Natural Resources | ModeShift

Torrent of Water and Big Questions Pour From Matchless Peaks of India’s Himalayan Region

by Keith SchneiderDecember 11, 2013January 4, 20144

OKUND, UTTARAKHAND, INDIA -Â We made the crossing at night from Chamoli, reaching this Himalayan foothill town after dark. The innkeeper, anxious for guests in a travel economy that came to a standstill in mid-June, cooked dal and nan bread for dinner and then showed us to a room that was unlit and unheated. It didn’t matter. Thick blankets kept us warm. And at dawn we awoke to strong black coffee and the sun lighting the …

BEIGIN 2013: A Conference That Thrilled Students, Stirred Lifelong Friendship

by Keith SchneiderNovember 26, 2013December 30, 20132

NEW YORK — Five years ago Linda Ragsdale, an artist and mother from Nashville, survived a terrrorist attack in Mumbai, India that killed 166 people. In a keynote speech at the BEIGIN H2O conference in Beijing, Linda described the orderly persistence of the attack on the hotel where she stayed. Not a soul stirred in the auditorium at the International School of Beijing as she recounted the sound, the smell, the sight of the gun …

Just As It’s Always Been, Earth Day Marks Big Problems, Big Choices

by Keith SchneiderApril 25, 2013June 18, 20140

CHATHAM, Mass. — The tides here lay down a walkway of shells — horseshoe crabs, scallops, palm-size crabs — where the water meets dry sand. On Earth Day 2013 a nearly full moon is perched, like a round plate on a pedestal, amid an expanse of cloudless blue sky. Gulls soar and dive in a stout breeze, and in the nearby mudflats men and women with long-handled metal rakes in hand and collars turned up …

Great Lakes Algae Blooms: Lake Erie Respite, Lake Superior Rises

by Keith SchneiderAugust 4, 2012September 8, 20250

Not far from where I live in Benzie County, Michigan lies a network of shaded forest trails that end on the broad sand beaches of Lake Michigan’s Platte River Bay. In the distance, the steep flanks of the Sleeping Bear Dune dive to the Great Lake. Across the Manitou Passage the green expanses of North and South Manitou Islands are like the broad backs of giant turtles floating in the water. On clear and sunny …

In North Dakota’s Bakken Oil Field, The Smell of Diesel, the Sound of Trucks

by Keith SchneiderDecember 19, 2011March 8, 20125

WILLISTON, ND — Past midnight at the station platform in Spokane, 850 miles east of this riotous Great Plains city riding the lashing tail of an oil drilling dragon, the roustabouts and heavy equipment operators kiss wives and girlfriends, then reluctantly board Amtrak’s Empire Builder. Twenty-one day shifts, 14 hours a day, in wind-whipped cold and in a perilous work zone that can maim or kill has a way of quelling enthusiasm — even when …

John Adams Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom

by Keith SchneiderNovember 18, 2010November 20, 20100

Congratulations are in order for John H. Adams, the co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who yesterday was named one of the 15 recipients this year of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nationâ€™s highest civilian award. Adams is the first founder of an American environmental advocacy organization to receive the award since Russell E. Train was similarly honored in 1991. Train, of course, was a founding board member of the World Wildlife Fund …

Bubbling and Crude: Gulf Coast Spill Reflects Devotion to Wealth, Power, and Oil

by Keith SchneiderMay 5, 2010May 6, 20102

On March 17, two weeks to the day before President Barack Obama laid out a new plan to expand offshore oil exploration in the United States, a government auction of federally controlled oil and gas reserves in the Gulf of Mexico was held at the New Orleans Superdome. It took just a few hours for 77 energy companies to pledge $1.3 billion to the U.S. Treasury to look for oil and natural gas across a …

A Miserable Week

by Keith SchneiderMay 1, 2010May 1, 20100

A week that began with a political blow â€“ the disruption of the bipartisan Senate team drawing up climate and energy legislation â€“ ended in environmental disaster. A vicious oil spill, produced by the explosion and sinking last week of the Deep Horizon drilling rig, inundated the Gulf shoreline and threatened to wreck the aquatic diversity that makes the Louisiana coast one of the worldâ€™s most productive fisheries. Twenty one years ago, as a reporter …

Though the Need is Urgent, Earth Day’s Best Moment May Lie in Past

by Keith SchneiderApril 23, 2010April 23, 20100

This week, just a day before the nation marked the 40th Earth Day, the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded 50 miles from the Louisiana coast, leaving 11 people dead, dozens injured, and a pulse of crude oil that is spreading across the Gulf of Mexico. The blast, which caused the platform to sink on Earth Day itself, came 16 days after 29 men perished in a West Virginia coal mine – the worst American mining …

Circle of Blue is “Changing the Face of Journalism”

by Keith SchneiderApril 17, 2010April 18, 20100

Bob Giles, a son of the Midwest, former Pulitzer Prize winning editor at the Akron Beacon Journal, and then again as editor and publisher of The Detroit News, has been the curator since 2000 of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. A working newspaper journalist and editor since 1958, Giles knows a thing or two about reporting. He just published a piece in Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and …