“I don’t think of America as my Facebook feed, I think of America as that guy in Oklahoma who held out that bag of McDonald’s for me,” said author Ken Ilgunas.
On Monday, The Center for Global Education welcomed Ilgunas to Wentz Science Center for the third and final Sustaining the Globe event of the term. Ilgunas told his story of trekking across America along the intended path of the Keystone Pipeline.
“A trip like this, it makes your cynicism just kind of vanish into thin air,” Ilgunas said.
Ilgunas is on several magazines and news programs. He also appeared in 2013 on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
He divided his story into three parts. The first of which was titled “Into Debt and Into the Wild.” He spoke of coming out of college drowning in debt and going to live in Coldfoot, Alaska, a town of 35 people.
While he was there, he would pick up trash for nine dollars an hour. He managed to live with practically no expenses. Every dollar he made picking up trash could go toward paying off his debt.
Part two was called “The Van Experiment.” Ilgunas described his days living in a van in South Carolina in order to go to graduate school debt-free. He showed several pictures of the inside of his van, allowing the audience to get a glimpse into his lifestyle.
Despite his living conditions, he felt freedom now that he was out of debt and off of the “conveyor belt” of the conventional modern life. He decided he was done focusing on self-oriented pursuits, which became the basis for his first book, Walden on Wheels: “On the Open Road From Debt to Freedom” (2013).
The third and final part, “Trespassing Across America,” detailed his journey along the Keystone Pipeline, 1,700 miles from Albert, Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. Ilgunas says he’s intrigued by a lack of a defined and an easy to follow path.
He boxed food, mostly consisting of energy bars and junk food, and had his friend mail them to places along his route. Ilgunas said several anecdotes of his four-and-a-half month hike. This included instances of kindness from total strangers as well as his close encounters with cows.
He explained some of the harmful effects of the unfinished Keystone Pipeline and how the people he encountered felt about it. His journey attracted a great deal of national attention from the media. He used this to spread negative attention toward TransCanada, the pipeline’s owner.
His closing message expressed his desire for all of us to rethink our relationship to fossil fuels and energy usage.
“What we’ve done is amazing. When you look at a place like this (tar sands), you think ‘if we can make this, if we can do this, what else can we do?’” said Ilgunas.
Ilgunas is the author of three books and currently resides in Scotland. There will be three or four Sustaining the Globe events next term, but the topics and dates are yet to be announced.
