I grew up in California, New Mexico, and Minnesota, three states known for their sweeping landscapes, and I’ve taken my fair share of road trips with family and friends. Since I was very young, I’ve been drawn to the sometimes lonely, sometimes endearing role played by the various bits of vernacular architecture and do-it-yourself industry that dwell in these distinctive and richly American roadside settings. Sometimes this feels nostalgic, but it is not really. Instead, I think of it as a form of documentary, or history painting, and what often excites me the most is seeing the landscape I grew up with being remade in ways that renew my childhood fascination. One piece of this is the blossoming windmill or wind turbine industry, which seems to range easily from small scale to large, from the hippie to the industrial, from the traditional and neotraditional homesteads that dot the outskirts of any agricultural region to the new-new technology/new-new economy dreams now seeming to pop up everywhere from Silicon Valley to Chandigarh to Shanghai.