Walking to the Sun

A seasoned travel writer and adventurer journeys on foot through the various landscapes of our energy past and our energy future, from Maine to California

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On a winter day in 2013, Tom Haines stood in front of his basement furnace and wondered about the source of the natural gas that fueled his insulated life. During the next four years, Haines, an award-winning journalist and seasoned wanderer, walked hundreds of miles through landscapes of fuel—oil, gas, and coal, and water, wind, and sun—on a crucial exploration of how we live on Earth in the face of a growing climate crisis. Can we get from the fossil fuels of today to the renewables of tomorrow? The story Haines tells in Walking to the Sun is full not only of human encounters—with roustabouts working on an oil rig, farmers tilling fields beneath wind turbines, and many others—but also of the meditative range that arrives with solitude far from home. This granular narrative is told in the spirit of the nonfiction of John Steinbeck and the nature writing of Henry David Thoreau. It is reminiscent of the best work of literary wanderers like Rory Stewart, Bill Bryson, John McPhee, Eric Newby, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, but with the purpose-driven caveat of trying to understand where our energy comes from now—and where it will come from in the future. Walking to the Sun overcomes the dislocation of our industrial times to look closely at the world around us and to consider what might come next. The result is an empowering ground-level reckoning of our relationship with nature in the twenty-first century.