Our Town: Out Walking | Jun 2025

15 minutes read time.

      June begins with a postcard in my hand outside the Ithaca post office. It is addressed to Myra Suib in Danbury, Connecticut: one person in one town sending something to another person somewhere else. Then the postcard is gone and I am looking at water.

      Water keeps returning through the month—dark and reflective, falling over rock, collecting on pavement and flowers, carrying pollen or debris, sometimes clear and sometimes oily or brown and turbulent. But I wasn’t out looking for water as a theme. I was walking, and these were the things that stopped me long enough to take out the camera: white seeds in the grass, flowers at different stages of bloom and decay, cracked asphalt, bagpipers playing in a pavilion, a piece of plastic caught in weeds, and suddenly a bumper sticker that says FUCK PUTIN.

      The walks continue in the order they happened. I came across a young couple near Taughannock Falls. She was in the water wearing a mermaid costume, her tail trailing in the water while her boyfriend photographed her. Then a freight train passes and, through the slow dissolves I use in Deeper Listening, its horizontal movement carries into electronic instruments, a spinning record, musicians performing, handmade circuit-bent toys and an old 8mm projector. A spider is living on the glass in front of the projector. People nearby are talking about lamps and drinks while the spider goes about its business. Then the glass, web and machinery give way to a kayaker on open water.

      I like that passage, but I did not go back through June looking for the most ingenious transition I could manufacture. The train came before the music; the projector came before the spider; the spider came before the kayak. The chronology matters to me. I could make a shorter film of the best effects, the best pictures, the moments where two images happen to fit together beautifully, but that would be a different work. This is the playground of coincidence, and month to month, the work follows its own rules.

      Walking gives me the material and also gives me the order.

      Later there are blossoms fallen into grass, a painted stream interrupted by a real sprinkler valve and a NO TRESPASSING sign, a decal of guns protecting a stick-figure family, a county electric vehicle, an old fence seen so closely that its knots and grain become a landscape, vines curled into a circle, a windmill turning, a RESIST shirt, gas meters locked behind a white cage while plants grow around them, Mexican and transgender flags, ducks resting beside the creek, graffiti, rain. We see the movement between tiny things and large structures, and the way the dissolves briefly make two different places occupy the same image.

      I don’t experience these things as “nature” on one side and “the human world” on the other. They are what was there. The utility pipe and the ant walking across it are there together. So are flowers and political language, beauty and garbage, an old projector and a spider web. Walking at this pace gives all of them a chance to enter.

      Eventually the walk reaches a No Kings demonstration. The scale changes. After so much attention to surfaces, plants, insects, water and solitary objects, there are suddenly crowds, flags, faces and signs: NO KINGS, STOP RIPPING FAMILIES APART, LOVE IS THE ANSWER, Slava Ukraini, a quotation from the Declaration of Independence. The political world has not interrupted Our Town. It is part of our town.

      And then I walk on.

      That return matters. It is not a loop and it is not a replay. The film returns to flowers, water, trees, pavement and small movements, but these are later encounters. The month has moved forward. Near the end, a robin stands with nesting material in its beak; grasses blow; my shadow crosses the pavement; my boot enters the frame; geese dip into the water; a pinwheel turns beside daylilies; another shadow carries an umbrella; my hand reaches out and touches a mural. Light from leaves and a chain-link fence leaves temporary patterns on the sidewalk.

      This is close to what walking means to me. I go out without knowing what the important thing will be. The heavens are available, but so is a crack in the sidewalk. I try to leave enough time for either one to get my attention.

      The slowing and the long dissolves extend that attention in the finished film. One moment has not quite disappeared when the next one begins, and for a few seconds they have to live together. Sometimes a visual rhyme appears. Sometimes there is humor or friction. Sometimes I don’t know what the connection is, and I would rather leave that uncertainty in the film than explain it away.

      I have also resisted reorganizing each month afterward into the strongest possible cinematic argument. What happened early in June remains early in June; what happened later has to wait. That is partly a discipline and partly the subject of the work. The films contain not only what I saw but something of the duration in which I saw it—days accumulating into a month, one walk following another, familiar routes continuing to change.

      Then the walk continues.

      For Thoreau, walking was something larger than getting from one place to another: a practice of freedom, attention, and openness to the world. But he also understood that such freedom was not simply available on demand; it required time, independence, and a kind of grace.

      In Walking (1862), he writes:

Smackdown

Official Story / Public Reckoning / Deeper Contrast

June 2025

EPA / Interior / Energy

Federal agencies describe June through energy dominance, affordability, grid reliability, statutory authority, deregulation, and expanded access to domestic resources. EPA proposes eliminating greenhouse-gas limits on fossil-fuel power plants and weakening mercury and air-toxics requirements. Interior moves to remove restrictions on oil and gas development in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve and then proposes reopening as much as 82 percent of the reserve to leasing. During extreme June heat, the Energy Department invokes emergency authority to maximize available electricity generation.

