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 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 ninety-one and climbing. The notebook recorded a day that looked like any other July in central Wisconsin except for the haze that hung low…
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 gasoline that runs the chainsaws and snowblowers my customers bring in for repair, the propane that heats the shop through a February in Friendship…
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 carve out its nesting cavity. You don't shoot the bird. You cut the pine. You don't wound the salmon. You let the silt from the construction…
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 at 100, Washington at 102 by Wednesday. The air is bad. The humidity is worse. The people who will die in these temperatures are already in…
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 READOver 100 wildfires are burning uncontrolled in Canada, and the smoke that blanketed the Midwest and Northeast yesterday is settling into Adams County now — the way it settled in last summer, and the summer before that. You close the shop…
2026-07-16 · 6 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 READ
Big 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 READSeattle's city council voted this month to pause new data-center construction for a year. The city that houses Amazon and Microsoft looked at five proposed projects that would eat a third of its current electricity demand and said stop. I…
2026-06-10 · 6 MIN READWall Street is dumping its hollow AI bets to buy back the actual trucks. I read the notice on a clipped business page spread across my workbench next to a cracked plastic recoil starter from a 2018 Honda EU2200i generator. Out on County G,…
2026-06-10 · 3 MIN READTrump claims his Hormuz deal will lower the global oil price. The diesel pump at the Co-op in Friendship hasn't moved. Brent crude has been swinging by dollars a day on every headline from the Strait of Hormuz, and the financial press is…
2026-06-09 · 5 MIN READGlobal grain and fertilizer cartels are pricing the family farm out of the dirt. When the Pacific Ocean warms by two degrees, the first thing to break is not the crop. It is the price of getting the crop into the ground. A super El Niño is…
2026-06-09 · 5 MIN READI saw the number hit $5.79 this morning—up thirty cents in a week, give or take a dime’s memory—when I pulled the shop truck up to the Co-op tank in Friendship. Jerry behind the counter had yesterday’s Times-Reporter open to the energy…
2026-06-09 · 6 MIN READThe Nymex July natural gas contract settled at $3.147 per million British thermal units Monday, down a nickel from Friday, down from the $3.39 touch earlier in the week. That two-and-a-half percent slide is a number. On my bench, it's not…
2026-06-08 · 7 MIN READThe oil market is using rural America’s fuel tank as its safety valve. I filled the Silverado at the Co-op in Friendship this morning. Diesel was $3.89 a gallon, same as last week. The pump doesn’t know that Iran and Israel traded fire…
2026-06-08 · 7 MIN READBig Tech companies drain rural aquifers to feed their AI servers. In Box Elder County, Utah, the land has been deep in drought since last summer. The Great Salt Lake is shrinking, ranchers are told to conserve every drop, and the governor…
2026-06-08 · 7 MIN READThe Federal Reserve is killing rural credit to manage a war economy. A currency desk in Singapore or an investment bank in Chicago can watch the dollar rally against the Malaysian ringgit and see a tidy macroeconomic adjustment. The dollar…
2026-06-08 · 6 MIN READA farmer in southwestern Virginia wrote recently about cutting firewood with a stranger, and how that afternoon made the political divide feel less like an unbridgeable chasm and more like the product of decades of bipartisan decisions. I…
2026-06-07 · 7 MIN READMarket speculators and the administration are betting July's fuel supply on a phantom Iran deal. Wall Street and Washington are gambling the diesel that runs the shops and farms of rural America on a diplomatic resolution that hasn't…
2026-06-05 · 4 MIN READNymex traders price rural heating fuel on speculative storage bets. The bulletin from New York reports July delivery at $3.278 per million British thermal units, held up by a hotter forecast and a South Central storage injection running…
2026-06-05 · 3 MIN READThe financial press is abandoning young workers to a rigged economy and propping up the meritocracy myth. A Credit Karma survey making the rounds on the shop bench this morning reports that thirty-nine percent of millennials doomspend…
