Keith Schneider | ModeShift

Flip: Great Interactive Maps by LIAA

by Keith SchneiderApril 28, 2007April 29, 20072

Flip, you may recall,Â is this blog’s effort to call out particularly good applications ofÂ interactive multi-media to the exquistely difficult work of reshaping America’s resource-wasting and demoralizing patterns of development.Â To an extent that is at once stupefying and aggravating most American communities have zoned themselves into corners of the 20th century — stressing separateness, division, car dependence, racial purity, andÂ income stratification — that make no sense fot the mashup that is the 21st century. Put another …

As Gas Heads to $4, Teachable Moment For Presidential Candidates

by Keith SchneiderApril 27, 2007April 27, 20073

Â We’re one-tenth of a penny short ofÂ $3-a-gallon gas today here in Michigan.Â Energy analysts predict that the price will approach or exceed $4 by mid-summer.Â Welcome to the new world of gas price politics and the emerging new culture of energy efficiency in America.Â Â It’s a whole lot easier to make the case for land and energy-conserving development patterns,Â energy efficiency, and a new economic development strategyÂ in the United States whenÂ consumers’ ire is stoked by the price at …

Ellie Mae Returns

by Keith SchneiderApril 26, 2007April 26, 20070

Â Benzonia, our little town of 500Â in northwest Michigan’s Benzie County, is abuzz with the story of Ellie Mae, the little black, nearly 18-year-old dogÂ that turned up alive and well after wandering in the woods here for two weeks. Ellie Mae, of course, is the canine matriarch of my family.Â I reported in an April 12 post that she’dÂ walked off the back porch in half a foot of snow and never returned.Â She’s back, is in good …

Email the Sun

by Keith SchneiderApril 25, 2007April 25, 20075

Â New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of a select number of Republican leaders in the United States who makes any sense, turned up at the American Museum of Natural History on Sunday to deliver an Earth Day plan for his city that should be the basic text for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the United States. A full account of the 127 steps the mayor proposed is here. The big pieces …

Build High Speed Rail in the Midwest

by Keith SchneiderApril 23, 2007April 25, 200722

Â Since 1996, nine states in the American Midwest have been gradually inching forward on a proposal to establish a 3,000-mileÂ high speed train network linking 100 of theÂ region’s big and small cities.Â Chicago would serve as the hub of the The Midwest Regional Rail System. Spokes would include Detroit, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Columbus, Des Moines, and many other large cities served by trains capable of traveling 110 mph, which would make the travel time and …

Earth Day is Boomer Day

by Keith SchneiderApril 21, 2007April 21, 20078

Â Perhaps not since the very first one 37 years ago has Earth Day attracted the credibility or theÂ genuinely intense national and global focus that it has this year. Thousands of grassroots celebrations, including the annual march in downtown Traverse CityÂ today, are occurringÂ this weekend.Â In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a moderate Republican, introducedÂ a greenÂ investment plan and policy strategy forÂ transforming the nation’s largest metropolis into an even more transit-friendly,Â energy-efficient, environmentally-sensitive place to live and do …

The Right To Speak and the Duty to Be Right

by Keith SchneiderApril 18, 2007April 18, 20076

For longer than I care to recount Rush Limbaugh has been in my life. My work takes me on the road, as it’s done for three decades now, and sometime in the early 1990s IÂ scanned the AM dial and happened on his show. He was an amusing host then; funny, well-informed, voluble, not nearly the sanctimonious blowhard,Â fabricating tool of the radical establishment right that he’s become.Â RushÂ attractedÂ so many listeners to his noon to 3. p.m. show …

Kunstler on Tom and His Green World

by Keith SchneiderApril 18, 2007April 18, 20070

Jim Kunstler, the author of The Geography of Nowhere andÂ wielder of one of the sharper editorial knives in the country, takes slices out of Tom Friedman’s Sunday New York Times Magazine article on the global green movement in anÂ essay that published on his site at kunstler.com andÂ picked up by Alternet.org.Â The money passage: “Friedman goes on to tout Wal-Mart’s mendacious campaign to “green” up its operations by, among other things, improving the mileage of its …

Tom and His Green World

by Keith SchneiderApril 16, 2007April 29, 20073

Tom Friedman, the New York Times’ great foreign affairs columnist and a former colleague of mine wrote this in a must read Sunday Magazine article yesterday: “After World War II, President Eisenhower responded to the threat of Communism and the â€œred menaceâ€ with massive spending on an interstate highway system to tie America together, in large part so that we could better move weapons in the event of a war with the Soviets. That highway …

Gas Prices, Peak Oil, and the New American Backwater

by Keith SchneiderApril 12, 2007April 18, 20075

It’s the nuttyÂ season here in the first weeks of spring.Â The purebred chicken scratchÂ hill billy hound dog puppy that I picked up off the highway in southern Virginia almost 18 years agoÂ decided she’d had enough and wandered off two days ago and vanished.Â It’s been snowing hereÂ in Michigan’s great white north for more than a week.Â Over the weekend I shoveled nine inches of snow off the deck and driveway and it’sÂ colder than it was in January when …