This Ugly Wales

Posted on June 19th, 2007 filed in Corporations, Environment, Photos, Silence, Wales

Caught in the act of tearing up the Welsh countryside! Here is a photo of National Grid’s gas pipeline near Llanigon, north of Brecon.

The photograph was taken in mid June 2007. It is an ugly site to behold. The gas pipeline is a giant industrial phallus imposed on Wales by planners in London. A few corporations will benefit from this project. It will do little good to resolve the peak oil crisis we face in the next few years.

But do we not accept all the noise and the pollution ? Do we not rejoice at the smell and smoke that remind us of our industrial might ?

Ralph Borsodi’s book This Ugly Civilization (1929) reminds us of how man accepts the ugliness of his own creation :

THIS is an ugly civilization. It is a civilization of noise, smoke, smells, and crowds–of people content to live amidst the throbbing of its machines; the smoke and smells of its factories; the crowds and the discomforts of the cities of which it proudly boasts.

The places in which the people work are noisy. The factories are filled with the recurring, though not the rhythmic, noises of machines and the crash and clatter incidental to their operation. The offices, too, are noisy with the rat-tat-tat of typewriters, the ringing of telephones, the grinding of adding machines. The streets on which the people move about, and around which they work and play, resound with the unending clatter of traffic–the roar of motors, the squeaks of brakes, the shrieks of sirens, and the banging of street cars. And even the homes in which they are supposed to rest are noisy because they are not only packed close together but built tier on tier so that the pianos, phonographs, and radios in them blare incongruously above, below, and on all sides of them.

The people of this factory-dominated civilization accept its noisiness. For noise is the audible evidence of their prowess; the inescapable accompaniment of their civilization’s progress. The greater the noise, the greater the civilization.

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More photographs of the gas pipeline on Flickr.

There are many of Ralph Borsodi’s books available for free at the Soil and Health library.