Emphasis

• Interior proposes rescinding the 2024 rule governing the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, describing its protections as roadblocks to responsible energy production and arguing that expanded development will strengthen energy security and independence.
• EPA proposes repealing greenhouse-gas standards for fossil-fuel power plants and amendments to Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, presenting the action as a way to provide affordable, dependable energy, reduce regulatory costs, preserve coal generation, and restore American energy dominance. EPA also proposes that greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil-fuel power plants do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution within the meaning of the Clean Air Act.
• Interior proposes reopening up to 82 percent of the 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska to oil and gas leasing and development, describing the change as support for American energy independence, economic security, national security, and Energy Dominance.
• The Department of Energy issues an emergency order during extreme heat in the Carolinas, authorizing specified generating units to operate at maximum output in the name of reliable, affordable, and secure electricity and reducing the risk of blackouts.

Key verbs

• repeal
• rescind
• reopen
• unleash
• restore
• authorize

Foregrounded

Energy prices, electricity reliability, domestic production, national security, statutory authority, regulatory costs, economic development, and access to fossil-fuel resources. Environmental rules are repeatedly evaluated in terms of what they restrict, obstruct, cost, or prevent.

Minimized or contested

The cumulative scale of greenhouse-gas emissions, the public-health and climate benefits of pollution limits, the costs transferred from plant operators to the public, the consequences of continued fossil-fuel expansion, and the value of leaving environmentally sensitive lands protected from development.

The Guardian / New York Times

The public record follows June through a different measure of significance: the physical scale of power-plant emissions, their health and climate consequences, who receives the benefits of deregulation, and who bears the resulting costs. Reporting places the administration’s language of affordable and reliable energy beside measurements of emissions, pollution, public-health damage, and the consequences of keeping fossil-fuel infrastructure operating.

Emphasis

• Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor examine EPA’s proposed finding that power-plant greenhouse-gas emissions are not significant, reporting research showing that if the U.S. power sector were treated as a country, it would rank as the world’s sixth-largest emitter of planet-heating greenhouse gases.
• Lisa Friedman reports on EPA’s proposed elimination of climate and pollution limits on power plants, including carbon standards and tighter mercury restrictions, as Administrator Lee Zeldin presents the rollback as deregulation that will lower costs and strengthen energy production.
• Milman and Noor examine who receives the savings from weakened power-plant rules and who bears the consequences, contrasting regulatory savings for plant operators with much broader public-health and climate costs.
• Tom Perkins examines the administration’s intervention to keep Michigan coal generation operating, reporting objections that the plants are costly and heavily polluting and that continued operation may impose costs on ratepayers even as the federal government invokes grid reliability.

Key verbs

• measure
• compare
• quantify
• document
• warn
• account

Foregrounded

The magnitude of emissions, public-health effects, climate damage, pollution costs, scientific measurement, the distribution of benefits and harms, and the consequences of keeping fossil-fuel infrastructure operating. Significance is measured through what enters the atmosphere and what follows from it.

Minimized or absent

The administration’s broader argument that deregulation can lower electricity costs, increase domestic production, strengthen national security, preserve grid reliability, and return environmental agencies to what it considers the proper limits of federal law receives less emphasis than the environmental, health, economic, and climatic consequences of those policies.

Sources

• U.S. Department of the Interior. Interior Moves to Rescind 2024 Rule on Alaska’s Petroleum Reserve. 2 Jun 2025.
• Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor. Trump’s EPA set to claim power-plant emissions ‘not significant’ – but study says otherwise. 9 Jun 2025. The Guardian.
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. EPA Proposes Repeal of Biden-Harris EPA Regulations for Power Plants, Which, If Finalized, Would Save Americans More than a Billion Dollars a Year. 11 Jun 2025.
• Lisa Friedman. E.P.A. Axes Biden’s Climate and Pollution Limits on Power Plants. 11 Jun 2025. New York Times.
• Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor. Trump’s pollution rollback rewards wealthy plant owners — at the expense of Americans’ health. 12 Jun 2025. The Guardian.
• U.S. Department of the Interior. Department of the Interior Moves to Expand Oil and Gas Development in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. 17 Jun 2025.
• Tom Perkins. White House moves to keep costly, dirty, unneeded Michigan coal plants open. 20 Jun 2025. The Guardian.
• U.S. Department of Energy. Secretary Wright Issues Emergency Order to Secure Southeast Power Grid Amid Heat Wave. 24 Jun 2025.

The Deeper Contrast

Our Town keeps changing the scale of attention.

A knothole in a fence, rain on a leaf, the grain of concrete, a fly on a flower. Then a bridge, an electric car, a windmill, gas meters behind a cage. Elsewhere a freight train carries into an electronic music jam—keyboards and handmade circuit-bent toys, a spinning record, musicians, an old 8mm projector with a spider living on the glass in front of it. The long dissolves briefly allow these different scales and environments to occupy the same screen. Vegetation moves into concrete; vines cross utility systems; machinery gives way to an insect, then open water.

