The Invisible Systems Holding Industrial Civilization Together

I learned something extraordinary today.

Millions of screwworm flies are being raised, right now, in enormous facilities. The males are sterilized and then loaded onto airplanes, which release them over vast areas of the southern U.S., Mexico, and Central America. The sterile males mate with wild females, producing no offspring. Generation by generation, screwworm populations collapse, preventing devastating infestations in domesticated animals (“livestock”), wildlife, pets, and occasionally humans.

I’d never heard of any of this.

The screwworm program that creates a barrier between South America, where screwworm is endemic, and Central and North America failed sometime back in 2023—probably due to illegal transport of “livestock”—and screwworm has now reached the U.S. again (Texas and New Mexico), and so has been in the news lately. None of the news tidbits I’d read about screwworm included the details of the continuous eradication program, so the story of the screwworm program was new to me.

It made me think again about how what we know as modern civilization depends on countless systems like this—ingenious, effective, energy and materials intensive, and almost completely invisible to the public. Most of us move through life assuming that the human-made world around us simply is. We rarely stop to ask what invisible work is being done, every single day, to keep it that way.

The screwworm program exists only because a remarkable chain of technologies and institutions continues to function without interruption: specialized breeding facilities, sterilization equipment, genetic expertise, aircraft, fuel, pilots, international cooperation, funding, and decades of accumulated scientific knowledge. Remove any of these pieces for long enough, or add in illegal “livestock” transport, and the system fails.

We often describe our civilization in terms of what it produces—oil, coal, gas, cars, computers, skyscrapers, solar panels, medicines. But perhaps it is better understood as a civilization of maintenance.

Every day, millions of people perform work that is almost entirely invisible. They monitor dams, inspect bridges, synchronize and adjust satellites, maintain weather stations, produce chlorine for drinking water, repair undersea communication cables, calibrate electrical grids, preserve seeds, vaccinate livestock, monitor invasive species, maintain refrigeration systems, and replace countless components that wear out.

Most of these activities attract almost no public attention because they succeed by preventing problems rather than solving crises. When they work, nothing happens. We’ve become so accustomed to this continuous maintenance that we mistake it for the normal state of the modern world. It’s only when a process fails that we notice—a bridge collapses, or a chemical storage drum explodes killing 11 people, or screwworm reenters the U.S. after decades of being contained.

Most if not all of the conditions we now consider normal are not stable states. They are actively sustained by enormous flows of energy, materials, expertise, and organization.

Agriculture provides an obvious example. Modern industrial agriculture depends on synthetic fertilizers, irrigation systems, replacement machinery, pesticides, engineered seed varieties, veterinary medicine, refrigeration, transportation, and global supply chains. There are many hidden layers. Millions of honeybee colonies are transported across continents to pollinate crops. Specialized facilities preserve the engineered seeds. Veterinary laboratories continuously monitor for diseases that most farmers never encounter precisely because those surveillance systems are working.

This same pattern appears almost everywhere in our modern civilization.

Abandoned mines require perpetual pumping and water treatment to prevent acid drainage from contaminating rivers. Tailings dams must be monitored and maintained indefinitely. Hazardous waste sites depend on containment systems designed to last only if future generations continue repairing them. Nuclear waste remains hazardous on timescales that dwarf every civilization humanity has ever built. All of these “things” will fail when the processes that maintain them stop. (The stuff of nightmares, as the processes will indeed eventually stop.)

Our digital world appears to many as ubiquitous and weightless, yet it too depends on constant attention. Data centers continually replace failing and outdated hardware. Software must be updated. Security certificates expire. Undersea cables break and are repaired. Satellites age and must be replaced. Diesel generators must be refueled. The precise timing signals that synchronize electrical grids, financial transactions, and telecommunications depend upon extraordinarily sophisticated infrastructure operating every hour of every day.

Perhaps the most fragile component of all is not the infrastructure itself, but the communities of people who know how to maintain it. Around the world are small groups of specialists whose expertise has taken decades to develop: engineers who repair high-voltage transformers, technicians who maintain satellite ground stations, scientists who breed sterile screwworm flies, operators who manage nuclear facilities, and countless others whose work is almost entirely unknown outside their professions. The more complex society gets, the more specialized these processes become, and the more specialized the knowledge required by the people who perform the processes.

Reading about the screwworm program this morning reminded me that I understand maybe (total guess) 0.1% of how modern civilization operates. Is there anyone on Earth who understands it all? My answer would be: most likely there is not.

We tend to imagine civilization as a collection of things, when in reality, it is a collection of ongoing processes, and most of those processes are about maintaining the things we build.

This has important implications for those of us who think seriously about ecological overshoot and the future of industrial society.

When I read about collapse, most of the discussion focuses on the obvious losses to come: electricity, transportation, food production, or communication. Those will certainly matter. Equally significant will be the gradual disappearance of thousands of specialized maintenance systems that most people never knew existed. We will not simply lose conveniences; we’ll lose the continuous interventions that currently stabilize infrastructure, suppress natural processes that threaten that infrastructure (water, dandelions, screwworms, what-have-you), contain pollutants, preserve knowledge, and compensate for the ecological consequences of previous generations of industrial development.

The consequences will unfold slowly and unevenly. Some will become apparent within days or months. Others might take decades to emerge. Still others might not be fully understood until long after the expertise required to address them has disappeared. All will be devastating to the natural world, as well to us human mammals.

A screwworm fly

I find the screwworm story fascinating because it is one tiny window into a world of invisible maintenance that surrounds us every day. Once you become aware of it, you begin to see civilization as an intricate web of relationships, technologies, institutions, and people, all working continuously to hold together a world that cannot possibly hold itself together because it is entirely unnatural. My go-to things fall apart story is the coming failure of hundreds or thousands of tailings dams, but the screwworms might give that story a run for its money.

My conclusion after reading about the screwworm program? The greatest illusion of modernity is not that our civilization will last forever. It’s that we have forgotten how much effort it takes to make today look “normal” and how utterly abnormal every second of every day of our modern lives actually is.