The farther west you travel from Chicago, the less obvious it becomes where Chicagoland actually ends.
The city does not simply stop. Suburbs thin out. Housing developments become islands. The spaces between them widen. Decorative streetlights give way to utility poles, and then, almost without announcement, the landscape belongs to corn.
That makes DeKalb County, Illinois an interesting place for a random Street View road trip.
It sits about 63 miles west of Chicago, covers roughly 633 square miles, and had an estimated population of about 102,000 in 2025. DeKalb and Sycamore provide the county's main urban centers, Northern Illinois University brings a sizable college presence, and yet enormous portions of the county remain unmistakably agricultural.
The DeKalb County History Center describes agriculture as one of the defining threads of the county's history, and that becomes obvious almost immediately on Street View.
But there was something else I kept noticing.
The countryside here did not look especially rough.
It looked organized.
Maybe I had simply stumbled onto an unusually tidy collection of roads, but scene after scene had the same peculiar quality: trimmed lawns, clean gravel drives, bright barns, sharply defined fields, buildings that looked freshly cared for. Coming from central North Carolina, where rural landscapes often feel looser and more accumulated over time, I found the contrast striking.
I have been watching videos lately from a young woman who travels around Russia.
She goes to places I would like to see myself someday: Siberia, Lake Baikal, the Ural Mountains. Her videos are quiet and beautiful. There are trains, snowy roads, apartments, forests, meals, conversations, long stretches of landscape.
What struck me most recently, though, was something almost completely unrelated to the scenery.
She cannot monetize the videos.
Google deactivated Russia-based AdSense accounts in August 2024, and YouTube still says that creators with Russia-based AdSense accounts cannot monetize their channels. The restriction is one of a long series of measures connected to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
That makes sense at the level where we usually discuss international affairs.
Russia invaded Ukraine. Other countries and international companies responded. Sanctions and restrictions followed.
But then the abstraction travels downward.
Eventually it reaches somebody filming Lake Baikal.
That is where the situation starts to feel different.
It is easy to talk about countries as though they were people.
Russia invaded.
America threatened.
China wants.
France objects.
Iran retaliates.
We do this because it is useful shorthand. Governments really do act on behalf of states, and those actions have consequences.
But nations contain millions of people who may have had almost nothing to do with those decisions.
Drive across northern or western Iowa and one feature of the landscape becomes hard to miss.
There are cornfields, grain elevators, small towns, long straight roads, and, increasingly, enormous white wind turbines turning above all of it.
That would not be especially surprising in a state known for aggressive climate politics.
Iowa is not such a state.
Donald Trump won 55.7 percent of Iowa's presidential vote in 2024. Republicans currently hold large majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. Iowa has moved decisively toward the Republican Party over the past decade. (Iowa Secretary of State)
And yet, in 2024, 62.84 percent of all electricity generated in Iowa came from wind.
Coal supplied about 21 percent. Natural gas supplied about 14 percent.
Wind was not a boutique supplement to Iowa's electrical system. It was the system's dominant source of generation. (Iowa Utilities Commission)
At first glance, there seems to be a political contradiction here.
Renewable energy has become entangled with climate politics in the United States, and climate politics has become sharply partisan. One might therefore expect the country's most wind-dependent states to resemble the country's most environmentally progressive states.
But Iowa suggests that this is the wrong way to think about it.
The more interesting question is not why a Republican state somehow tolerates wind power.
It is how wind power became useful enough that tolerating it ceased to be the point.
