Keith Schneider | ModeShift

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 …

“America First” Puts Big Hurt on International Water Programs

by Keith SchneiderSeptember 25, 2025September 25, 20250

Last February, when Elon Musk called the U.S. Agency for International Development “a criminal organization” that had outlived its usefulness, the full calamitous measure of closing the world’s most important human aid organization was not yet apparent overseas or in America. Seven months later it is brutally apparent. Across the planet a shameful retreat is occurring in the global work to secure clean water and safe sanitation for millions of people in Africa and Asia. …

Jack Gyr Honored at Joyous Retirement Party

by Keith SchneiderSeptember 11, 2025September 12, 20252

How many ways can a good man’s life be measured? By the joy he holds for his family, his friends, his work, his community, and himself. By the people he encounters and the way they greet him — with a smile, with an embrace, with unabridged delight. By the visible evidence of his success. The people he employed. The people he helped. The community that, for decades, admired his way of conducting his life. All …

Political Left, Right, and Everyone Between, United Over Water in Indiana

by Keith SchneiderSeptember 3, 2025September 3, 20250

Residents of Boone County, Indiana, had a lot to be anxious about in 2023 when state authorities revealed the scope of a nearly 10,000-acre innovation and high-tech manufacturing park they were developing outside Lebanon, a half-hour drive northwest of Indianapolis. One concern was the public taxpayer cost of the LEAP project – short for Limitless Exploration/Advanced Pace – now nearing $1 billion. Another was the way authorities made big decisions for the “mega site with …

A Muffled American Environmentalism

by Keith SchneiderAugust 22, 2025August 22, 20250

Let’s all stand up and cheer our fellow Americans in the West for raising their voices and shutting down a Republican plan last month to sell millions of acres of the public domain. Even considering Earth Day demonstrations in April, it’s the first time any of the Trump administration’s irrational and dangerous initiatives to impede, weaken, and obliterate the nation’s protections for land, water, and air generated more than a peep of resistance. Where has …