#infrastructure

I took these photos on a short walk near my house in East Durham. Nothing heroic. No grand mission. Just… me trying to remember that making pictures can be fun again.

It’s been a while since I’ve done this. Partly because the vibe out in public has felt more tense—like everyone is bracing for something, and everyone is watching everyone. Since the ICE raids started around here, that background hum of suspicion feels louder. And even beyond that: smartphones kind of flooded the world with “photography,” and somehow the magic got diluted. Not because the camera got worse—because the social feeling around taking pictures got heavier. Like you’re always one misunderstanding away from a weird moment.

But I miss the old feeling.

I used to shoot a lot of analog—mostly with a Zorki (my scrappy Soviet Leica clone) and a plastic Holga that could turn a normal scene into a dream with one light leak. I’m not using them right now because film + development costs have gotten steep. So yeah: I’m using an emulator app on my phone. And honestly? It gets you surprisingly close to the spark.

The point wasn’t to overthink, or to “capture” anything important. The point was to shoot from the hip—give myself permission to walk, notice, and press the shutter without asking the world for approval first.

If you feel that same tension—paranoia, self-consciousness, the “what will people think?” loop—this is your reminder: you can take a short walk and make art anyway. Even if the feeling doesn’t fully go away… you can still come back with something real.

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.

Electric vehicles have a peculiar way of making gasoline cars feel complicated.

You plug the car in. Electricity flows into a battery. Later, that electricity turns a motor, and the motor turns the wheels. There is no gasoline to pump, no miniature sequence of explosions under the hood, and much less energy disappearing as waste heat. After spending some time with a good EV, it becomes surprisingly easy to look at the internal-combustion automobile and wonder whether we are seeing the mature form of transportation or an extraordinarily successful transitional technology.

That raises a much bigger question.

Suppose the United States eventually converted essentially its entire passenger-vehicle fleet to electricity. Where would all that electricity come from?

One intriguing answer begins in the enormous stretches of open land across the American interior. The Great Plains and neighboring regions contain abundant solar and wind resources, along with vast areas where large generating projects can be built. Could we simply build enough solar capacity there to provide the energy currently supplied by gasoline?

And if we could, could that electricity eventually appear wherever Americans currently expect to find fuel: interstate exits, highway service plazas, neighborhood filling stations and thousands of other places across the country?

It sounds like a project of almost cartoonish scale.

The surprising part is that the arithmetic itself does not rule it out.