ModeShift - Part 2

“America First” Puts Big Hurt on International Water Programs

by Keith SchneiderSeptember 25, 2025September 25, 20250

Last February, when Elon Musk called the U.S. Agency for International Development “a criminal organization” that had outlived its usefulness, the full calamitous measure of closing the world’s most important human aid organization was not yet apparent overseas or in America. Seven months later it is brutally apparent. Across the planet a shameful retreat is occurring in the global work to secure clean water and safe sanitation for millions of people in Africa and Asia. …

Jack Gyr Honored at Joyous Retirement Party

by Keith SchneiderSeptember 11, 2025September 12, 20252

How many ways can a good man’s life be measured? By the joy he holds for his family, his friends, his work, his community, and himself. By the people he encounters and the way they greet him — with a smile, with an embrace, with unabridged delight. By the visible evidence of his success. The people he employed. The people he helped. The community that, for decades, admired his way of conducting his life. All …

Political Left, Right, and Everyone Between, United Over Water in Indiana

by Keith SchneiderSeptember 3, 2025September 3, 20250

Residents of Boone County, Indiana, had a lot to be anxious about in 2023 when state authorities revealed the scope of a nearly 10,000-acre innovation and high-tech manufacturing park they were developing outside Lebanon, a half-hour drive northwest of Indianapolis. One concern was the public taxpayer cost of the LEAP project – short for Limitless Exploration/Advanced Pace – now nearing $1 billion. Another was the way authorities made big decisions for the “mega site with …

A Muffled American Environmentalism

by Keith SchneiderAugust 22, 2025August 22, 20250

Let’s all stand up and cheer our fellow Americans in the West for raising their voices and shutting down a Republican plan last month to sell millions of acres of the public domain. Even considering Earth Day demonstrations in April, it’s the first time any of the Trump administration’s irrational and dangerous initiatives to impede, weaken, and obliterate the nation’s protections for land, water, and air generated more than a peep of resistance. Where has …

Toxic Algae Bloom Forecasts Are a Study in Negligence

by Keith SchneiderAugust 22, 2025August 22, 20250

Back in 2003, when researchers began predicting with excellent accuracy how much of western Lake Erie would be coated with the green slime of a toxic algae bloom, there were important points to be made. The annual forecasts, largely funded with $20 million annually from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, provided water quality regulators and public health authorities in the U.S. and Canada real-time assessments on where the poisonous algae, which is capable of …

MAPA – Make America Polluted Again Starts in Iowa

by Keith SchneiderAugust 22, 2025August 22, 20250

President Donald Trump’s campaign to carve up federal environmental agencies and paralyze statutes that cleared the air, cleaned U.S. waters, and protected wildlands marks the opening of MAPA, the new era to make America polluted again. With uncanny speed and premeditated precision, Trump and his Cabinet are cutting budgets, slicing protections from statutes, and pushing thousands of seasoned scientists and resource managers out of the federal government’s principal environmental agencies: the Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric …

In Promoting Polluting Coal, Trump Looks Back. Way Back.

by Keith SchneiderJuly 11, 2025July 11, 20250

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 …

Nuclear Energy’s Unsettled Revival

by Keith SchneiderJune 30, 2025June 30, 20250

In January, executives at Constellation Energy startled the world with their plan to restart the closed and cold 840-megawatt Unit 1 reactor at Three Mile Island nuclear power station, site of one of the most dangerous meltdowns in atomic history. Not so long ago such news, like the specter of the ruined Unit 2 reactor core that remained after the 1979 accident in southern Pennsylvania, would have attracted more than surprise. It would have generated …

New Texas Miracle

by Keith SchneiderJune 30, 2025June 30, 20250

In the years during and immediately following the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009, the Texas Business Association and other like-minded chambers of commerce noted how America’s second most populous state had come through the ordeal with unrivaled economic vitality. Texas attracted more direct foreign investment, was the nation’s largest exporter, and was home to more than 50 Fortune 500 companies. The state also attracted new residents, businesses, and jobs at a faster pace than …

Trump Wants to Wreck Progress on Restoring Great Lakes

by Keith SchneiderJune 30, 2025June 30, 20250

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 …