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My friend Helen Macdonald's writing about the natural environment has influenced how I think about infrastructural systems. A forest is home to trees, plants, fungi, and lichen, as well as to birds, insects, reptiles, amphibians, small and large mammals, and more, each of which is in an ongoing ecological relationship with the others. Every forest is a hyperobject, an enormously complex environment that's shaped not just by its location, landscape, and climate but also by the history of humans in that place. If you go on a walk in the woods, what you see depends on the season and the particular path you take through it. More than anything, though, what you see in the woods depends on the eyes that you are seeing it through. A birder, a hunter, an entomologist, a soil ecologist, a real estate developer, and an artist will all see different things. Helen introduced me to Richard Mabey's idea that the natural world can only be understood and appreciated as a re- sult of careful, knowledgeable attention. Without the ability to describe the differences with detail and specificity, a meadow of native grasses and the pesticide-soaked monoculture of a golf course that replaces it are effectively indistinguishable.

— How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra (Page 15)