ModeShift - Part 23

Paris Negotiators Expected to Reach First Global Climate Pact

by Keith SchneiderNovember 26, 2015November 29, 20150

French authorities issued an alert on November 18 about the upcoming COP 21 Paris global climate summit that needed almost no explanation. Two big public demonstrations planned for November 29 and December 12 would not take place, French officials declared, because of the risk they would be terrorist targets. The Paris Climate Conference, which opens on November 30 and closes December 11, is the 21st United Nations-sponsored annual global gathering meant to â€œstabilize atmospheric concentrations …

Drought Influenced Syrian Civil War; So What?, Says U.S. Congress

by Keith SchneiderNovember 20, 2015November 21, 20150

A paper earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States added fresh, peer-reviewed details about how a malicious four-year (2007 to 2010) drought in Syria played a role in touching off a calamitous civil war in 2011. The long rein of water scarcity ruined the farm economy, and drove over 1 million farmers and their families into unstable resource-scarce cities inspired by the Arab Spring to rebel …

China Joins Global Pivot Away From Carbon

by Keith SchneiderNovember 7, 2015November 19, 20150

SHENZHEN, China â€“ Although it is a distinctive way to view the world, to some extent the contemporary industrial age is a global narrative of substance abuse and recovery. Sixty years ago the basic elements at the center of political and ecological concern were uranium and plutonium. Reckless Soviet and American atomic bomb blasts put so much deadly radiation in the atmosphere that milk and water became contaminated. Nations heeded the warnings of scientists and …

Donghao Chung, Guangzhou’s Daylighted Refuge

by Keith SchneiderOctober 25, 2015November 11, 20152

GUANGZHOU, China — Can a polluted stormwater drain newly constructed as an urban park speak for a city? Can a place of refuge, where clear water slips past slick rocks and families gather near the sound and mist of fountains, be an extension of a nation? There’s always risk in heaping such rhapsody on a single example. Still, in the characteristically handsome Chinese design, and in the cooling embrace of its flowing water, the Donghao …

Pope Francis Visit, VW Behavior, China Cap and Trade, and John Boehner — How They Coincide

by Keith SchneiderSeptember 27, 2015September 28, 20150

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Progress never unfolds in a straight line. The colors and patterns of life, like tracking clouds from space, are too complex, too irregular, too imperfect to make sense much of the time. Once in awhile, though, a flawless aberration occurs, like the events last week in the United States and China. Pope Francis arrived in Washington and New York to issue a call to action on climate change and an appeal to …

1039 Miles Per Tank; 86 Miles Per Gallon

by Keith SchneiderSeptember 11, 2015September 11, 20150

BENZONIA, MI — The morning that two jetliners destroyed the World Trade Center 14 years ago today I was in Manistee, Michigan shopping for a new car. If you recognize, as I do, that among the primary Al Qaeda justifications for the attack was America’s late 20th century appetite for Mideast oil, and the meddlesome regional interest we displayed for securing our petroleum supply, then you might also consider that my search for an affordable …

Slowly, With Earth Pushing Hard, A Confederacy Of Concern Develops

by Keith SchneiderAugust 28, 2015November 19, 20152

BENZONIA, MI — The role of a journalist isn’t hard to understand. We’re translators. We sort through the myriad details ofÂ complex subjects and choose the most salient to build a narrative that’s simpler for readers to understand. There couldn’t be a more important era to deploy that skill than now — the dismaying, dangerous, fabulous, primal decades of the 21st century. We’re now 15 years into the 21st century. Underlying so much of the …

Birmingham Civil Rights Institute’s Lessons in Race — Changed and Not

by Keith SchneiderJuly 28, 2015July 29, 20150

BIRMINGHAM, Al. — The weekend before the pastor was assassinated and eight other African American adults were murdered in a church basement in Charleston, South Carolina, I spent the afternoon studying the exhibits at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. The 23-year-old museum is a journey in photographs, videos, and artifacts of the dangerous struggle in the mid-20th century for justice, voting rights, and equality in Alabama’s largest city, and across the American South. A few …

Gabrielle Gray’s Last ROMP

by Keith SchneiderJuly 11, 2015June 23, 20214

OWENSBORO, KY. — Around noon on the last Saturday of Gabrielle Gray’s long run as the founder and director of ROMP, this Ohio River City’s signature bluegrass music festival, a moment of pure love and remembrance unfolded unexpectedly. Standing alone on the festival stage with her fiddle, Phoebe Hunt, one of the singularly great young artists that ROMP has featured in the last several years, prepared to open her set as a solo. A striking …

Challenged By Drought, Fire, Earthquake, and Flood, California Departs On New Path

by Keith SchneiderJune 20, 2015July 6, 20150

OROVILLE, CA — Until visitors peer over the crest of 770-foot Oroville Dam, which stores the cold Sierra waters of the Feather River and is the tallest dam in the United States, it’s hard to tell a drought grips Butte County, or any of the other neighboring Central Valley counties in this part of northern California. The dirt-lined transport canals are filled to the top with water that slakes the thirst of thousands of hectares …