On utility, poles apart

I missed this the first time around, but on Sunday night I caught Andy Rooney's screed on "60 Minutes" about ugly utility poles and lines:

Eighty percent of the cities in the United States have no restrictions on putting up wooden poles with wires and cables hanging from them.

They dominate our skyline. If there are good, natural, full-grown trees in the path of the pole-borne wires, power companies regularly disfigure the trees by cutting holes in the foliage. They chop off limbs to let their wires through.

Wires bring us the magic of electricity and voices from far away. I know that, but 90 percent of the time they should be buried and invisible. Instead, they're what we always see looking up.

Rooney being Rooney, he admits that electricity might be marginally useful, but can't get over the fact that trees might have to be sacrificed. Beauty trumps utility, especially when there is such an obvious answer to the problem:

Power companies argue that it's too expensive to bury wires and cables. Well, it's never too expensive to do the things that absolutely ought to be done.

It's easy to declare that "it's never too expensive" when it's someone else's money, though it's hard to believe he is really so clueless about the effect of such costs on providing the "magic of electricity." Maybe it's because I grew up in the country, but when I see utility poles, I don't see an ugly landscape that would more beautiful with trees. I see connectivity, not being cut off from the rest of the world.

He is right that the wireless revolution will begin to lessen the need for such highly visible hardware (and he left out fiber optics), and that's certainly a welcome advance (though at least as much for utility's sake as for beauty's). But let's not be so willing to trade progress for a romatic notion of pastoral bliss. Asphalt is not nearly as aesthetically pleasing as rolling countryside, but it sure does make getting from here to there a little bit easier.