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When we first heard, last year, about the $10 billion investment that T. Boone Pickens (see pix above) is making in the Texas Panhandle to build the largest wind generating station in the United States our response was elemental. Right message. Right messenger. Right scale of investment to foster the clean energy, good jobs economy. Today in New York, Pickens made another thrust to prod America to take charge of its energy future. He launched …

In 1999 Alan Durning, the author and director of the Sightline Institute in Seattle, published a prescient and well-received book about natural resources and economics entitled “Green-Collar Jobs.” “A sustainable economy can generate employment just as well as an unsustainable one,” Durning wrote. “For every declining industry, like those that log old-growth forests, make farm chemicals, and build roads, there is an emerging one to take up the slack, like those that advise organic farmers, …

The presidential candidates of both parties have uttered next to nothing about urban development, suburban well-being, and how to improve the quality of life in the places where 80 percent of Americans reside. But the Web sites of the candidates, particularly the Democrats, offer some clues. A useful summary was posted earlier this month by Robert Godspeed on Planetizen.com.

My friend Brad Johnson, a graphic designer who with his wife, Julie Beeler, manages one of the hottest interactive multi-media studios in the country, Second Story Media in Portland, Oregon, sent me a link the other day to motionographer.com. Motionographer is a portal to much of the hottest and most creative online motion graphic artistry now happening around the United States and the world. I’m often asked where the Web is going. My response since …

  Benzonia, our little town of 500 in northwest Michigan’s Benzie County, is abuzz with the story of Ellie Mae, the little black, nearly 18-year-old dog 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. I reported in an April 12 post that she’d walked off the back porch in half a foot of snow and never returned. She’s back, is in good …

Keith Schneider is a nationally known journalist, strategic communications, and public policy specialist based in northern Michigan, where he’s lived since 1993. He currently serves as communications director for the Apollo Alliance, a national coalition of labor, environmental, and business groups working on accelerating the clean energy economy and the millions of new jobs that will result. He splits his time in northern Michigan and in San Francisco, where the Apollo Alliance is based. In …