water to the customer.

Over the years, intensive research and development efforts have been devoted to lowering the energy cost of reverse osmosis seawater desalination with tremendous success. Since about 1990, energy costs have decreased by nearly 75 percent for large-capacity plants. In principle it is possible to lower the energy costs of reverse osmosis desalination even further, although this could very well be at the expense of higher capital cost.

There are a number of impediments to lowering costs further. As water permeates through the reverse osmosis membranes, various solutes such as organics (e.g., pesticides and humic materials, which affect acidity and alkalinity), inorganics (e.g., calcium carbonate, calcium sulfate—essentially dry wall material—as well as silica), particulate matter, and bacteria concentrate near the membrane surface. As these materials concentrate, more energy is needed to pump the water through the membrane; cleaning and replacing membranes also adds to the cost of the process. Advances in membrane materials, process optimization, and control could further reduce the cost of water desalination. Engineers are also experimenting with lowering the costs through developing membranes that will lower desalination plants’ footprints, creative financing for larger plants, as well as possibly deploying smaller, remotely monitored and operated plants closer to the point of need. Smaller plants could potentially benefit from the use of renewable energy resources like solar and wind power.

We are in a world of new water challenges and new water opportunities. New and non-traditional water resources (seawater, groundwater) and wastewater reclamation opportunities exist, but are mostly underutilized.

Over the next few years, it seems likely that the cost of desalination water production will be reduced by 20 to 40 percent. Around the world, many large desalination plants have been in operation for decades, and thousands of smaller plants are being built.

Seawater is a large water resource that is not subject to droughts. In that sense, it provides a large reservoir that—in proportion to surface water—is “limitless.” Seawater desalination could provide the necessary buffer the state needs to make up for water shortages now and in the future.

The post Could Drinking Seawater Be Good For Us? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

However, the extent to which the planet will warm, and how high sea levels will get, still depends on what we do now to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and remove surplus carbon from the atmosphere.

The news about the glaciers naturally raises the urge to grasp for quick fixes, but this would be a mistake. Recently, I met a group of environmental researchers from six universities working on climate change issues. We realized that we all harbored a similar hope that we could come up with simple, rapid solutions to minimize climate change—though we also shared a gut feeling that there would be no easy way out.

This group of researchers and I decided to team up to explore the potential of “climate engineering”—large-scale, coordinated strategies to reduce global warming by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or reducing solar input to Earth. Then we compared these approaches to efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—or “abatement.” I spent the last two years working with these colleagues on the first scholarly attempt to rank these approaches, to see if we could find solutions that offer real hope to “engineer” our way away from human-induced climate change.

My group looked at a range of climate engineering solutions from the perspectives of technical feasibility, cost, ecological risk, public opinion, capacity to regulate, and ethical concerns. We explored the major options on the table, even considering—but ultimately abandoning as unfeasible—such outlandish approaches as positioning giant mirrors in space to reduce the amount of sunlight being trapped in Earth’s atmosphere, seeding clouds to reduce the amount of light entering Earth’s atmosphere, and adding iron to the oceans to increase the carbon that algae and phytoplankton take up from the atmosphere.

The truth is that—at least so far—we cannot engineer away climate change.

Our findings clearly showed that the most effective approach is reducing carbon emissions. We can reduce emissions through three steps: fuel conservation (i.e., using less), increased energy efficiency, and switching to alternative low-carbon fuels. Together, these steps are the most promising means for diminishing the nine gigatons of carbon dioxide being released each year by human activity. Best of all, technologies to accomplish these steps are already available and could reduce the amount of carbon being added to the atmosphere by seven gigatons per year.

So why aren’t we, as a society, going full force to implement emissions reductions? Certainly, significant infrastructure and economic restructuring needs to happen for deep cuts to emissions, but we know how to do this. There are clear political and economic hurdles to shifting our energy infrastructure, and consumers get cranky about being told what kind of car to drive.

