At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
In mid-December 2020, a month before he left office, President Donald Trump quietly signed the Save Our Seas Act to put the federal government’s shoulder to the work of developing alternatives to disposable plastic products, encouraging recycling, and limiting plastic debris in the world’s oceans. It took years of civic activism about the harm plastic causes to human health and the marine environment to convince Trump to sign the law, which helped prompt leaders of …
SOMERSET, KY — The studio of CeCe Butcher, the gifted Kentucky artist, is a corner of her home, fit for knitting or painting, close to the shoreline of Lake Cumberland. It’s an early winter day. Calm, quiet, serene. Light from big windows finds a flourish of long-handled brushes, like a bouquet set in a cup. Paints of every color grace the tabletops. A formidable leafy dieffenbachia does its work keeping the air clear from its …
President Trump blew a lot of smoke at his inauguration. He promised more oil production, less regulation, fewer clean cars, less clean energy. He withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord, and opened Alaska to more development. Like dry branches dropped in a dark forest, Trump’s inaugural pledges and the executive orders that came shortly thereafter were dry kindling stoking the bonfire of fossil fuels. The president’s allegiance to producing more carbon pollution set …
From the perspective of Americans who live in Michigan and Wisconsin, the Line 5 oil pipeline across the Straits of Mackinac makes no sense. It’s old, 72 years old. Line 5 is older than the U.S. interstate highway system, and that’s been in major repair for a quarter century. It’s in the wrong place. The pipeline’s 645 mile-long corridor from Superior, Wisconsin, to a refinery in Sarnia, Ontario, includes 4.5 miles of bottomlands submerged 130 …
HONOR, MI – The choreography inside a small independent rural grocery store is on display daily at Honor Family Market. Tim Schneider, one of four siblings that own and manage the store, stacks packaged goods in one of the seven aisles. Younger brother Patrick Schneider prepares prime cuts of beef and homemade sausage. A sister, Marilyn Edginton, oversees the bakery. Her younger sister, Helen Schneider, manages the produce department, and oversees accounts, ordering, and payroll …
SUNNYSIDE, Washington – Waters from the snowpack of the Cascade Mountains support orchards, vineyards and dairies here in the Yakima Valley of eastern Washington State, boosting a flourishing farm economy and helping to stock store grocery shelves nationwide. But as the waters flow, so do a host of dangerous farm pollutants, contaminating drinking water wells in the valley and through the adjacent Lower Umatilla Basin across the state line in Oregon. Regulators and citizen groups …
WEST BEND, Iowa – People who think seriously about how to limit the toll industrialized American agriculture takes on communities, land, and water ought to visit the Fehr family’s organic Clear Creek Acres in northern Iowa. With just shy of 800 residents, West Bend is barely a blip on a prairie landscape, but it has become home base for an uncommonly large expanse of organically grown crops- operations that have found success in challenging the …
On July 31, 2024 the Michigan Supreme Court issued one of the most significant decisions in decades to strengthen safeguards for the state’s natural environment and especially its clean water. With a 5-2 majority, the court ruled that the state Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) had full authority to “take all necessary steps” to protect Michigan waters from agricultural pollution. The import of the decision cannot be overstated. It reverses decades of …
EDON, OH — For 60 years, this one stoplight Ohio town has been known as a place where time appears to stand still. With more than 400 Amish residents settled in and around the rural community that straddles the Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan state lines, it is common to see large families traveling by horse-drawn black buggies to and from farms where they milk dairy cows and grow corn. Adhering to a strict religious doctrine …
BENZONIA, MI — Eight people were filling in their ballots today when I arrived at Benzonia Township Hall on Michigan’s fourth day of early voting. Before the era of Trump voting was a sacrosanct celebration of American citizenship. But this year voting in this tiny town of 500 residents close to Lake Michigan is fraught with all manner of peril. The simple act of voting has been violated by menace and lies. In its fundamental …