These are not arguments disguised as images. They occurred during the walks, in the chronology in which June gave them to me. But slowing them and allowing one image to remain while another arrives creates transient visual puzzles. For a few seconds, two ordinary things have to be looked at together before either one disappears.

The film does not insist that nature stands on one side and the constructed world on the other. The ant and the utility pipe are already in the same place. So are the vine and the gas meter, flowers and asphalt, water and a bridge.

The scale changes again when the walk reaches the No Kings demonstration. After insects, flowers, surfaces and solitary objects come crowds, flags, faces and political language: NO KINGS. STOP RIPPING FAMILIES APART. LOVE IS THE ANSWER. A passage from the Declaration of Independence. The political world has not arrived from somewhere outside the film. It was waiting farther along the walk.

Then I walk on.

The Smackdown asks us to make a different kind of comparison. Here the things placed beside one another are not accidental encounters. Federal agencies and journalists describe many of the same policies while choosing very different scales at which to measure them.

EPA proposes that greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil-fuel power plants do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution under the Clean Air Act. The official language emphasizes affordable and dependable electricity, regulatory savings, statutory limits and American energy dominance. Interior describes restrictions on oil and gas development as roadblocks. Energy invokes reliability and emergency authority to keep electricity generation available.

The public reckoning widens the frame. Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor report that if the American power sector were a country, it would rank among the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitters. Other reporting asks who receives the savings from deregulation and who absorbs the costs through pollution, health damage and a changing climate.

What looks small depends on where the frame is placed.

A power plant can be treated as one regulated source category. A molecule of carbon dioxide is invisible. Widen the frame—to a power sector, an atmosphere, a population, a century—and significance changes.

The film can leave relationships unresolved. A vine may overlap a gas meter without becoming an argument about fossil fuels. A flower can dissolve into political language without having to explain it. Walking allows that uncertainty to remain.

Government does not always have that luxury. Regulations establish boundaries; agencies decide what harms count; policies determine what may be emitted, extracted, protected or ignored. Eventually the frame chosen by public institutions has consequences beyond language.

That may be June’s deeper contrast.

During the walks, I try to give both the heavens and the crack in the sidewalk enough time to get my attention. In the public record, the struggle is partly over which things will receive that attention at all—and at what scale they will be allowed to matter.

See also: Eric Holthaus. Major US climate website likely to be shut down after almost all staff fired. 11 Jun 2025. The Guardian.

Exclusive: Climate.gov, which supports public education on climate science, will soon no longer publish new content.

…another dimension of what happens when climate knowledge itself loses institutional support.

See also: Dharna Noor. Trump promised riches from ‘liquid gold’ in the US. Now fossil fuel donors are benefiting. 18 Jun 2025. The Guardian.

How Kelcy Warren, one of Trump’s biggest industry backers, and his pipeline firm are likely to flourish in his second term.

See also: Damian Carrington. Only two years left of world’s carbon budget to meet 1.5C target, scientists warn. 18 Jun 2025. The Guardian.

Breaching threshold would ramp up catastrophic weather events, further increasing human suffering

See also: Damian Carrington. Climate misinformation turning crisis into catastrophe, report says. 19 Jun 2025. The Guardian.

False claims obstructing climate action, say researchers, amid calls for climate lies to be criminalised.

Researchers described misinformation not as background noise but as an active obstruction to climate action—a useful companion to June’s struggle over the meaning of words such as significant, burdensome, and reliable.

See also: Tom Perkins. White House moves to keep costly, dirty, unneeded Michigan coal plants open. 20 Jun 2025. The Guardian.

One plant produces more arsenic pollution than any other in US, and the other has been slated for closure since 2021.

See also: Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor. Trump’s tax bill seeks to prevent AI regulations. Experts fear a heavy toll on the planet. 27 Jun 2025. The Guardian.

Unrestricted AI use could add 1bn tons of planet-heating emissions in the US over the next decade, researchers say.

See also: Nina Lakhani. UN expert urges criminalizing fossil fuel disinformation, banning lobbying. 30 Jun 2025. The Guardian.

Rapporteur calls for defossilization of economies and urgent reparations to avert ‘catastrophic’ rights and climate harms.

See: U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report (2010 Draft) | Climate Change – Greenhouse Gas Emissions | U.S. EPA

See: Digging Deeper Investigation | Underfoot, Out of Reach

See: Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering

See: E.P.A. Proposes New Emission Standards for Power Plants

See: Stripping the West

See: Oil150, 1859-2009: Celebrating the Story- Progress from Petroleum

See: Extraction-tax and campaign donations

See: U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi: The Gavel: Draining The Swamp

See: No Boundaries