The Subjectivity of "Beauty"

After seeing the diagram on page 81 and the statistic that a 1999 explosion from a Holcim Plant Site damaged Ada, Oklahoma, I tried to dig up some more information to see whether Ada's story matched the Hudson's. I found this quotation from notoxicburning.com, complaining about Holcim Cement's lax environmental policies from a November 2006 update:
"Three of those are classified as "high-priority violators" by EPA, including a Holcim cement plant in Ada, Oklahoma, which was fined $321,000 in 2005 for violating its pollution limits more than 1,000 times in a single year. Despite repeated requests, Holcim has declined to share emissions data from its Oklahoma cement plant, leading one to believe that this information would be detrimental to Holcim’s Trident proposal."
Suspiciously, I could find no mention of the Ada plant on the official Holcim website, though Holcim was once an Associate Member of the Environmental Federation of Oklahoma, according to 2005 records.
I also found this, though I can't locate the date on it, which also references the Ada incident: http://www.friendsofhudson.com/research/overview.pdf

I wanted to reiterate what I said last week in class, and which Silverman speaks of in Stopping the Plant. I argued that aesthetics was a major factor in environmental planning (building a cement plant on the Hudson, playground for weekending Manhattanites, versus building one on the Arkansas river, which is dry 90% of the time anyway). Silverman illustrated that the division is much starker and deeper than pretty vs. ugly; rich vs. poor plays a large part in development as well. The Hudson Valley and Tulsa are somewhat similar in their seemingly stark economic divisions - the Vanderbilt Mansion, equivalent to the midtown mansions built by 1900s oil barons in Tulsa, next to honest, lower-class towns like Garrisson, equivalent to the West side of Tulsa, across the river and surrounded by refineries. Ada is not a tourist attraction, by far, but, as Silverman repeats, working-class individuals don't care about the view, not through ignorance, but because they can't afford to care. Environmentalism certainly is a luxury of money and time; hybrid cars are expensive and sorting through the recycling bin is not a quick process. I don't think it's coincidence that any information about the Ada incident is buried somewhere on the internet while stopping the St. Lawrence plant merits an entire book. Ironically, I did find a message board post of a woman asking if anyone knew of cement companies in Ada, as she and her husband were moving there. Someone responded with the Holcim phone number. The post dates to this past August.

Not to play my own devil's advocate, but I also wondered whether cement plants and other industrial structures could ever be considered an improvement to the landscape. There's probably no way to prove this idea, although I was reminded of the book Professor Eismeier showed us earlier in the semester defending the "Hudson Valley Ruins." I agree that the Hudson Valley, though not officially recognized by the National Parks Service as a National Park (which is absurd), has too much aesthetic and historical value to lose to a cement plant, but there are probably areas where industrialization can be considered beautiful. I personally find some kind of beauty in images like these: http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y55/silverbeam/CSM%20Blog/powerlines.jpg
http://www.europavalve.com/images/oil-refinery-crop2.jpg

Overall - and I think this is what Silverman struggled with - the end result was neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, and this moral ambiguity may have its core at the subjectivity of aesthetics.