Voice
A small-engine mechanic in Friendship, Wisconsin (population 700), working a one-man shop on the 40 acres three generations of his family have held. He hunts, follows the Packers, rereads Wendell Berry every winter, and keeps a twelve-year notebook of ice-out and deer-rut dates that shows the climate shifting. He writes on what corporate consolidation has done to small-town rural America — from inside the working-class life that used to be the middle class and is now, as he puts it, what's left.
The food system robs the harvest before the rain stops. Here in Adams County, I know what a busted crop does before it reaches a futures screen. It turns a year into a payment schedule. Seed, fertilizer, fuel, labor, loan interest, and the family's ordinary living all went out. If the crop fails, the income does not return on the same day. A machine payment still does. A feed…
2026-09-03 · 5 MIN READIndia built a solar revolution it cannot move across its own grid. Eleven terawatt-hours of clean electricity generated and then told to stop — because the wires, the batteries, and the switching gear that move power from one place to another could not keep up with what the panels were pouring in. Government data and the energy think tank Ember put the figure at roughly the…
2026-09-02 · 4 MIN READThe State Department abandoned eighty-five American pilgrims in a Nepali valley to a glacier. The Kailash Journeys agency says four hundred Americans took its pilgrimage tours this year. Every one of them was of Indian origin. The State…
2026-09-01 · 3 MIN READMy neighbor on the south road called last Tuesday to ask why the coop raised his propane surcharge again this winter. I told him it wasn't just propane. I told him about methane — invisible, eighty times more potent than carbon dioxide…
2026-08-31 · 3 MIN READInternational Paper and shipping giants are dismantling the South’s pine economy for cheaper fiber. I know what that kind of disappearance looks like. In Adams County, a mill closing did not remove one employer from one town. It pulled…
2026-08-28 · 6 MIN READThe Trump administration is in advanced talks to take a direct stake in 17 Venezuelan oil-and-gas fields holding roughly 90 billion barrels of proven reserves — nearly twice the entire U.S. reserve base — and the moment Washington signs, the energy map of the Western Hemisphere redraws itself. This is not a tariff adjustment. This is the United States planting a sovereign flag…
2026-08-28 · 6 MIN READThe trade war that started on Trump's desk is about to land on American cropland — and the weapon Canada is most likely to use next is the one Washington left out of its own tariff list on purpose. Potash. I can see the fertilizer trucks from my shop. They run Highway 13 past Friendship most weeks this time of year, headed for the Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative and the…
2026-08-27 · 5 MIN READWest Point fired its only climate scientist for telling cadets the truth. Out behind the shop last Tuesday morning I watched the fog come off the cranberry marsh on the south side of the section. Forty years ago my uncle Pete used to say…
2026-08-27 · 4 MIN READSaturday morning I was at the locker in Friendship, dropping off half a beef from a neighbor. Ron Watters runs about forty cow-calf pairs on a hundred and sixty acres west of town off County Z — a retired C&NW man who came back to his…
2026-08-26 · 5 MIN READThe Sand Hill mill closed in 2009, the year I graduated from Adams-Friendship High School. The same extractive logic that closed it — a timber economy that pays men with guns when paperwork fails — is what got a 50-year-old Kichwa…
2026-08-25 · 6 MIN READDonald Trump is killing union offshore wind jobs to perform his war on windmills. I want to talk about something I read in Dharna Noor's piece in the Guardian that the Adams County Times-Reporter picked up last week, and that I have not…
2026-08-23 · 6 MIN READThe federal government is tearing apart wild horse families to feed cattle on public land. The line Robyn Smith gave a reporter at the roundup in Rio Blanco County, Colorado, was "they're living their best life." She was watching through a…
2026-08-21 · 7 MIN READ
Trump and Steve Pearce are desecrating sacred Pueblo land for oil company profits. Tuesday night I sat at the bench after the shop closed with the BLM's proposed rule open next to the Adams County Land and Water Conservation Department's…
2026-08-20 · 6 MIN READThe fossil fuel industry emptied the reservoirs of the American West. I read the wire Tuesday morning on the bench at the shop, with the parts catalog open to a Stihl chainsaw order I needed to call in. A woman named Dianelis Molina Cruz…
2026-08-19 · 5 MIN READThe fossil fuel industry is drying Europe's rivers to keep selling its product. The slough at the back of my forty went dry in late July. I watched it go dry in 2018 and 2020, the worst two years of the last twelve, but this year it went…
2026-08-18 · 5 MIN READMeta is secretly buying Kentucky farmland to fuel AI compute, hiding behind shell companies and NDAs. I read Christopher Mims's Wall Street Journal piece on Delsia Bare and her mother Ida Huddleston at the bench one evening last week, and…
