By Jia Tolentino, Illustration: Shuhua Xiong, The New Yorker, July 10, 2023
Tim Wehage grew up in South Florida. At home, the TV was often tuned to Fox News, where he heard a lot of rants about liberal hypocrisy, but he didn’t consider himself political. After high school, he began working for his family’s construction business. He had no intention of going to college until he realized that he didn’t want to spend his adulthood doing manual labor in the tropical heat. In college, as a mechanical-engineering major, he learned about renewable energy and about the science behind global warming. In 2017, a couple years after graduating, he moved across the country, to Seattle, to take a job with a company that improves the energy efficiency of chilled-water facilities—the systems that produce cold air for data centers, hospitals, and universities. He was carless, and walked everywhere. He became a vegan. He loved being immersed in the beauty of the Pacific Northwest.
He hadn’t travelled much as a kid, and he decided to have a peripatetic 2019, under the auspices of a company called Remote Year, which set up monthlong stays for remote workers in twelve different cities. In Kuala Lumpur, the air was opaque. In Hanoi, he developed sinus issues, and thought about how the city’s nearly eight and a half million inhabitants breathed this air every day of their lives. He heard from a local that orangutans were going extinct in Indonesia; he felt dazed by grief. He took a tour of the Sumatran jungle, hoping to see an orangutan while he still could, and then saw miles and miles of palm-oil plantations, where the orangutan’s native habitat had been clear-cut for the consumer crop. The guide asked who in the group was American, and if any of them checked food labels to see if the product contained palm oil. “Well, when you don’t do that, this is what happens,” the guide said.
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