An underlying issue is also that reducing emissions may not seem like a particularly active approach. People like to fix problems, not do less, which is essentially what needs to happen with emissions reductions. The active, problem-solving aspect of climate engineering is the main attraction of these strategies. However, the analysis I led on climate engineering strategies clearly indicated—unfortunately—that what is really needed is the careful, hard, unsexy work of reducing emissions.

This is not to say some approaches to climate engineering don’t hold promise, but their benefits are mostly supplemental, so several approaches will need to be used in addition to emissions reductions.

The best, lowest-risk strategy to complement emissions reductions is probably helping nature do what it already does: sequester carbon through biological means. Plants, for instance, already convert atmospheric carbon into solid materials. Curbing the destruction of forests and promoting growth of new forests could tie up as much as 1.3 gigatons of carbon in plant material annually. Deforestation is now responsible for adding one gigaton of carbon to the atmosphere each year. A major barrier to stopping deforestation is finding alternative sources of economic growth in developing countries like Brazil and Indonesia—which had some of the largest losses of forests globally in the past decade. Global initiatives for forest protection and reforestation seem to be making some headway on this front, but large business interests still represent a major hurdle to protecting the world’s forests.

Improving soil management also holds considerable promise because soils can trap plant materials and diminish the amount of carbon dioxide the materials give off as they decompose. Over time, agricultural tilling has led to the loss of about half (78 gigatons) of the carbon ever sequestered in these soils. But such simple steps as leaving slash (plant waste left over after crop production) on fields after harvests to be incorporated into the soil could reintroduce between 0.4 and 1.1 gigatons of carbon annually to soil. The approach would also improve soil’s ability to retain nutrients and water. This approach requires a concerted effort across agricultural areas, and is limited by the amount of land that is actually being farmed.

Applying biochar (or charcoal) to soils, particularly in agricultural areas, could also help. The process, which uses high temperatures and high pressure to turn plants into charcoal, releases little carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Charred plant material takes significantly longer—sometimes centuries—to decompose compared to untreated plant material. The carbon bound up in plant tissues then takes longer to return to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Biochar also improves nutrient and water retention in soils, and has been used as an agricultural amendment for centuries. To be effective, this approach would need to be global in scale, but it is limited by the amount of land that is in agriculture, since the effects of adding biochar to natural ecosystems are unknown.

Another promising strategy is to capture and store carbon belowground from industrial smokestacks, particularly near fuel refineries or power plants. This strategy turns carbon dioxide into a liquid form of carbon, which oil and coal extraction companies can pump into underground geological formations or wells, and put a cap on. Millions of tons of carbon are already being stored this way each year because injecting carbon dioxide into oil fields actually scours more hydrocarbons out of oil fields and allows companies to recover more oil. Applied globally, carbon capture and storage has the potential to store more than one gigaton permanently each year. However, a leak of liquid carbon could be fatal to humans and animals, and the risk—while minimal—may stand in the way of public acceptance.

Like most people, I want my kids to grow up with clean air, play on familiar beaches, and learn about the frozen ice caps at the ends of the Earth. But it can be difficult to take action and pay for something in the distant (though rapidly materializing) future.

Even while we work to reduce carbon emissions on a large scale, we can show our willingness as individuals to pay for the carbon we use. Taxing the carbon we emit from cars, power stations, and airplanes is probably the best, most straightforward option—but taxes will make everyday consumer products and transportation more expensive. Other market options like cap and trade may also work, but will probably be less efficient.

I support a carbon tax as a down payment for my own child’s future world—and exercise my power to push my representatives with letters and phone calls, and to elect officials who promise to abate the effects of climate change. I also pay for voluntary carbon offsets for my fuel use, since cars and airplanes produce some of the largest emissions on a personal scale. Although offsets do not directly reduce emissions, some effective offset programs support things like forest protection and soil management for carbon storage—both identified in my study as promising climate engineering strategies.

While we should not rely on climate engineering to solve the climate change problem, certain strategies do provide feasible, low-cost, safe, and ethical options, and may help us minimize climate change faster than we are creating it.

The post Sorry, Polar Bears<span class="colon">:</span> There’s No Quick Fix for Those Melting Glaciers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.