Traveling Light: Sustainable 1000’s Road Trip Across America

By Anna Merlan


For a guy who drives a Prius, Shane Snipes has been spending a lot of time at truck stops lately. That is, when he’s not visiting an elementary school, a cafe, a university, some small town’s city council chambers, or the odd church. It’s all part of Sustainable 1,000, an epic six-month long road trip across the United States in which Snipes will interview 1,000 people in 48 states in 200 days, talking to all of them about what it means to be green in America. He was in Phoenix when I caught up with him by phone last week, sounding surprisingly buoyant for an environmentalist temporarily marooned in the land of strip malls and tract houses. “It’s great, actually,” he offers politely. “The weather’s really nice.”

He’s more enthusiastic when it comes to talking about his time in Santa Cruz. Snipes, who has worked for nearly a decade as a sustainability trainer and educator, spent almost a week here at the end of April talking to locals about their ideas on sustainability and green living. The day before we spoke, he had just conducted his follow-up online radio show for Santa Cruz (something he does for every city he visits), with UC Santa Cruz Sustainability Manager Aurora Winslade as his guest. “I found him to be a fun and engaging host,” Winslade says. “He had a nice balance of hearing my perspective, listening to people who were calling in and emailing, and sharing his own stories of working in the classroom.” For her part, Winslade talked about working on sustainable practices in education, whether that means reducing water use on campus (UCSC has reduced theirs by nearly 40 percent per capita since the 1980s) or student-led educational efforts, like the university’s newly-minted Education for Sustainable Living Program.

Santa Cruz interview

“You guys have so much natural beauty in Santa Cruz,” the Seattle-based Snipes says. “And you treasure it on a very deep level. It’s fascinating to see how it permeates everyone’s life.” While he was in town, he talked to several local businesses, including Green Motors, Terra Nova, a green landscaping company, a variety of downtown vendors, and, perhaps more unexpectedly, the First Congregational Church, a United Church of Christ congregation and certified green business. For Senior Minister Dave Grishaw-Jones, the links between environmentalism and Christianity are clear. His church’s green involvement, he explains, “spiritually flows out of a belief that God is part of the cycle of life: the earth, the sky, and the water. We’re paying very close attention to environmental issues these days and how we in our homes, our choices, and in our life as an institution can be faithful to the earth and more compassionate towards the planet that gives us life.”

“In Santa Cruz you’re lucky because you have that as kind of a mentality,” Snipes says. “The green business certification program is so popular there. In southern California, it’s been much harder to launch it. But your city has a long history of recognizing that choosing an environmental way of thinking makes for a better lifestyle – that’s built into how that city is.”

That’s not necessarily been true everywhere that Snipes has visited, though in his nearly two months on the road so far, he’s always found at least one green initiative in every place. “Palm Springs and Palm Desert [in southern California], for example,” he says. “There are these little mini pockets of innovative things in the midst of golf courses, houses, and landscaping.”

Palm Desert Interview

Snipes has also been confronting hard questions about his own role in creating a more sustainable world. How “green” is it, for example, to drive across the lower 48, even in a Prius? Snipes wrestled with the question before even starting out, and eventually ended up purchasing the new car expressly for the trip. “I chose to do that, rather than keeping my old car, because I was going to be doing so much driving, so as to create the least amount of footprint as far as air pollution goes,” he says. “But all that metal, all that plastic, everything had to be created in that car.” While on the road, he tries to eat organic food 90 percent of the time and choose recycled products. Ultimately, he says, “Yeah, I’m using gas. But what am I using it for? To get people excited about what it means to be sustainable. It’s all for the good of green.”

As he’s visited places with a less environmental bent than Santa Cruz, Snipes has learned the key is to be funny, low-key and non-confrontational. “People’s perception of sustainability is that someone is trying to take something away from them,” he says. “I try not to make it about changing them so much as it’s about asking questions. What we’re trying to do is teach people what they have.”