2026-08-16 · 5 MIN READWashington tried to erase the Navajo language it then used to win a war. I live on forty acres in Adams County, Wisconsin, that belonged to the Ho-Chunk people long before there was an Adams County — before there was a Wisconsin, before…
2026-08-14 · 4 MIN READOil markets are taxing Adams County's harvest by holding diesel too expensive to run. I was at the Cenex in Adams last Thursday filling the Silverado — nine gallons of off-road in the tank — and the pump was reading a dollar ten higher…
2026-08-13 · 4 MIN READThe fossil-fuel industry is heating Europe for profit. I wrote the first ice-out date in my notebook twelve years ago, standing on the bank at Lake Petenwell with a thermos beside me and the same question I still have now: how many times…
2026-08-10 · 5 MIN READTotalEnergies and Eni are selling Europe a new dependence and calling it independence. The first hard freeze in Adams County usually lands in the first week of November. Every year about then I stand in the shed and watch the gauge on the…
2026-08-09 · 5 MIN READTrump restarted a war that fills refiners' pockets at the pump. I watched the diesel price climb at the station on the way to the co-op this week, and I have watched enough fuel spikes to know what one does to a one-man shop in a county…
2026-08-07 · 6 MIN READClimate change is stealing the thin margin Malaysian growers need to survive. I know that margin from Adams County, where a farm can stay busy, productive, and still be one bad season from trouble. The crop is not the whole business. The…
2026-08-06 · 4 MIN READThe logging company is stripping Pacheedaht territory bare. Near Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island, about 20 forest defenders slept on a gravel logging road. They came in a five-car caravan, slept in tents and the backs of cars, and put one…
2026-08-06 · 5 MIN READAuthorities charged a man with arson in one Spokane wildfire. Three fires near Spokane destroyed about 850 buildings and forced roughly 67,000 people to evacuate after erupting last weekend, according to the Associated Press. No deaths…
2026-08-06 · 4 MIN READHotter weather is driving Spokane families from their homes. At my bench in Adams County, the distance between Washington and Wisconsin is a map distance, not a weather distance. The same heat that dries a western hillside changes the work…
2026-08-05 · 4 MIN READAbout 20 forest defenders camped overnight on a gravel logging road near Port Renfrew, British Columbia. They slept in tents and the backs of cars, parked one truck across the road, and took their positions at 3 a.m. The next morning, a…
2026-08-05 · 8 MIN READTyson, JBS, Cargill and National Beef are robbing ranchers and consumers. The beef price story starts with drought, disease and the smallest American cattle inventory since 1951. It does not end there. Eric Gropper runs about 350 breeding…
2026-08-05 · 6 MIN READThe Trump administration drilled border-wall wells without state permission. Here in Adams County, I know what it means when somebody treats groundwater like an empty tank. Our county sits on the Central Sands, where farms, homes, lakes…
2026-08-05 · 6 MIN READTrump's administration is risking New Mexico ranchers' water for a border wall. Wisconsin has a name for the well that pulls its neighbors dry. It is called a high-capacity well, and the state's Department of Natural Resources has required…
2026-08-03 · 5 MIN READDemocrats are telling people standing in floodwater that the real issue is the price of bread. That is the calculation the consultants made. Don't talk about the weather. Talk about groceries. Don't say "climate." Say "affordability." They…
2026-08-01 · 4 MIN READOPEC and Washington are robbing rural America at the pump. I filled up the truck this morning at the Co-op in Friendship, and the numbers on the pump felt like a gut punch. Diesel had climbed enough to sting — high enough that the total…
2026-07-31 · 5 MIN READThe Trump administration is starving the Lumbee Tribe's healthcare after a hundred and thirty-seven years of broken promises. Angie Lowery is forty-four years old. She is a citizen of the Lumbee Tribe, and she lives in Lumberton, North…
2026-07-30 · 4 MIN READThe fossil-fuel industry is poisoning the summer for a generation of kids. Here in Adams County, the air doesn't smell like it used to. The notebook has twelve years of this, and the line doesn't bend back. The seasons are arriving…
2026-07-26 · 5 MIN READThe water shot into the stock tank on a high mesa south of Montrose, and a trickle soaked the dry earth below. Scott Snyder rose from the shade to fasten the hose and stop the spillage. "It's just so much work. I hate dropping any of it,"…
2026-07-25 · 7 MIN READCongress drained the petroleum reserve, and now a Houthi attack will spike diesel prices. I filled up my Silverado at the Co-op on Highway 13 this morning. The diesel pump read $4.19. That is thirty cents higher than it was a month ago,…
2026-07-24 · 6 MIN READThe natural-gas futures are not the story. The heat that moves them is. The Nymex front month sits at $2.928 per million Btu and cannot break above $3, even after a 32-billion-cubic-foot storage build that analysts called "modestly…