2026-06-04 · 5 MIN READThe SEC stripped the map protecting corporate operations. Three hundred thousand words, three thousand footnotes, a bureaucratic apparatus that once tried to force companies to chart the physical toll of their own extraction — and the…
2026-06-04 · 8 MIN READWashington and Tehran are choking the Strait of Hormuz to drive the pump price higher. The diesel pump says it without waiting for Baron Lamarre or the Wall Street Journal market-talk breakdown. The numbers are already laid out: WTI…
2026-06-03 · 4 MIN READThe oil companies are robbing American motorists to fill foreign storage. May's tally from Kpler puts American crude exports at 5.6 million barrels a day, a new national record. The barrels are moving because a war in the Middle East has…
2026-06-02 · 7 MIN READThe soccer oligopoly demands a stoic hero while gutting the leagues that built him. The sports-media complex watches Christian Pulisic's drought like a ledger of moral failure. Mauricio Pochettino nods at forty-five minutes of work against…
2026-06-01 · 5 MIN READThe fossil fuel industry's forty-year campaign of climate denial is killing the Scotch bonnet pepper harvest. The ice went out on Petenwell on March 8 this year. The notebook on the shop bench shows that twelve years ago, ice-out came on…
2026-05-31 · 6 MIN READWes Streeting is selling North Sea oil as a youth jobs program. Those of us who have spent years watching the same pitch land in communities that need work recognize the shape of it. A politician stands before a place and tells the room…
2026-05-31 · 4 MIN READLula paves the Amazon highway to feed global timber and soy extraction. The mechanics of it work exactly the same way on the section lines in Adams County. I drove County Z yesterday afternoon, where the blacktop runs out and the gravel…
2026-05-27 · 4 MIN READSome days, the news makes it sound like we’ve finally pinned down the history of the solar system, like we’re reading from a finished book. Other days, the page keeps turning. This week, the James Webb Space Telescope’s latest look at…
2026-05-25 · 5 MIN READPresident Trump is sacrificing rural drivers on the Iran peace dividend. We who run small engines on inherited land in Adams County watch the diesel pump prices because the diesel pump prices run the shop. When the Strait of Hormuz went…
2026-05-25 · 7 MIN READWe had a hot one last week in Friendship, the kind of June preview that makes the shop unbearable by ten in the morning and doesn't let up. I was in the pole barn, a carburetor rebuild spread across the bench, and the air had that heavy…
2026-05-24 · 5 MIN READTrump is forfeiting the Arctic to Russia and Exxon. We were out on the lake last weekend, and the ice was gone earlier than we've ever recorded. The notebook I keep — a private ledger of spring thaws — showed the walleye spawn already…
2026-05-23 · 9 MIN READRead a story Wednesday night in the Wisconsin State Journal about cities redesigning parking lots with federal grants. Permeable concrete, rain gardens, native plants to manage stormwater runoff. Adams County is managing…
2026-05-23 · 6 MIN READOdo Tevi, Vanuatu’s ambassador to the United Nations, stood before the General Assembly and testified that the harm is not a theoretical curve on a climate model. For the communities he represents, he said, it is already here: along…
2026-05-22 · 6 MIN READThe Army Corps of Engineers chose the Dakota Access Pipeline over Standing Rock water. The Corps announced Thursday that it granted the final easement for the Missouri River crossing, deciding that the best balance of public safety,…
2026-05-22 · 4 MIN READTrump and his EPA are slowing down the transition to newer, efficient cooling equipment, telling us they're doing it to lower the price of a gallon of milk. It's a transparent shell game. On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that the…
2026-05-21 · 4 MIN READWashington is surrendering to 2.5 degrees of warming while calling the science a failure. The latest climate scenario report landed this week. The planet is still warming at more than 0.2 degrees per decade. The emissions cuts baked into…
2026-05-20 · 5 MIN READThe fossil-fuel industry is selling our climate as a free good to keep the shareholders paid. The scientists in Geneva have jettisoned their worst- and best-case scenarios as no longer plausible. They have released a new list of seven…
2026-05-19 · 4 MIN READDonald Trump sacrificed the world’s island nations for a tweet, and the oil companies abandoned the working towns to the heat. The scientists who this week updated the long-term climate scenarios didn’t say the danger was gone. They said…
2026-05-19 · 5 MIN READ
