ModeShift - Part 3

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 …

Earth Day at 25 – New York Times Essay

by Keith SchneiderApril 22, 2025April 22, 20250

WHETHER they pulled tires out of the Bronx River in White Plains, set up recycling booths in Chicago or marched in San Francisco, the millions of Americans who celebrated the first Earth Day in 1970 were bound by two principles: the environment was a mess, and the Government needed to do something about it. This week, America marks Earth Day’s 25th anniversary. But that cracking sound heard across the country is more than the breaking …

Here’s An Essay For Earth Day 35 in 2005

by Keith SchneiderApril 22, 2025April 22, 20250

I was a 14-year-old eighth grader in White Plains, N.Y. on April 22, 1970, the very first Earth Day. It was such a national happening that Highlands Junior High School organized work parties for the occasion. My friends and I decided to paint the dingy New York Central train station downtown; we laid on so much white enamel that the brick walls looked as though they’d been bleached. The New York Times was impressed. They reported on …

Trump’s Earth Day Purge

by Keith SchneiderApril 22, 20250

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 …

“Hands Off!” Rally In Benzonia, A Fresh Look At The World

by Keith SchneiderApril 6, 2025April 6, 20250

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 …

Is Water the Unmentioned Reason for Trump’s Interest in Greenland?

by Keith SchneiderApril 2, 2025April 2, 20250

Say this much, President Trump’s vow to “go as far as we have to” to control Greenland is pernicious, consistent, and ironic. Though he’s obscured his reasons for bringing the world’s largest island under American management, Trump’s aides and geopolitical experts offer three justifications. The first: gaining access to critical minerals, even those for batteries to power the electric vehicles that Trump purportedly dislikes. The second: securing a larger military perch at the top of …

‘Most Momentous Day’ in EPA History? Spare Me.

by Keith SchneiderMarch 24, 2025March 24, 20250

One of the signature moments in contemporary American environmentalism occurred on October 6, 1967, in Suffolk County, New York, when nine scientists and a lawyer formally launched the Environmental Defense Fund. Now a $314-million-a-year global organization with 750 employees, EDF went on to influence pivotal environmental achievements, among them the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, and then helping the agency ban DDT and close the ozone hole. In January, Suffolk County bobbed …

Surprise! Trump Order to Increase Timber Harvest Could Make Sense

by Keith SchneiderMarch 13, 2025March 13, 20250

Among the maddening features of Donald Trump’s presidency is this: His instinct for identifying structural weaknesses is keen. His capacity to decide and execute solutions is generally terrible. How else to explain that, for Trump, stopping the killing in Ukraine means siding with the dictator who started the conflict. Or that Trump identified the deep resentment of working people who supported him, but proposes stark changes in health, food, job, childcare, and retirement programs that …

A Big Solar Plant Planned For Hanford

by Keith SchneiderMarch 7, 2025March 8, 20251

There are still a number of Americans, readers of the New York Times, who recall the Pulitzer-nominated project I led in the late 1980s and early 1990s to uncover the decrepit and dangerous conditions at the nation’s secret nuclear weapons production facilities. I reported from all the weapons production sites in 12 states, including the Hanford reservation where the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb was manufactured. In December 2024 I returned to Hanford to interview …