Infrastructure is a book about all the stuff that people have built on the landscape we live in—the machinery that supplies us with raw materials, food, water, and energy, and the networks of roads, rails, and communications lines that hold civilization together. This is a nature guide to everything that isn’t nature.

Some of the most interesting artifacts are things we pass on the street every day, although we seldom take notice of them, and we may not know exactly what they do, how they work, or why they have been designed in particular shapes and sizes.

If you live out in the country, other kinds of sights may be more familiar.

In some areas, the rhythmic nodding and sighing of oil well pumps is a commonplace part of daily life. (In years to come, we'll be seeing more of these in regions outside the traditional Oil Patch.)

Beyond the ordinary furnishings of the built environment, there are grander fantasies of the technological imagination, such as this cathedral of agricultural production, complete with spires and flying buttresses.

Poke around in some corners of the industrial landscape, and you find exotic and rather mysterious apparatus lined up in a precise geometric array.

There are glimpses of beauty in unlikely places . . .

You look out your window on a cross-country flight and see crop circles everywhere: The checkerboard landscape of rural America has checkers on it!

Back down on the ground, it’s not hard to figure out what makes the polka-dotted landscape: A huge sprinkler slowly twirls around the center of each field, creating a green circle.

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Sometimes it’s the immense scale of the enterprise that makes an impression.

And sometimes it’s just a small detail that attracts the eye.

Industrial installations can be forbiddingly complex, but they are not beyond comprehension. Almost always, there’s a system to it: Stuff comes in one end, gets processed somehow, and goes out the other end. Infrastructure, the book, has a system too. It begins with raw materials and fuels that we dig or pump from the earth, and the food we grow. Then there are the networks of rails and roads, power lines and communications channels that lace us together. And, at the end, whatever is left goes back in the ground as waste, unless we can learn to make something new of it.

Question 1: Once upon a time, every freight train ended with a caboose. No more: A caboose at the end of a train is as rare as a steam locomotive at the front. What became of the caboose?

Question 3: These funnel-shaped objects on the roof of a sawmill in Sacramento, California, are called cyclones. What do they do?

Question 4: The tall structure in the foreground at the left, and its distant twin across the water at the right, are built directly over the tubes of the Holland Tunnel, which carries traffic under the Hudson River between Manhattan and Jersey City, New Jersey. What are the towers for?

The first edition of Infrastructure came out in 2005. The industrial landscape has seen changes since then. The revised and updated edition of the book, published in October 2014, covers new developments and offers reassessments of some older technologies.

One distinctive novelty is the sudden appearance of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in places where the tungsten-filament light bulb held sway for a century. Almost all new traffic signals use LEDs rather than a light bulb behind a colored glass lens. LEDs are also showing up in street lights, as well as light bulbs for home use.

Surely the most remarkable technological story of the new century is the emergence of the Internet as the preeminent communications medium. Although the roots of the Internet go back almost 50 years, the physical infrastructure was almost invisible until recently. They can’t hide it anymore. Internet switching nodes and data centers are huge installations. Even if most of the machinery is hidden in windowless rooms, the buildings are identified by their abundance of backup generators and cooling units.

The word fracking was a new addition to the American vocabulary when the first edition of Infrastructure appeared. In the past 10 years this technique for recovering “tight oil” has changed the complexion of the petroleum industry, and changed some large swaths of the North American landscape.

Have you ever looked out the window of a car or an airplane and wondered, “What is that thing, anyway?” Then yes, this is the book for you. No expertise required—just curiosity.

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