Contrary to the illusions put forth by the extreme energy surplus - a surplus quickly burning up alongside its illusions - of the modern area, which presents the natural world as a blank canvas to be seized upon, limited only by the imagination, the manipulation of the landscape and the built environment still resembles the flow of energy in the natural world, in that the greater, denser masses take much more energy to move and transfer, and otherwise stay put for longer intervals of time.
A large unwieldy sentence no? But I put too much work into it, and don't have the energy to fool with it at the moment. Ha! It'll soon help illustrate my point.
The big heavy things, especially the more difficult to manipulate - and the more rare - tend to mold and sculpt the work that takes place around them, and define what is possible, and this can introduce a vivid element of human drama itself, beyond the bare constraints it imposes. Let's take for instance a massive wooden beam that makes up a major structural element of a large building.
A huge unbroken piece of wood, with the integrity to provide structural support, implies a very large tree that must be both handled by heavy equipment and milled by a large capable lumber mill. This takes time and a lot of effort, energy, and equipment, and there is a good chance that the entire tree is absorbed into the piece, a tree that took more time to grow and required more resources and better conditions to produce, necessarily a form of rarity, at least eventually.
There are not just so many costs absorbed into this thing, but also a sort of awe and respect, and apprehension, that goes into the work. This thing arrives onsite, and it becomes an ordeal of its own as it is finally settled into place. A certain desperation begins to descend if there are complications with its fitting and settling: what if the size isn't right, what if it is slightly warped, or what if the joining parts of the structure aren't quite right? This isn't like botching a minor piece of lumber and going back to the stock to cut another. There aren't many substitutes or second tries, this thing must fit, and it must work well and be in good condition.
Builders will resort to a stunning grab bag of techniques and measures to torture these pivotal elements into place: banging on them every which way, drilling, cutting, shaving, filing, compressing, what have you. They think to themselves: no way in hell are we going to get this beam back out from where it was placed. The struggle itself begins to resemble a simple struggle for survival, everything hinging on its success.
This can come as a revelation for those newly entering a given specialized mode of labor. A system saturated with energy tends to mask the economy of labor, at least for those standing outside of the actual process itself. With more energy available, there are greater possibilities for substitution, or else there are more tools available to manipulate or transform a given state of affairs. Otherwise, for those standing outside of a given labor process - and as a consequence more distant to it - it appears as though all sorts of spectacular things come into being out of thin air, but there are still human beings bringing those things about with harrowing struggles of their own, using energies and powers ultimately finite and mutable.
