You come to realise the value of a few committed hobbies shortly after setting out on a migratory profession.  We manicure our habits to increase focus and fill months away from familiar surroundings productively.  Only weeks after leaving London for Cambridge to work on my first small composite repair job with Senvion, I found myself dangling from an 11mm rope 150 meters above the Solway firth - this time repairing leading edge erosion on a Vestas V90 Wind Turbine Generator blade.  From there to Glottesvälen and then all over Scandinavia, Europe and eventually home, to North America.

I took an interest in photography while working three-quarters of an hour off the coast of Cumbria for a summer.   I shared a farmhouse at the top of an alluvial plain near Ulverston with my friends Gavin and Alex and rolled my eyes at their highbrowed conversations about F-stops and ISOs, but I also paid attention.

The photos here are taken primarily in Western Canada while working mostly on the ground amongst fields of lentils, durum wheat and corn around Medicine Hat, Swift Current and Cypress Hills.  I’d been accustomed to rope access work in the mountains of Dorotea, offshore in the Solway Firth, in the hills of the Alleghenies or atop the Mesas of New Mexico - so, the slow pace and desolation of the Canadian Prairies left me with time to ponder and a wandering eye.

I’d worked around most of these photos for several months before I stumbled across the frames but once I found them I shot them fairly consistently over a period of about 3 years - Forty Mile County, Bluehill, Hanna, Rattlesnake, Garden Plains, The Hand Hills, Hilda, Stirling, Paintearth County No. 18.  A combined 1200 megawatts of wind energy capacity was produced during that time.  

The wildfires that I saw from the tops of nacelles in Bird’s Landing California in 2018 were sobering.  By the time that 1200 MW had been commissioned in Canada, the fires had spread to 400 miles south of the Arctic Circle and we worked through their smoke all summer in Alberta in 2023.  That 1200 MW felt like too little too late to the few asking the question and as I write this at the end of July in 2023, settling in for a year of work in Castor, Alberta, the world is hotter than has ever been recorded.  The public is just beginning to be told the truth and the discomfort of a lie being uncovered permeates our thoughts.  

Richard Dawkins’ Extended Phenotype echoes as I try to sum up the feelings that encase these photos for me.  The wind turbine generator is our beaver dam, our termite mound.  The cell harnessed mitochondria, we harness the mesocyclone, or perhaps will one day, and Culture is born out of the tales we tell of the leaps between one breakthrough of energy cultivation and the next.