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.7 Mumfordwas later introduced to MacKaye in 1923 as the RPAA was forming.The trailidea was so well aimed and it represented so many of both the communitybuilding and land management goals of regionalists, that it helped to galva-nize the RPAA in its early days.It became a kind of trope of regional plan-ning efforts.More interesting than its association with any one platform or critique,however, was the character of the Appalachian Trail as an organization.As ingeological models, the Appalachian organization was analogous to the rutsand divides caused by glaciation and glacial flow.Like a continental divide,watershed, or levee, it contained and shaped reciprocal exchange and activityalong its length.MacKaye would later extend this fluvial model by likeningthe trail to a kind of levee that contained and shaped development.The trailwas governed by additional organizational protocols as well.It was also alinear subtraction along the crestline of a mountain range, an  open waythat had the power to rearrange priorities in an industrial economy.8 Finally,the trail was immaterial.It was a void or a line of force, not a construction.This largely invisible physical alteration, however, effected a simple but radi-cal reversal in the flows of commerce and population migration.Withoutvastly changing the physical arrangements, but reversing the protocols of itsuse, this  supertrail remagnetized and recentered development in the terri-tory through which it passed, remotely affecting areas some distance fromthe spine.It would format industrial and urban patterns, changing them froma series of concentric nodes to a more evenly distributed network straddling aspine.The entire network also multiplied intelligence and connection throughparallelism and differential connection between different species of network.|1.129It was not a single trail but a  cobweb of trails that would cover the moun-tain and recircuit all the existing transportation networks, creating newbranches and circuits.9Among the most important qualities of the trail s organization was itspower as a partial or tactical intervention.The footpath, though scaled to thebody within a single section, when extended for hundreds of miles became apowerful mark or divide in the land.And while there was a direction of travel,there were no fixed termini.The trail also traveled through similar crestlineterrain at its interior, but it organized vastly different terrain at its periphery.The tactical placement of a single detail, repeated or extended, would haveenormous radiating effect.Since the sites were constituted within patternsof connection and process, population flows, transportation and utility net-works, and other distributive protocols, small adjustments were potentiallyvery effective within the larger organization.Even though the AppalachianTrail was mammoth in size, it initiated a process of systemic though not nec-essarily comprehensive changes, and after attaining a gigantic length, thenetwork relationships were no longer simple.In the years following the Appalachian Trail article, MacKaye continuedto mine the prototype for more meaning.He treated this special kind of lineand the large land organizations it was intended to adjust as a heuristic de-vice to discover more about the workings of the land.He studied it in pan-orama and cross section, and he studied its effect on labor, resources, andpopulation migration.In 1922, MacKaye wrote that the Appalachian Trail was deeply calculated to interest not only architects and landscape architectsbut foresters and all others of the genus  engineer.  10 MacKaye proposed thatreconditioning the industrial and terrestrial landscape could only be directedby the  composite mind of several engineers. 11 Hydroengineers, foresters, sil-viculturalists, and economists, for instance, were all technicians in this en-deavor.MacKaye considered land-based engineering and natural resourceplanning to be on a par with those forms of engineering which were later tobe privileged in America, namely those related to commerce and defense.Heconsidered his own practice of Geotechnics or  regional engineering, as hecalled it, to be a kind of composite form.12As the new field of electrical and automobile networks became criticallayers in the Appalachian organization, they materialized a network of associ-ations MacKaye had projected for the trail.Rather than considering thesenetworks as alien, he conceived of these emerging technologies as part of an|Subtraction Inversion Remote: The Appalachian Trail30inclusive ecology.Highways and hydroelectrical grids operated on an almostgeological scale, thus expanding the industrial ecology into an environmentalrealm beyond the scale of the machine metaphors and motion studies usedby technocrats.As a by-product of fluvial activity, electricity could be under-stood as an energy abstraction as well as a terrestrial activity [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]