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In 2017, At Home On My Native Ground

Mrs. Schneider and me. The highlight of highlights of 2017 was marrying Gabrielle Gray in San Francisco on October 19. (Photo/Keith Schneider)

SOMERSET, KY — Maybe because I married in October, and traveled to India in January and to Manila in May to write about environmental heroes. Maybe because I summered in Michigan without any deadlines to meet or editors to impress. Maybe because my mother regained her balance, our friends remain close, and our families and children are making their way so well in the world. Maybe because I joined the Los Angeles Times for a spell and felt the old muscle memory of daily reporting revive so easily.

Maybe because of all of these events, my despair for the nation, and certainly the world, is not nearly as profound as that expressed by so many other people.

I’m 61 now. If I was a blue whale I’d weigh 110 tons. If I was an eastern oak, I’d be 80 feet tall. If I was a bathroom I’d have been renovated three times. I’m old enough, in sum, to understand that every day is a little blessing, and a year is a prayer come true. In other words I’m happy even as I contend with the various bruises that will only mount with every new year.

Two dear friends died in 2017 — my lifelong friend and brother Andy Feinman passed in May; my Michigan friend and brother Dennis Pace died in October. Their deaths are a lingering hurt.

Andy and Dennis succumbed to cancer, which is the scourge of our Baby Boom generation. As kids we were exposed to the most persistent levels of chemical and radioactive poisons in history. Cancer is the unsparing disease born in industrial mid-century America. It strikes decades later when we are well into middle age. For the Baby Boomers, the fifties and sixties amount to a generational kill zone.

If there is any personal solace it may lie in this conclusion: If you survive your sixties you’re in pretty good shape to enjoy as much of your old age as you’re willing to accept. I’m just starting to navigate that sixties kill zone. So far, so good.

In almost every other way, 2017 unfolded in chapters that were surprising, delightful, and satisfying. After a six-year romance, Gabrielle and I were engaged on April 19 in New York where I purchased a ring in the 47th Street Diamond District, dined with my brother Reed, and were serenaded by bluegrass musician friends Dominick Leslie and Phoebe Hunt at a Greenwich Village club that we closed well after midnight. Six months to the day later, we were joined by Maggie Gray and Samson Grisman in San Francisco and were wed in that city’s magnificent City Hall.

Moments after our declarations with Maggie, Samson, and wife Gabrielle. (Photo/Keith Schneider)

Continue reading “In 2017, At Home On My Native Ground”

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The White House Wants To Disrupt Elko County and a Whole Lot of Other Places in the West

The Ruby Mountains in Elko County, northeast Nevada. (Photo/Keith Schneider)

ELKO, NEV. – From this rest stop desert city midway between Salt Lake City and Reno the snow peaks of the Ruby Mountains are like finely crafted wainscoting in an elegant ballroom. The slopes rise sharply to form triangles in the sky. In 1989, Congress approved permanently safeguarding 92,650 wooded acres along the ridge lines from any intrusions in the Ruby Mountain Wilderness. The big flat sagebrush valley that runs up to the base of the mountains’ western flank is open range for grazing, and hunting ground for golden eagles. The watery meadows on the eastern flank are nesting sites for migrating birds. Since 1938, 37,632 acres of it have been protected as the Ruby Lake National Wildlife Refuge.

Elko is an intriguing place. It’s the biggest city in the nation’s sixth largest county and has a nationally-recognized cowboy poetry festival every winter. Elko also has understood since its founding as a railroad stop in 1869 the economic value of extracting resources from the land and conserving the natural geography. The county is home to one of the largest gold mining sectors in the United States. Elko County, where about 50,000 people live, was hardly scratched in the 2008 to 2012 Great Recession because Americans got so freaked out that the price of gold climbed to $2,000 an ounce.

