It was once my family’s land and now I am a trespasser as I listen for the morning birds above the din of tractor trailer motors. The sounds of frenetic traffic will soon drown all out as the trucks start rolling and thousands of warehouse workers rush to their shifts. Standing still in a spot that was once comforting is now dangerous at this time of the morning.

Located twenty miles south of the UPS Worldport along the I-65 corridor, my father’s homeplace is being consumed by an emerging world of mega warehouses, expansive roads and crowded truck stops, the scale of which is designed to meet the needs of the global economy. Watching machinery fill in the stream valleys and dig out the hills for building pads that accommodate one million square foot warehouses and parking for hundreds of trucks and vehicles, I feel compelled to capture the transition. Rapid change is apparent with every visit as the fertile land, wildlife habitat and my history, as well as that of generations before me, are scraped away. A landscape engineered for tractor trailers and the efficient movement of goods is rising in their place with only a passing reference or two to site challenges.

Twenty Miles South began seven years ago as a vehicle for personal mourning with a vague sense that something more than my story was at stake. I began probing consequences of our addiction to the immediate delivery of goods with the click of a button. What are these places we are creating? What happens when we erase memories imbedded in a place? What lessons have we lost? As we level acre upon acre and interrupt community after community, what are we gaining? Ultimately, I am exploring our values and how they manifest themselves in these newly manufactured out sized worlds.