February 24, 2026

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

by Keith Schneider2

BENZONIA, MI — The role of a journalist isn’t hard to understand. We’re translators. We sort through the myriad details of  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 …

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

by Keith Schneider0

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 …

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Gabrielle Gray’s Last ROMP

by Keith Schneider4

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 …

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

by Keith Schneider0

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 …

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Earth Day 2015 Marks Convergence of Inspiring Trends

by Keith Schneider1

Earth Day, first celebrated 45 years ago in the United States, is now a grown-up international convergence that joins a reckoning with ecological deterioration to the panorama of human activity devoted to improving the planet’s condition. What’s inspiring about Earth Day is that the same principles of responsibility, collective action, pollution prevention, and natural resource conservation that informed the first Earth Day in 1970 have proven to be the durable foundation of 1) ecological repairs …

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Lower Subansiri Dam, Unfinished and Silent, Could Be Tomb For India’s Giant Hydropower Projects

by Keith Schneider1

ITANAGAR, India – With all the immediate distress and hopeful fervor that has greeted Narendra Modi’s new administration, one of the government’s unyielding themes is the prime minister’s allegiance to running water. Specifically, the swift currents that pour from the steep flanks of the Himalaya range as a cure for the country’s endemic electricity shortages. In the three months after his election last May the 64-year-old leader personally dedicated three new hydropower plants and a …

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Owensboro Will Build International Bluegrass Music Center

by Keith Schneider2

In the week that America expressed its disdain for Indiana’s spiteful political fanaticism, and its new “religious freedom” statute that would allow business owners to discriminate against gays and lesbians, comes a much more responsible story of what’s possible in public policy. On April 1, Kentucky Democratic Governor Steve Beshear teamed up with Owensboro Republican Mayor Ron Payne to advance the economic and artistic interests of the mid-size Ohio River city. The two found a …

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Savannah Port Anticipates Panama Canal Expansion in New York Times

by Keith Schneider0

SAVANNAH, Georgia — The business, art, and transactional legitimacy of reporting is to recognize that everything is connected. That’s especially true when your beat is global, your opportunity is unlimited, and your bank account is a like a hungry fledgling fish hawk. Case in point: this article on the Savannah port’s increasing traffic which was posted today in the New York Times. Much of the port’s success is wrapped around its anticipation of the opening …

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World Water Day Ingredients Need Big Dash of Urgency

by Keith Schneider0

From east to west, ever since the world began, there was water. Plentiful. Clean. Always available. None of those descriptions apply to water today.  Though the condition of the world’s water is perilous, and job-producing opportunities for conservation and efficiency are abundant, water’s ranking on the list of public priorities and attention typically is not near the top. It’s not for a lack of effort from the water wonks. In 1993, a year after international …

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U.S. Ports Modernize While Water Supply and Quality Deteriorate

by Keith Schneider0

SAVANNAH, Ga. — There’s not much about water infrastructure that gets America’s lawmakers excited these days unless it’s a big coastal port. The New York/New Jersey port, with a big assist from the federal government, is spending $1.3 billion to lift the 84-year-old Bayonne Bridge high enough to allow a new generation of super-sized cargo vessels to pass underneath. Charleston, S.C., with state and federal support, is spending $2 billion to deepen the harbor and …

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