ModeShift

Not so terribly long ago the International Energy Agency issued one of the early century’s most optimistic projections for the environment, human health, and water quality. It declared 2013 the year the world’s operating coal mines had reached peak production of 8 billion metric tons.  From that year forward, the agency predicted, the use of the dirtiest fuel to generate electricity would steadily decline, carrying with it planet-healing reductions in climate-changing air emissions and water-polluting …

Atop one of the world’s tallest freshwater sand dunes in northern Michigan’s Benzie County there’s a place to marvel–dawn or dusk–at the magnificence of the Lake Michigan shoreline. The view encompasses Betsie Bay, where the state-protected natural river of the same name empties into the sparkling clean shallows between Frankfort and Elberta. A wide sand beach stretches for miles north and south, a dun-colored threshold defining the space between the big lake’s crystal-clear blue waters …

I was a very young cat, just turned 14 years old, when 20 million Americans celebrated the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Schools closed where I was raised in White Plains, N.Y. to give students like me freedom to take part in all manner of eco-sustaining activities. I gathered a few friends to join me downtown to paint the White Plains train station and drag tires and old appliances from the dark, heavily …

BENZONIA — America, the resistance is us! All of us. We experienced that here in the far northwestern corner of Michigan when more than 500 people gathered with signs displaying all manner of messages of resistance. Then we marched along US 31 to a sound track of excited voices and honking horns in a historic “Hands Off!” protest of President Trump’s MAGA recklessness. Nobody in that crowd ever experienced a political demonstration of that size …