[Thank you for your patience after a long time away...]
This Week in Infrastructure Systems [#TWIST]:
- NPR's Planet Money podcast, "A Pesticide, A Pigweed And A Farmer's Murder," discusses the case of a farmer who was murdered after confronting one of his colleagues about potential dicamba drifting onto his cotton fields. You see, farmers had been using genetically engineered seeds that were resistant to Roundup, a powerful herbicide that is used to control unwanted plants including pigweed. Unfortunately, the pigweed evolved to become resistant to roundup, and some farmers sought to use dicamba as a potent alternative. Compounding this situation even more, current dicamba formulations are not approved due to potential drift onto neighbors' fields. I encourage you to listen to the podcast to learn more about this interesting case.
- With titles like "Rural America is the New Inner City," and "Rural America is Stranded in the Dial-Up Age," the rural-urban broadband divide has re-entered American consciousness through the Wall Street Journal's coverage, among others. This is reminiscent of the time when rural electrification had not been completed. It is immensely expensive to extend electricity access to sparsely populated areas because the economics may not work out from a basic benefit-cost perspective. Nonetheless, we decided we realized that just like water, wastewater, roads, or gas/oil, electricity is a lifeline utility for modern life. We as a society decided then that urban-rural inequalities with respect to lifeline utilities are not acceptable. Today, we have to figure out how to pay for extension of broadband internet access to rural areas, just as we figured out how to pay for extension of electrification to rural areas. Fast internet is no longer a luxury, but a lifeline.
Delivering up-to-date broadband service to distant reaches of the U.S. would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, experts estimate, an expense government, industry and consumers haven’t been willing to pay.
-Levitz and Bauerlein, WSJ, 15 June 2017