ModeShift - Part 31

Lake Michigan Ice Caves, Evidence of a Mighty Scheme

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 17, 2014February 17, 20140

LELAND, Mi — The northern Michigan winter this year, with its Arctic cold and persistent snow, has locked Lake Michigan’s shoreline in towering walls of ice. It’s a frozen grip. The gales of January and the calmer winds of February, shifting from stout to steady, pulled the water and pushed the ice until it careened upward and outward, forming pregnant walls and bridges that birthed big caves. Yesterday, gloriously cold and sunny, hundreds of people …

This is India — TII

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 15, 2014February 17, 20142

Noh Ka Likai Falls, India’s tallest and most beautiful waterfall, pours off a green and forested limestone cliff and plunges in a water-misted shower 330 meters to a blue pool. Photo/Keith Schneider SHILLONG, India — This beautiful and tidy hill station city in Meghalaya, in Northeast India, is steadily expanding along the ridge tops and steep slopes of the region’s Himalayan foothills. Among the reasons is that few cities in India, and few Indian states …

Owensboro Convention Center Opens With Big Party; Senators Paul and McConnell Not Among The Guests

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 9, 2014February 9, 20146

OWENSBORO, KY –Â In February 2009, in the very depths of the Great Recession, seven of the nine commissioners elected to lead this capable city and surrounding Daviess County took a long breath, understood the political consequences, and approved a modest increase in a local tax to generate $80 million to build a new downtown. Though just two of the seven officials remain in office, what they accomplished in a single courageous vote achieved three distinct …

Shillong Times and its Courageous Editor, Patricia Mukhim, Gain National Hearing On Coal Mine Safety

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 2, 2014April 17, 20143

Patricia Mukhim, editor of the Shillong Times. Photo/Dhruv Malhotra SHILLONG, India — To the best of anyone’s knowledge, and that includes a tribunal of senior jurists who heard testimony here on January 24, 15 men drowned in a coal mine in this state’s mineral-rich Garo Hills on July 6, 2012. The disaster occurred in one of the thousands of Meghalaya’s dangerous and unregulated coal mines. It wasn’t formally reported for more than a week. The …

Algae Blooms, A New Visitor, Ruin Sleeping Bear Dunes Shoreline

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 25, 2014September 8, 20250

EMPIRE, Michigan — It’s winter in Northwest Michigan, the coldest and deepest season of ice and snow in years. It’s possible that the severe winter will produce the conditions necessary to curb the newest noxious and unsightly threat to the region’s waters: the algae blooms overtaking northern Lake Michigan and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. The blooms not only illustrate the presence of rising levels of nutrients in the water. They also are evidence of …

Abu Dhabi Slowly Pursues A Water-Conserving, Cleaner Energy Path

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 23, 2014January 23, 20140

ABU DHABI — Just across an expanse of sand and highway, close to this capital city’s airport, lies a collection of modern buildings promoted here as the example incarnate of what’s possible when a nation fueled by oil decides that the supply of its primary natural and economic resource is finite. It’s a beginning. But just that. A beginning. Masdar City, as it’s called, is a state-sponsored planned development that isn’t yet close to being …

Where Cars Don’t Dominate, Rapid Transit and Strong Economies Do

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 8, 2014January 9, 20140

BERLIN — There are few more impressive places to arrive by intercity train anywhere in the world than this city’s central rail station, the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. A colossal steel and glass building opened in 2006, the Hauptbahnhof (pronounced hote-bonn-off) soars up four levels, from east-west high-speed platforms to high-speed trains running north-south. Stainless steel and glass elevators, and stainless steel escalators tie together the platforms and the various levels of the station, which is stocked …

As We Build More, Use More, The Earth Is Pushing Back Hard

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 1, 2014June 18, 20142

PRAGUE — City Square erupted at the start of the 2014 New Year with a deafening and blazing midnight fusilade of rockets and cannon blasts. The air filled with spent gunpowder and smoke so dense the brilliance of the firebursts was obscured. The Czech crowds, so slim and young and dressed in chic leather and spiked heels, cheered with the joy and lusty charm that comes with political security and social success. This 1,000-year-old river …

Martin Herbert Schneider — A Fabulous Life

by Keith SchneiderDecember 18, 2013May 24, 20267

The mortality files of the city of New York, the city that he loved and where he of spent most of his life, will formally record that Martin Herbert Schneider was born on March 30, 1924 and died on December 13, 2013. Those are the statistical facts. But what actually happened is that Martin died two days earlier. He stood on the corner of 59th Street and Madison Avenue, ready to board the bus. A …

Torrent of Water and Big Questions Pour From Matchless Peaks of India’s Himalayan Region

by Keith SchneiderDecember 11, 2013January 4, 20144

OKUND, UTTARAKHAND, INDIA -Â We made the crossing at night from Chamoli, reaching this Himalayan foothill town after dark. The innkeeper, anxious for guests in a travel economy that came to a standstill in mid-June, cooked dal and nan bread for dinner and then showed us to a room that was unlit and unheated. It didn’t matter. Thick blankets kept us warm. And at dawn we awoke to strong black coffee and the sun lighting the …