Petits Soldats Maintaining a Futile Guard Against the Unstoppable Tide of Nature

Within just a few years of the end of world war two, with our newfound wealth and joie de vivre at having survived that shit, we built scores of movable bridges from the mainland to the beaches of Sunny Florida™️. Now we can't really afford to replace or even maintain the the ones we have.

We homo sapiens are always trying to fight nature. Even the most basic, primitive human activity takes what nature placed in one spot and moves it around—digs it up here, cuts it down there, piles it up somewhere else—until we think it works better for us.

Of course modern, industrialized humans do this to the extreme. Consider concrete—human-made rock made from nature-made rock that we break down and reassemble.

But still, nature always wins. Whatever we put in one spot doesn’t stay there for long.

One of the ways nature grinds down our creations is through corrosion. And one of our favorite metals, steel, is very prone to turning into red powder before our very eyes. Though it's a shame to watch a great steel structure dissolve into nothingness, the accompanying chemical process is very useful to us, forming the basis of chemical energy storage, or batteries. As the iron in steel binds with oxygen nearby, electricity is produced. This electricity is not enough to be useful, and if we were to make something to harness it, we would accelerate that corrosion.

We can, however, push against the electricity and slow the process to a crawl. We do this by connecting a power source to the steel or by attaching a more reactive metal doing its own corrosive process, pushing electricity against the steel's oxidation.

This is especially important to harness on infrastructure near the coast—like all those postwar bridges from the '50s and '60s—where salt water accelerates corrosion and where people want to be (or at least the most important people with big beach houses).

There is one specific elephant-in-the-room case where our ability to change our environment has outpaced nature's ability to erase our work. But, amusingly, we didn't do it on purpose, and what change we did effect has amplified nature’s destructive ability in just about every way. All we’ve managed to do is hand some of our greatest work to nature on a silver platter for eventual, sooner than later, destruction.

Here is an example of an anti-corrosion cathodic protection system test site up near Saint Augustine, along Florida's "First Coast." It amuses me that these little fellas look like soldiers standing guard against a sea that is just going to overwhelm them in my lifetime. And I'm not that young anymore. They are there to help us save our infrastructure from nature—infrastructure that exemplifies and even contributed to the conditions that now will overwhelm it. It's just so perfectly encapsulated in one spot, but also so well hidden if you don't know the history and how all this stuff works.