Welcome to Carbonstories!
Now in our eleventh year, we are also on Substack.
Over the years we've built a substantial archive of posts drawn from bicycle tours across North America. For the first several years, Michael rode and wrote solo. In 2019, Jenny began joining him on tour, adding her drawings to the mix - a collaboration that has both challenged and deepened what we notice along the way.
We travel slowly, by design. At 10 to 15 miles an hour, over days and weeks, one can hear things a car window seals out. The farmer worried about his aquifer. The refinery worker who thinks climate change is overblown. The retired schoolteacher who's watched her town flood three times in a decade. These are the conversations that drive this work.
Our posts follow climate change and the communities living inside it; the disruption, the denial, the resilience, and the grief. We've biked the Deep South, where inequality and environmental peril travel the same roads. We've pedaled through industrial stretches of Lake Superior, traced the Saint Lawrence through Quebec, crossed the Canadian Shield through Ontario, and followed Newfoundland's wind-scraped coastline to the edge of the continent. We've ridden through the Dakotas thinking about soil and bees, through the Carolinas thinking about land use, and along the Mississippi River thinking about water, pipelines, and what renewal actually costs. We've biked from Los Angeles to Tucson as we explored what others are calling deep adaptation - learning to live with what cannot be undone.
The work keeps growing. We've written about food systems in Prince Edward Island, about wildfires and free markets in Ontario, about hope and despair in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. On Substack, we've pushed into harder territory - questions of American identity, fear and reality, the nature of inequality. The bicycle remains our primary instrument, but the questions it leads us to have no natural boundary.
Why keep doing this, at a moment when the political winds have turned so cold on climate? Because the stories haven't stopped. Because the people we meet along the road are living inside consequences that no policy reversal can no longer fully undo. And because we believe - stubbornly, maybe - that the fastest way of traveling to the human heart is through stories.
Jenny Hershey and Michael Chase (aka Michael Johnson Chase) are collaborators on Carbonstories. Michael does the writing, Jenny does the drawings, and we both contribute photographs. Unless otherwise noted, all material on this site is copyright protected by either Jenny or Michael. This photo was taken in Newfoundland.
Yet, let's be clear-eyed about our situation. Human enterprise has baked in so much damage already to our atmosphere and oceans that we still won't avoid some loss and disruption. The real question is just how much? And how do we come to terms with what we have done, and what we are likely to do, in spite of our best efforts?
We won't fully come to terms with what we have wrought through policy or technology. Dealing with the extraordinary environmental losses we are experiencing but have not yet come to terms with, and facing the possibility that our species may be as mortal as we are as individuals, is also emotional, cultural, and spiritual work. The purpose of Carbonstories is to explore the larger questions about our relationship to our environment, ourselves, and the society we wish to create.
Our bikes at Aransas Pass, Texas.
Our Biographies
Michael Chase spent many years as a theatre professor and movement teacher at the National Theatre Conservatory at the Denver Center Theatre, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and SUNY Purchase. In 2007, he left teaching and enrolled in a solar panel installation course at Bronx Community College. That pivot led to work as a solar installer at Quad State Solar on Long Island, then to Solar One, where he developed and ran the Green Workforce Training Program. He subsequently served as Director of Green City Academy at Green City Force, and did educational outreach for the Urban Green Council. Those years - working at the intersection of workforce development, urban sustainability, and environmental justice - shaped how he thinks about the climate crisis: not as an abstraction, but as something already reorganizing the lives of people who had the least hand in causing it.
In 2016, Michael devoted himself to cycling throughout the United States and beyond, and began this blog. Since then he has logged thousands of miles and dozens of tours, reporting from places most climate journalism never reaches - the rural South, the industrial Midwest, the agricultural Plains, the remote Canadian Maritimes. His essays explore water rights and pipelines, racial and economic inequality, food systems and soil health, and the psychological and cultural dimensions of living through ecological loss. More recently, his writing has moved into questions of American identity itself - who we think we are, who we've been, and whether the country can find its footing in a moment of compounding crisis. He is based in New York City.
Jennifer Hershey was Vice President of Building Operations at Jujamcyn Theatres for over 30 years, overseeing the care of five landmark Broadway houses — home to productions including The Producers, Jersey Boys, Angels in America, The Book of Mormon, and Moulin Rouge. She managed hundreds of employees and led the historic renovation of all five Jujamcyn theaters. Along the way she developed deep expertise in building systems: HVAC, plumbing, electrical, structural, fire safety, and the specialized demands of live theatrical performance.
That technical fluency found a second life in sustainability. A founding member of the Broadway Green Alliance, Jenny chaired its Venues Committee for over a decade, working with every Broadway theater chain to build best practices from the ground up. She led Jujamcyn to become the first Broadway chain involved in a carbon offset program, and drove the campaign to convert all 40 Broadway theaters to energy-efficient signage, making the Great White Way the Great Green Way. She completed Al Gore's Climate Reality Leadership Corps training in 2018.
Since joining Carbonstories, Jenny has brought a visual intelligence to the work that words alone can't carry. Her drawings don't merely illustrate - they observe. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, her work can be found on Instagram at @deeofo.
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Unless otherwise noted, all material on this site has been created by either Michael Johnson Chase and/or Jennifer Hershey, and is copyright protected.
Thanks for visiting.