Lately, though, residents in Elko County have been stirred up by a plan, hatched in the Trump White House, to disrupt the decades-long equilibrium they’ve achieved between extraction and conservation. In the last week of December I drove out to Elko from my base in Salt Lake City to take a tour of the Ruby Mountains and see what’s going on. Since early October I’ve been based in Utah’s capital city to report for the Los Angeles Times as the western environment and public lands correspondent. My contract ends in early March. Until then I’ve got time and room to roam to tell a momentous story of an administration’s pursuit of an economic and energy development story in the West that does not fit its time. (Read my reports here.)

The Ruby Lake National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1938, sits in a valley on the east side of the Ruby Mountains. (Photo/Keith Schneider

The powerful tide of that story washed into Elko County in September when residents learned that the U.S. Forest Service, which manages the Ruby Mountains, is preparing to auction leases for oil and gas development on some 50,000 acres of public land that border the wilderness on the western flanks, and the wildlife refuge on the east. The Bureau of Land Management, the Interior Department agency that owns and manages most of the public land in the West, also is preparing an oil and gas lease auction for hundreds of thousands of acres of public desert land in the western reaches of the county. Continue reading “The White House Wants To Disrupt Elko County and a Whole Lot of Other Places in the West”

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Dennis Pace Loved His Life in Benzie County

Dennis Pace was a good athlete and loved cross country skiing. He also was almost always the tallest guy in the group, which left to right, included Heath Green, Kayla Bates, Keith Schneider, and Jack Gyr. Photo/Keith Schneider

I looked back in my photo archive to find a picture of Dennis Pace, my dear friend who died last week. I found I’d photographed Dennis solely in the winter while we skied or skated. Strange since Dennis and I spent a lot of time together during every other season, as well. He was a bike rider, a soccer and basketball and tennis player. We ran the Sleeping Bear dune trails and sailed on Crystal Lake. We shared good meals and drank beer on his deck and mine. We talked a lot about the ideas of the day. All the kids loved him.

Though he was raised in the Phoenix desert and educated at the University of California at Berkeley, Dennis very clearly ventured East to discover a region that fit his soul. Benzie County, near the top of Lake Michigan, is a one-stoplight forested county where no town holds more than 1,000 residents. Young people like Dennis arrived in the 1980s and early 1990s to build lives far from the places where they were raised.

Dennis landed in Benzie County in 1988. He, his wife Kate, and their two children, Isabel and Dakota, joined a community of caring people who formed a circle of trust and experience that he found delightful and absorbing. During the next 29 years Dennis built a lot of other good circles in Benzie County.

Dennis Pace was a good skater and raised funds to keep the ice rink in Benzonia active in the winter. Photo/Keith Schneider

His passions were his children and grandchildren, his parents and friends, music, sports, and his community. When his kids were young he was a fixture playing midfield at every soccer game, center at basketball games, and wing at hockey games. After Isabel and Cody and all the other kids grew up, Dennis managed the Benzie Area Youth Soccer Program for nearly 20 years. He raised funds to keep the Benzonia ice rink open in the winter. He joined the board of Beulah’s Darcy Library. Trained as an optometrist, Dennis cared for us at the Scarborough Family Eyecare office in Beulah. The Betsie Current newspaper published a really nice piece on Dennis two years ago.

He loved music and played with friends every Thursday at his home in Beulah. He sailed and anchored a sweet and agile boat on Crystal Lake. He liked small parties and dinners with friends. He cooked an impressive brisket feast. Dennis was generous with his time and his affection. He liked the steadiness of firm schedules and easy events, like basketball games on TV at the Hahn’s, breakfast every morning with Jonathan Clark at L’Chayim Delicatessen, and coffee with friends every Saturday in Beulah. Continue reading “Dennis Pace Loved His Life in Benzie County”

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This Is Tamil Nadu

Priyanjoli Basu, a successful designer and dressmaker, flanked by her husband Varun (l) and close friend Dhruv Malhotra, at her apartment on the Chennai beach. Photo/Keith Schneider

CHENNAI, India – Unlike India’s other immense cities Chennai is a world apart. Tamil Nadu’s capital city does not have crowds of beggars trolling intersections like in Delhi. It is not nearly as traffic jammed as Mumbai. Its homes are well cared for, and many of its office buildings are new and Miami white, unlike the sagging and dilapidated built environment that describes Kolkata.