2026-07-24 · 4 MIN READA year ago the Muscogee Nation Supreme Court ruled that Black Creek Freedmen are citizens of the Nation. The treaty promised it in 1866. The highest court inside the Nation confirmed it in 2025. Chief David Hill and the Citizenship Board…
2026-07-23 · 4 MIN READTrump and his trade officials are using Canadian dairy farmers as cover for tariffs that will cost American dairy farmers their biggest export customer. That is the move. Here is the math. Canada bought $1.3 billion in American dairy last…
2026-07-23 · 3 MIN READThe smoke hit Friendship on a Tuesday afternoon in early July. I was running the Stihl on a downed birch off County Z when the sky went the color of a dirty dishrag and my eyes started burning. By Wednesday morning the air-quality index…
2026-07-22 · 4 MIN READThe drillers behind America's energy-dominance story are paying buyers to take their gas. In the Permian Basin — the biggest, most productive oil field the country has ever had — natural gas prices averaged negative $2.19 per million…
2026-07-21 · 7 MIN READThat is what the United Nations said Tuesday. The annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report found the daily cost of eating adequately jumped almost a quarter between 2021 and 2025, from $3.44 to $4.28 in…
2026-07-21 · 4 MIN READThe Trump EPA is protecting companies poisoning farmland with toxic sludge. When the farmers asked what to do about it, the agency told them to do their own research. The decision, published this month to the federal register, killed…
2026-07-20 · 4 MIN READDollar Tree does not come to a county like Adams by accident. It comes because the population is low, the median income is low, the labor-force participation is the lowest in the state, and the alternatives have already been killed. It…
2026-07-20 · 6 MIN READThe smoke rolled into Adams County on Tuesday afternoon. By Wednesday morning the sky over Friendship had gone the color of old dishwater and the air smelled like somebody had burned a house two towns over. The thermometer at the shop read…
2026-07-17 · 6 MIN READTrump drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lose a war on Iran. A 9.6% single-day jump in Brent crude is the kind of price move a small-engine shop in central Wisconsin absorbs in a week. The diesel that runs my Silverado, the…
2026-07-16 · 5 MIN READFossil fuel companies are burning alive people who never burned their fuel. The Associated Press reported that Banda, India — a northern town that has recorded some of the country's highest temperatures — endures extreme heat at all hours,…
2026-07-16 · 4 MIN READThe Trump administration is hiding the information that keeps rural households from burning through their savings during a heatwave. I write this from a shop with a window air conditioner that has been running almost continuously since the…
2026-07-16 · 3 MIN READThe U.S. Department of Justice just opened a federal trial against the Israeli private investigator Amit Forlit, and climate activists are watching for a reason that has nothing to do with Israeli cybersecurity firms. The indictment…
2026-07-16 · 5 MIN READThe Trump administration is killing endangered species by changing what the word "harm" means. Let me tell you what the word does on the ground. A red-cockaded woodpecker needs a longleaf pine with a certain age and a certain heart-rot to…
2026-07-16 · 5 MIN READTrump and the Republican Senate are sacrificing rural Americans to the heat so they can keep cutting corporate taxes. Another heat dome is rolling east across the northern Plains, the Midwest, the Northeast. Chicago at 97 degrees, New York…
2026-07-15 · 4 MIN READA Marathon Oil subsidiary is burying carbon under Clymers, Indiana, for eighty-five dollars a ton. Melissa Harrison is raising five grandchildren in one of a few dozen white-clapboard houses in Clymers, in Cass County, Indiana. Generations…
2026-07-12 · 4 MIN READThe transformer on the pole behind the shop has been humming louder the last two years, and the guy at Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative says I'm not imagining it. He's got the loading data, and the co-op has been walking a careful line…
2026-07-11 · 8 MIN READThe Big Four beef packers are pocketing the drought-and-screwworm surcharge at Texas taco counters. The price of barbacoa in San Antonio has been moving for two years. The reasons this publication's reporting on the supply strain names —…
2026-07-10 · 4 MIN READTommie Zito and Raj Bhakta are flipping Poultney's closed college into a Christendom academy. The 3,000 residents of the western Vermont town did not get a vote. The pattern looks familiar from Adams County — the shape of a town that lost…
2026-07-09 · 4 MIN READBig Oil redlined the Pacific, and Adams County's culverts pay the margin. Three customers brought snowblowers into the shop last week. The first was a retired guy out on Czech Avenue whose driveway runs long and uphill. The second was the…
2026-07-08 · 5 MIN READFederal highway engineers are designing America's roads for a climate that no longer exists. The county blacktop a mile down the road went soft at the edges by Tuesday afternoon. The notebook has the heat index for the day at one-oh-four.…
2026-07-07 · 6 MIN READThe fossil fuel industry killed at least twenty-five Americans in this week's heat dome. Mitchell Ray Cooley was seventy-four. He had a medical condition the Hinds County coroner said impaired his judgment. He went missing Thursday, July…
