Climate Change

Being from the northeast, I have a thing for seasons. I like to complain that it’s too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. I like hearing horror stories about New England snow storms and New York summer scorchers. But most of all I live for the changes. It’s no accident that everyone loves spring and fall – not only is the weather perfect, but they are periods of transition, helping you mark time and shed the past, giving the year a natural, unavoidable rhythm.

But enough new age talk. I gave this a fair amount of thought while Gwen and I lived in Cambodia after I noticed the climate starting to wear on me. The weather there changes only slightly from season to season – ranging from kind of hot to really hot – and months of the year started to blur together. I found myself becoming listless. I needed something cyclical to feel like I was making forward progress (which as I write it seems a bit contradictory… but oh well).

We ran into the same problem while in the southwest. The weather was oh-so-beautiful, but relentlessly so. How can you fully appreciate dry, sunny, 80 degrees with a slight breeze, if you don’t have the occasional day of gray drizzle for comparison? I’m not sure, but folks seem to manage.

Ahh… being on the road is hard. We tackle some of life’s biggest problems – like how to cope with another perfect day.

The Wind State

Uh-oh, Gwen’s letting her eco-geekiness show again. (sorry)

We only spent two nights in Texas, and we didn’t really have any plans for the state except for one thing: visit a wind farm. I had learned a while back that the state produces more wind energy than any other in the US, and I hadn’t ever seen a wind farm first-hand before, so on our first morning there we headed out to the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center – currently the world’s largest wind farm.

To call this wind farm huge would be an understatement. It wasn’t really even a place, but more like an uncountable number of wind turbines scattered across a vast landscape. The tall spiky turbines stretched literally as far as the eye can see (and probably farther). I found it quite stunning and I would even use the term “beautiful” to describe it, but it turns out that the locals have not taken so kindly to this green energy wonderland. In fact, they sued the farm shortly after it was completed, declaring it a “private nuisance”. They lost the suit.

Christopher and I wanted to get some footage of locals talking about the farm and giving their opinion about the 300-plus turbines that decorate the landscape around their ranches. But we failed (mainly out of laziness resulting from the hot Texas sun), so instead you get to watch me stuttering into the camera instead. Enjoy!

Big Fat Ugly Footprint

No, that’s not Jesus’ footprint. It’s mine. Or maybe Christopher’s. I honestly can’t remember whose it is, but it doesn’t matter because it’s just a metaphor anyway. This post isn’t about feet – it’s about the relatively enormous environmental impact of our trip.

Lots of people are talking about gas prices these days, and as you can see on our “At the Pump” page, the price of gas has been floating around at a record-high $3 million a gallon over the last month. It’s been hard on our wallets, but we’ve been saving up and we expected this trip to be a big drain on our bank accounts, so each time we spend 50 bucks filling up the tank I may wince a little, but the pain passes and off we go. The high price of gas may deter many Americans from driving as much as usual – and for Christopher and me it’s been more of a challenge to put the pedal to the metal.

Gas Guzzling

With all this driving we have to stop for gas pretty frequently – and we’ve been saving the receipts. This is probably of much more interest to us than all you out there, but if you’re curious check out the “At The Pump” page and see how the cost of gas varies state by state (and week by week). I guess it’ll also serve as a running tally of the trip’s cost. You can watch us go broke! Online!

Disclaimer: we’ve been shelling out for premium because our mechanic told us that Precision Auto is a picky eater and it would be cost-effective in the long run (feel free to call us suckers). So take that into account when crunching the numbers.

Also… If you’re interested in where we’ve been (and where we might be going), check out the new “Map” page.

Environmental Degradation Tourism

For the past couple of years I’ve been working in the environmental sector, giving me the opportunity to learn about all sorts of environmental atrocities that are happening throughout the US and the world. One of the issues that has stood out among all of the messes of our time is Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining, a kind of “mining” which really doesn’t involve mines – or miners – at all.

When we think about coal mines, we generally imagine a deep hole in the ground that miners go into to dig coal out. With mountaintop removal, there is no hole. Instead, the earth itself is removed so that coal is exposed and can simply be picked up and trucked away. It is an engineering feat of massive proportions that is known to cause proportionately massive damage to the environment and the communities that live around it.

My long-standing fascination with this practice is the reason why Christopher and I found ourselves in Southern West Virginia. Let’s call it “environmental degradation tourism”. Before heading out there we called around and found some community activists that agreed to talk to us and get on camera (outside of a Hillary Clinton rally where they were protesting). They also gave us directions to Kayford Mountain, a location about thirty minutes outside of the state capital that provides a great vantage point for viewing mountaintop removal.