The most distinguishing feature, though, for an American journalist who has visited Indian cities and states across much of the country: Chennai’s tidiness. It’s unusual in a nation where thick blankets of paper and piles of bottles lie in the streets and alongside the highways. Household garbage, shoulder high, blocks alleys. The unkempt big cities and soiled countryside are like a metaphor for the bedlam that is contemporary India, an ambitious and crowded nation of 1.3 billion people.

Chennai is different. Quite a bit different. The city’s Bay of Bengal beaches sport garbage bins that people use. Municipal sanitation workers haul away accumulating refuse. The attention to appearances and street level hygiene is part of an unspoken culture of diligence and confidence that Chennai’s residents, well-to-do and poor, have built for themselves and their city.

Chennai’s residents know India’s fourth largest metropolitan region is on a roll. Jobs are plentiful. Incomes are rising. The city’s capable universities produce graduates that technology companies are anxious to hire.

A street merchant in Chennai, Tamil Nadu’s capital city. Photo/Keith Schneider

Chennai’s residents also know they exist in an “at any moment” geography of peril, almost all of it due to ecological torment. In the last two years Chennai has been blasted by a typhoon, drowned in a flood, and challenged by the worst drought in 140 years. People are unnerved, for sure. In January a student protest on Chennai’s main beach grew into a statewide strike and mass demonstration of grievances that attracted millions of participants.

But even during the week of active public dissent Chennai’s residents stayed so centered and cheerful that parents brought their children to protests just to witness how a great city displays its collective discomfort. On Marina Beach, Chennai’s primary locus of protests, volunteers guided cars to available parking spaces. Vendors offered cups of tea at no charge. An army of people, young and old, gathered up all of the bottles and paper and food waste that had been dropped in the sand.

The spontaneous demonstration during the Tamil harvest festival in January attracted all kinds of people to the city’s main beach. Photo/Keith Schneider

Straightening up after the party, an especially impressive display of public civility, is seen as a civic responsibility. TITN: This is Tamil Nadu.

At the end of each of my travels and frontline reporting in nations outside the U.S. I collect the various and intriguing threads — people, events , or cultural traits — that strike me as emblematic and distinguishing. They come together in “This Is” essays that I’ve prepared from India, China, Mongolia, Qatar, Panama, Peru, and South Africa. The idea is borrowed from a scene in Blood Diamond, Leonardo DiCaprio’s great 2006 movie about diamond mining during the civil war in Sierra Leone. Asked, while having a drink in an African watering hole, about a peculiarly confusing trail of events that made no sense, DiCaprio tells his mate: “TIA. This is Africa.”

In that same spirit, here are other points of interest from my latest trip to India. Continue reading “This Is Tamil Nadu”

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Regina Lopez: Update From The Philippines

Regina Lopez (r) on one of her helicopter tours of Philippine mine sites in May 2017. She held public events at each stop. Photo/Keith Schneider

Gina Lopez, the former Philippines Environment Secretary, sent a message here this week that updates her activities following the Congress decision in May to remove her from office.

“I’m now into this movement called ILOVE: Investments in Loving Organizations for Village Economies. The goal is to build the country from the bottom up. I am in the midst of collaborating with 20 million youth as a citizen’s lawsuit is filed against the government. Will send you the details. I’m meeting the student leaders today.”

Gina’s message also included a link this terrific video by a Dutch filmmaker. It’s quite good.

In the pantheon of courageous public servants I’ve met, Gina Lopez ranks near the top.

— Keith Schneider