Keith Schneider | ModeShift

Great Lakes Lawmakers Push Back Against Federal Environmental Rollbacks

by Keith SchneiderMarch 25, 2026March 25, 20260

With Donald Trump, there isn’t the thinnest layer of respect for America’s 60-year legacy of environmental protection. For crying out loud, Richard Nixon, of all the commanders in chief, established the Environmental Protection Agency. In the first hours of his second term Trump signed 40 executive orders. Six of those January 2025 actions were specifically intended to wreak industrial havoc on water, air, wild habitat, and oceans, and were largely directed at aiding fossil fuel producers …

Trump Pollution Exemption Means More Mercury Contamination

by Keith SchneiderMarch 25, 2026March 25, 20260

The practice of reporting on the environment starts with a working knowledge of a range of scientific disciplines. One of them is chemistry. To wit: since the 1960s, when Americans and visionary lawmakers voted to hold polluters accountable for their wastes, a specific chemical pollutant has emerged in each decade as the leading environmental and public health menace prompting legal and political action. The pollutants of primary interest in the 2020s, for instance, are PFAS, …

Great Lakes Nuclear Revival Fortified by Ample Water, $Billions In Public Financing

by Keith SchneiderMarch 4, 2026March 4, 20260

COVERT TOWNSHIP, MICH. – As a study in troubled operation, the Palisades Nuclear Plant once was ranked by the federal government as one of the four worst-performing nuclear plants in the country. The 51-year old plant closed in 2022, joining the Big Rock Point nuclear plant near Charlevoix and 11 others decommissioned outside Michigan in what appeared to represent the sunset of the era of splitting atoms to produce electricity. Not so fast. Sometime in …

Single Staircase Apartments Make Sense For Cities

by Keith SchneiderMarch 4, 2026March 14, 20260

SEATTLE – One of this Pacific Coast city’s newest apartment buildings is the eight-story Fremont View. Set in Seattle’s bohemian Fremont neighborhood, the $12.75 million project encompasses 29 airy and well-lit apartments that rise from a tight 9,600-square foot city lot. What makes such a tall and compact multi-family residence possible is a crucial design feature allowed by Seattle’s building code: the apartment’s single staircase. Until 2024 allowing one staircase in multi-family buildings more …

Copper Riches Lead Congress to Try Shortcut for Boundary Waters Mining

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 25, 2026February 25, 20260

The U.S. Senate this week is poised to vote on a narrowly-cast resolution intended to clear a new pathway to eventually open a long-disputed copper mine close to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeast Minnesota. There’s a lot more, though, riding on the Senate vote, and not just for a region of the American north country adored for its towering pines, and deep, clear waters. If it’s approved and signed by President Trump, …

Jolted by Climate Change, Youth Perch with Strength and Vision

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 4, 2026February 4, 20260

Late last month, Jonathan Fisher, one of the good people devoted to changing the world, got in touch to pitch me on a “participatory photography” project. Fisher was born and raised in Bronx, New York, and after spending much of his life helping manage the New York City subway system, he switched tracks. In 2010 Fisher joined another retired transit colleague, George Carrano, to help start Seeing For Ourselves, a nonprofit that “equips and trains marginalized …

Chris Jones Campaigns For Iowa Agriculture Secretary

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 28, 2026January 28, 20260

Three years ago Chris Jones was a decorated research engineer at the University of Iowa, where he directed Iowa’s network of stream pollution monitors and published details about state water quality in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Secure in his academic perch in 110-year-0ld Trowbridge Hall, Jones also contributed to his university-sponsored blog, where he prepared aggressive, masterfully written, and widely read reports that identified agriculture as the primary source of the state’s calamitous water pollution. In …

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 …