It is oddly appropriate that I am writing today’s #stampoftheday while sitting on my back patio, having just returned from a wonderful and bucolic week on a lightly settled pond in Liberty, Maine. Oddly appropriate because the 3-cent stamp, which was issued in 1952, commemorates the 100th anniversary of the founding of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the people who build the sort of massive infrastructure not usually associated with bucolic ponds in Maine. (To be perfectly accurate, the stamp was issued on September 6. But I have another stamp for tomorrow and no good option for today. So, in the spirit of good engineering, I decided to feature this as a project that was completed ahead of schedule.)

The stamp, which pictures an 1852-era covered bridge and the more modern George Washington Bridge, seems a far distance from where I’ve just been – an amazingly quiet pond where we heard loons, saw a few bald eagles (or saw the same bald eagle a few times), watched stunning golden sunrises and sunsets, and kayaked and swam in waters that sometimes were so still that they perfectly mirrored the sky. However, I recognize that my ability to drive to that pond in a little more than three hours was made possible by the work of the many civil engineers who, among many other things, designed the roads and bridges we used to get there. And even in the quiet, we would sometimes hear the vague sound of traffic from a far-off road.

That juxtaposition is not unique. Rather, it pervades much our lives, a theme captured “The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America,” a wonderful book by Gary Marx published in 1964. “On the morning of July 27, 1844,” Marx writes, “Nathaniel Hawthorne sat down in the woods in Concord, Massachusetts, to await (as he put it) ‘such little events as may happen.'” Over the course of eight pages, Hawthorne records the sounds of nature, the sounds of people, “a state of being,” Marx writes, “in which there is no tension either within the self or between the self and its environment.” But this reverie is interrupted. Hawthorne writes, by “the whistle of the locomotive – the long, shriek, harsh, above all other harshness…It gives such a startling shriek since it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumberous peace.” Marx goes on to note that variants of this episode “have appeared everywhere in American writing since the 1840s” including the scene in “Walden” where “Thoreau is sitting, rapt in a reverie and then, penetrating his woods like the scream of a hawk, the whistle of a locomotive is heard.”

That’s not the only tension I see (or hear) when I look at this stamp’s celebration of the genius, beauty, and importance of great works of civil engineering. I also see that, in keeping with its times, the stamp ignores the politics behind the projects. Civil engineers (and their political patrons) like to portray their decisions as driven by technical considerations, not political or financial factors (such as who might benefit from where roads and bridges get built, or don’t get built). But, such factors are intertwined as has been well documented in such well-known works as Robert Caro’s book on Robert Moses and David McCullough’s history of the Brooklyn Bridge. (Many others have picked up the same theme, including my mentor, Alan Altshuler, whose first book explored the interplay of politics and planning in Minneapolis and St. Paul in the late 1950s).

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, political controversies over the negative impacts from a host of proposed projects, such as a highways planned for many urban areas, such as Boston, made it clear that seemingly apolitical technical decisions by engineers usually had a political subtext as well. In many locales, notably Boston, growing opposition stopped many planned projects and forced the redesign of many others. In the mid-1980s, while still working as a newspaper reporter, I became fascinated by what appeared to be a new approach to such mega-projects, what Altshuler and I came to call a the “do-no-harm” approach to their planning in our 2003 book on urban megaprojects. The most notable example of this approach, of course, is Boston’s Big Dig, which replaced an aging, elevated highway in the heart of Boston with a depressed roadway covered by open space and parks.

Alan and I found that civil engineers who had both technical and political skills often played key roles in those projects. (In the case of the Big Dig, that person, of course, was the legendary Fred Salvucci.). But one of my favorite discussions of the ways that such engineers operate involves the story of how the legendary bridge engineer Othmar Ammann came to design the George Washington Bridge, which opened in 1931. As Jameson Doig and David Billington recount in a wonderful and little-known article published in 1995, although Ammann had worked under Gustav Lindenthal, the internationally known bridge designer and former New York City bridge commissioner, in the early 1920s, the two had parted ways and Ammann was running a pottery company in New Jersey. Behind the scenes, however, he not only was quietly exploring designs for what became the GW Bridge, but also laying the political groundwork to get the state governments in New York and New Jersey to empower the newly formed Port Authority to build the proposed bridge and hire him to oversee its design.

I can’t tell the full story here but I will quote a short section that has greatly influenced my understanding of the politics of megaprojects. “To Ammann,” Doig and Billington write, “…the substantive arguments and the political strengths of his opponents deserved the same steely-eyed analysis that a good engineer devoted to understanding the stresses on bridge cables and the stability of the ground under proposed bridge towers….if preliminary studies suggesting the tower footing would be solid rock, and closer exploration revealed softer ground, adjustments and even major redesigns would be necessary;…Moreover, bridge engineering was not an armchair activity; you had to go into the field continuously, marshal and motivate your workers and modify your abstract designs….So too, close exploration of the political ground associated with any large project was essential; and this exploration might require meetings with local politicians and business people…in order to work through the proper combination of engineering, esthetic, and political designs.”

And that’s the rub. We need the projects created by civil engineers but we also yearn to escape their impacts. And while we have to respect and trust their expertise we also need to keep it in check, to make sure it doesn’t overwhelm communities, particularly, as has often been the case, communities that are home to those who don’t have the power or resources needed to stop or alter harmful projects. It’s a tough, absolutely necessary, and usually unappreciated balancing act.

Enough preaching.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.