2026-07-05 · 6 MIN READExxonMobil is sacrificing my lake to lock in thirty more years of gas. The lake freezes weeks later than it did a generation ago, and the maple-syrup season has shifted into January and February instead of late March. I do not need a…
2026-06-30 · 3 MIN READThe national climate planners built the future for cities and abandoned the countryside. Saw the thermometer hit 96 at the shop last Tuesday, which is not supposed to happen in central Wisconsin in June the way it happened. The dogs…
2026-06-26 · 5 MIN READThe oil industry stole the summer days this county used to work through. The air in the shop gets thick enough by two in the afternoon in late June that the sweat sits on the skin without doing what sweat is supposed to do — the…
2026-06-22 · 7 MIN READTrump's peace deal with Iran is bleeding the oil producers he swore to protect. The diesel pump at the Co-op on Highway 13 shows four cents less this week than last. For a one-man shop in Friendship running tight margins on delivery runs…
2026-06-22 · 5 MIN READI filled the Silverado at the Co-op in Friendship yesterday — $4.47 a gallon, just under the national average that market reporting put out this morning. That's a dollar more than we were paying before the shooting started in the Strait of…
2026-06-18 · 4 MIN READThe LP delivery truck came through Friendship on Thursday. The price of propane didn't go down, and it won't, because the price of propane in Adams County is set by the same market that sets the price of liquefied natural gas loading onto…
2026-06-15 · 5 MIN READTrump is killing the AMOC early-warning system over pocket change. I keep a notebook in my shop — a spiral-bound book with oil smudges on the cover, the kind you can buy at the hardware store in Adams for three dollars. For twelve years…
2026-06-14 · 6 MIN READThe shale boom was a corporate raid on rural America. A Stihl chainsaw chain I bought last spring for forty-two dollars now costs forty-eight. The new tariff surcharges are right there on the invoice from my parts distributor, and the…
2026-06-14 · 5 MIN READExxonMobil and agricultural employers are killing people in the summer heat. The body is a cooling machine that runs on sweat. Sweat evaporates, core temperature drops, the loop runs fine — until the humidity locks the air and the sweat…
2026-06-13 · 4 MIN READWall Street lenders cut the credit lifelines working families need to survive. I got a letter from the bank last month telling me the credit line on my shop account was being lowered. I hadn't missed a payment. I hadn't asked for an…
2026-06-13 · 6 MIN READPresident Trump is fleecing working families at the pump to pay for his Iran war. The pump outside the Co-op in Friendship reads $4.15 this morning. Not the national average the White House briefs on — that's a nickel lower and a month…
2026-06-12 · 4 MIN READI filled the shop truck at the co-op in Friendship this morning and diesel was $5.19 a gallon, roughly tracking the regional average. That’s a lot more than I paid a year ago, and I can tell you where that extra money went: it went to the…
2026-06-12 · 5 MIN READTrump is commandeering the Strait of Hormuz to rig the pump prices we pay. I filled the Silverado at the co-op in Friendship yesterday afternoon. Regular $3.49, diesel $3.89. Down a dime from last week, but I’ve learned not to trust a…
2026-06-12 · 6 MIN READTrump and the oil traders are draining the strategic reserve to fund a war. He posted it himself on Truth Social last night — more than 100 million barrels of oil made it onto the market since last month because a secret U.S. escort…
2026-06-11 · 4 MIN READThe Department of Agriculture is sacrificing American farmers to a South American surplus. You sit on the tailgate at the cooperative elevator when the World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report drops and watch the futures…
2026-06-11 · 4 MIN READTrump's strikes at the Strait of Hormuz are pricing rural America out of affordable diesel. The Wall Street Journal reports the administration ordered attacks on Iranian targets near the choke point that moves a fifth of the world's oil.…
2026-06-11 · 4 MIN READTrump is breaking the April ceasefire to drive rural diesel prices through the roof. Military strikes between the United States and Iran have resumed. Diplomatic negotiations have stalled. Trump warned Iran that it will "pay the price" for…
2026-06-11 · 7 MIN READTrump's regulators built a casino out of American life to enrich insiders. I see the mechanics of this at the bench. A neighbor brings me a Husqvarna riding mower that won't hold a charge, and he isn't asking for the specs on the…
2026-06-10 · 7 MIN READNextEra buys Dominion to supply data centers and stick ratepayers with the bill. The arithmetic isn’t wrong. The premium looks fine. Earl‑per‑share pops right away. The part nobody’s saying out loud is that the deal adds up for…
2026-06-10 · 6 MIN READI see the trucks every morning on Highway 13, rolling south out of the sand counties toward the distribution hubs in Madison and Milwaukee — reefers and dry vans and flatbeds, the owner-operator rigs with the faded lettering you can only…
2026-06-10 · 4 MIN READ
