I'm back
I'm just going to take off where I left off after a few weeks of escapism.
Somewhere back in the archives are a few comments of mine about the organised pessimism of leftists too preoccupied with their ideology to consider their responsibilities to their species. The particular issue was a "Club-of Romish" contention that the end of oil meant the end of the world or some such drivel.
I invite the pessimists to read Peter L. Bernstein's The Wedding of the Waters.
Most of us got about a page in our public school American history books on the Erie Canal. Trust me, even in grad school you don't get much more unless you're specifically studying transportation history.
The building of the Erie Canal, Bernstein argues persuasively, was a critical moment in the shaping of the modern world. It created the American nation, and prevented the otherwise inevitable spinoff of the transmontaine West from the Atlantic seaboard. By moving the produce of that West into the stream of international commerce, it literally nourished the poor of the world and accelerated the pace of social change.
It was all done by people who didn't have so much as a day's training in canal building. (The better-trained engineers of Europe had written the thing off as impossible. ) None of them were civil engineers. Some of the most effective innovations were created by workers who may not have been able to read or write. What they had was a clear vision of the value of their work, and boundless self-confidence. This world-altering feat did not use one drop of oil. So primitive were the conditions of construction that it may not even have consumed a lump of coal to produce the iron...charcoal was more common.
It was also achieved with public sector funding when private capital had given up...and turned a profit. The modernised canal still exists, and while today serving recreational ends, it could be turned commercial in a heartbeat.
I'm no friend of doom and gloom, especially when it has an ideological agenda. Nor do I care to hear about what can't be done: It's far more impressive to discover what can.
Somewhere back in the archives are a few comments of mine about the organised pessimism of leftists too preoccupied with their ideology to consider their responsibilities to their species. The particular issue was a "Club-of Romish" contention that the end of oil meant the end of the world or some such drivel.
I invite the pessimists to read Peter L. Bernstein's The Wedding of the Waters.
Most of us got about a page in our public school American history books on the Erie Canal. Trust me, even in grad school you don't get much more unless you're specifically studying transportation history.
The building of the Erie Canal, Bernstein argues persuasively, was a critical moment in the shaping of the modern world. It created the American nation, and prevented the otherwise inevitable spinoff of the transmontaine West from the Atlantic seaboard. By moving the produce of that West into the stream of international commerce, it literally nourished the poor of the world and accelerated the pace of social change.
It was all done by people who didn't have so much as a day's training in canal building. (The better-trained engineers of Europe had written the thing off as impossible. ) None of them were civil engineers. Some of the most effective innovations were created by workers who may not have been able to read or write. What they had was a clear vision of the value of their work, and boundless self-confidence. This world-altering feat did not use one drop of oil. So primitive were the conditions of construction that it may not even have consumed a lump of coal to produce the iron...charcoal was more common.
It was also achieved with public sector funding when private capital had given up...and turned a profit. The modernised canal still exists, and while today serving recreational ends, it could be turned commercial in a heartbeat.
I'm no friend of doom and gloom, especially when it has an ideological agenda. Nor do I care to hear about what can't be done: It's far more impressive to discover what can.
posted by Uncle | 00:43
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