Absolutely! Truly countless. The two that are striking me right now are the catalytic moments that shifted my consciousness and made me want to become an environmental activist and then a sociologist.
I remember clearly when I was 9, driving over the "Grapevine" pass on I-5, when you crest the hills and look over the Los Angeles basin. It was shockingly filled with orange smog. I asked my father what it was and he gave me my first deeply disturbing environmental lecture, explaining why and how the air was so polluted. While another friend chose to define the smog as a way to create beautiful sunsets, I knew that it wasn't right and that something had to be done.
My second experience was also in a car, but was with my mother, as we drove through the Coast Range from Portland to the Oregon Coast. I was about 19 at the time. We turned a corner and were facing a huge clearcut on a steep slope. I was shocked and outraged and, honestly, started to cry for the loss of this beautiful forest and the way that the cutting method led to such destruction. Perhaps I was being melodramatic, but my heart felt called to write a poem about how this felt physically violating and that the "rape" of the forest called me to act and protest these practices.
In the end, I became an environmental sociologist and actually did my PhD dissertation on the timber conflict in the Northwest.