ModeShift

Combatting Agricultural Pollution: Michigan’s New Manure Management Rules

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 7, 2026January 7, 20260

LANSING. Mich. – Because lawmakers and regulators embrace the principle that agriculture’s primary objective is to feed people, farming is a sacrosanct industrial sector in the United States. Understand that every industry in the U.S. except for agriculture is required to limit water pollution. But ever since 1972, when Congress exempted farming from most of the water-cleansing requirements of the Clean Water Act, farms have been perfectly free to discharge into the environment some of the most …

Trump Is Desperate to End Era of Land, Water, Wildlife Protections

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 2, 2026January 2, 20260

No one I know, and few people outside my realm, consider their lives near the forests and clean waters of the upper Great Lakes as anything other than a blessing. Even though for two centuries residents here engaged in an ambitious campaign to achieve “progress” – wielding the axe on our trees and building facilities that discharge wastes into our waters – our landscape nevertheless is now a real-life demonstration of the hard-fought and virtuous …

Spain’s Hog Haven Pollutes Catalonia’s Water

by Keith SchneiderDecember 15, 2025December 15, 20250

BARCELONA – Go anywhere in the world, and an agricultural mess awaits. Even here in Catalonia, an autonomous self-governing region in northern Spain bordered by the Pyrenees mountain range and glorious Mediterranean beaches. Catalonia, it turns out, spent two generations developing industrial farm practices that turned it into a hog haven. With 8 million hogs, it is the largest producer in Spain, which itself is Europe’s largest pork producer. Readers of Circle of Blue know …

Momentous Court Decisions Near For Line 5

by Keith SchneiderDecember 15, 2025December 15, 20250

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. – For 72 years, in order to serve as a shortcut for crude oil from production fields in western Canada to refineries in eastern Ontario, Enbridge Inc.’s Line 5 pipeline has transported 540,000 barrels of oil and natural gas liquids daily beneath the forests and wetlands of northern Wisconsin and Michigan. Opened in 1953, the 645-mile steel pipeline starts in Superior, Wisconsin, crosses underneath streams and rivers, and passes through the reservation …

Johnny B. Is Somerset’s Keeper of Community Values

by Keith SchneiderDecember 11, 2025December 12, 20250

SOMERSET, KY — When Johnny Perkins was growing up as a black kid in mostly-white Somerset, Kentucky there was an order to things, a malignant moral code of separation and discrimination, a way of life most Americans have since rejected. He spent his first eight school grades in Somerset’s segregated Dunbar School. He worshipped in an all-black AME church. He accompanied friends to the Virginia Cinema on Mt. Vernon Street and sat in the balcony, …

Clean Water Is a Virtue in Helping Cities Be ‘Livable and Lovable’

by Keith SchneiderNovember 20, 2025November 20, 20250

BARCELONA – It’s useful to know that the dreadful leadership and debilitating governance that is trying to wreck the American experience is an outlier among the nations of the world. Just as relevant: assuring water supply and quality, not generally viewed as the most alluring feature of urban security, was described here as an essential element of any city’s success in an increasingly warmer and water-stressed planet. Those were two of the useful messages that …

Traces of Old Farm Chemicals Contaminate Water Across the U.S.

by Keith SchneiderNovember 20, 2025November 20, 20250

Even though it delivers airtight data and analysis essential for understanding and managing the risks industrial societies pose to water, land, and health, the U.S. Geological Survey is a federal science agency that rarely attracts public notice. So when my colleague, Brett Walton, told me about a new USGS study that found diminishing concentrations in groundwater for all but one of a group of twenty-two old-school pesticides widely known to cause disease in humans, I got interested. …

Big Crowds At “No Kings” Protests Here and Everywhere

by Keith SchneiderOctober 19, 2025October 19, 20250

What was the message in the No Kings protest yesterday in Benzonia, Michigan? A thousand people from a rural one-stoplight county had fun delivering it: Americans possess a stubborn resilience. It won’t be stomped out by a savagely authoritarian president, his aides, and the irresponsible cult of MAGA rubberstampers in Congress. The October 18 opposition event was by far the largest of the three protests held in Benzie County this year. Like the others, it …

Jane Goodall’s Legacy Included Protecting Clean Water

by Keith SchneiderOctober 17, 2025October 17, 20250

For just one mournful yet brilliant day — the first day of October 2025, the day Jane Goodall died — the deepening menace of our era was eased by the shining example of her life. People around the world took time to simultaneously grieve her passing and exult in her enduring achievements as scientist, conservationist, and protector of wildlife. For once, there was no dissent. Jane Goodall fully merited the public’s laurels. She spent many …

Slashing Federal Budget Is Big Problem for State Environment Agencies

by Keith SchneiderSeptember 25, 2025September 25, 20250

Every dollar that the federal government directs to state environment departments enables the Great Lakes and every other region to steward natural resources, yielding many times the value of the federal contribution. State environment departments make the case daily that they merit more financial support, not less. That is why Circle of Blue’s opinion desk has been worried for months about the dangerous consequences of President Trump’s proposal to rip $5 billion – 55 percent …