A walking contradiction

I forgot to bring my travel mug on a 4,000 mile drive across the US. Shame on me, at every gas station fuel-and-caffeine fill up. I prostrate myself before the neon gods of every almost-beautiful 24-hour rest area. I feel the weight of the carbon blowing from my tailpipe pushing on my heart. Perversely, the weight lifts a little when I pass the thousandth semi of the day, knowing each of them burns more fuel in a month than I do in a year, converting a gallon of diesel into newly-spongy permafrost for every five miles it heaves its 80,000 pounds.

I believe that we’re desperately fucking up the planet, and each other in the process. I also drive a car that gets 14 miles per gallon, fly regularly, and sometimes eat meat. I love mountains and birdsong and the ice on the river. I also love fast motorcycles and big machines and screaming engines.

My every trip to the garbage can is another small betrayal. I feel guilty when anyone throws something away. Material should be precious. Recently, I biked out of the mountains and into the staggeringly huge amount of waste we produce, in the form of the Sunshine Canyon Landfill (what a name). Over 1,000 acres of dead land, peppered with pipes and valves to release the endless stinking methane generated by the trash as it decomposes. The dump is a microcosm of my hypocrisy – I was horrified by the terraced wasteland and fascinated by the hundreds of diesel-drinking haul trucks and bulldozers and loaders it employs. I noticed on my way out that the small sliver of the landfill that’s visible from the freeway is covered in grass…the rest is bare dirt, hidden by mountains on all sides.

Some days I think mass action and personal responsibility make sense as a means of creating societal change, through the symbolism in the story told by individuals’ care. Other days, I think that politics shaped by corporate greed will drive us into the ground long before any push to change our individual behavior has even a sliver of the impact needed to slow down our collective freefall into disaster.

A friend told me a story of a woman who came to stay at his farm in Washington, a woman who was hyperaware of her ecological footprint and did her best to live a low-impact life. She arrived on the same day as a man who came to visit from Florida hauling his 25-foot boat. My friend saw her face as she realized that that man had canceled out her lifetime of care in a single trip.

What should we make of that?

I have no idea where I’m headed.

Last week I told my largest client that I’m going to be offline indefinitely starting in April, which was the first concrete step in shutting down the business I’ve been building since I dropped out of college in 2020. I couldn’t handle the idea of continuing to make my living from building tools to help people sell more shit on Amazon, a career path that I fell into by chance without thinking much about its implications. It paid more than I ever expected to make, especially in terms of hourly rate, but I can no longer bring myself to spend my energy on something so at odds with my values. I believe in fixing what has already been built, treating our material possessions like they matter (they do), and local production, and Amazon is the antithesis of those beliefs to a degree that makes my actions feel almost comically misaligned with my words.

It takes an ongoing and constant effort to remember these ideals I’ve set for myself. It’s so much easier (surprisingly easy, even) to fall back onto my default path (individualism, chasing money, mindless consumption) than to keep prodding myself to swim upstream. I get busy, and forget everything I promised myself I would do to help build the world I want to see. How is it that morality could be so fleeting? I feel unreasonably malleable.

I’ve found solace in the idea that the only thing we can do is to walk whichever path makes sense at the time, and keep trying to do good now without assuming that any good will actually result from our actions. The only thing to do, then, is to keep walking forward. These days, my answers rarely seem to come from thinking about the problem harder.

Yesterday, for the fifth time in my short life and the second time this week, I was within spitting distance of a wildfire.

We evacuated when the fire crested a ridge a quarter mile away, and I rode my motorcycle in the middle of a convoy of my friends as ash and smoke blew sideways across the freeway. I half-laughed to myself at our collective hubris, to think that we could ever win a war against the earth. In wildland firefighting, they don’t talk about extinguishing fires – instead, wildfires are described by the degree to which they’ve been contained. Last night there were three separate wildfires on the outskirts of LA at 0% containment, with 80-mile-an-hour gusts of wind feeding them.

Out-of-control fires have a strangely seductive quality to them. Half of us came back to the house within a few hours when our collective worry died down with the wind, winding through residential neighborhoods to avoid the roadblocked boulevards. We sat on the roof and watched the hills burn, then opened Instagram and watched bulldozers clear abandoned cars from a road across the valley to make way for emergency vehicles trying to get to the front lines.

Maybe it isn’t surprising that I slide back into moral complacency so easily. In the aftermath of each wildfire I’ve witnessed, nothing has changed but the color of the landscape.

I’ve driven across the immensity of the US more times than any non-trucker ever should, and I’ve had a few of the most transcendent moments of my life driving into the midwestern sunset. The juxtaposition of nature and machine, beauty and windswept desolation, endless blacktop and rolling fields makes it easy to be awestruck. The infinite red sky paints the chrome of every gleaming semi as they haul drilling rigs to the next piece of virgin soil, and towering wind turbines dot the landscape like beacons of a dying hope.

Age 18, heading west for the first time. I could see for 20 miles, reveling in the Americana glory of flying 85 down the highway on my motorcycle as the sun went down over the mesas of western Oklahoma. I hadn’t yet grasped the trouble we were in.

20, heading west again. This was the year of the world’s largest climate protests, which I was newly involved in, and now I understood where we were headed. In South Dakota I twisted through a wind farm as the clouds ran red. A few days later, I rode past the gaping black hole in the earth that is the Black Thunder Mine, the largest coal mine on earth. I nearly cried in my helmet, and a rainbow arched over the pit. I began to doubt the world could be fixed by business as usual.

Last month, 25. On the tail end of a four year trip into and back out of an environmental detachment born of hopelessness and overwhelm, and in the middle of another drive across the country – my eighth since 2017. I matched speed with a beautiful stretched Peterbilt for most of western Iowa, marveling at how easily it pulled its own immense weight as my 4Runner struggled to maintain 70mph hauling a measly two motorcycles. The sun set yet again, and for the first time I was able to wonder at the beauty of the natural world and the miracles of human engineering at the same time. Another wind farm stretched for miles, silhouetted against the sky. I no longer believe humanity can engineer its way out of the problems we’ve engineered our way into, but I’ll be damned if we haven’t built some spectacular things along the road to ruin.