April 23, 2024

30 Days, 11 States, 7700 Miles, 45 Interviews in the Age of Covid; Triple Vaxxed and Home Safe

by Keith Schneider3

SOMERSET, KY – The worst years of my career, 2008 to 2010, I served as communications director for two national non-profits seeking public interest advances in clean energy and global climate change. The work was interesting enough. But I had a hard time pitching good stories that I should be the one writing. These last two years have been nearly as frustrating. The pandemic shut down over a decade of national and international reporting on …

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Wells Run Dry For Thousands of Arizona Families

by Keith Schneider0

PHOENIX — Three weeks into a trip to Arizona to report on the state’s magnifying water-scarce condition I’m becoming more expert in a contemporary American story that pits a state’s unyielding capitalist model of growth against Mother Earth’s power to change the rules of the game. In its basic boundaries what’s happening here is a story of a state’s interest in coming to terms with the immensity of the water supply challenge it faces, its …

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Michigan’s Annual Groundwater Use For Agriculture is 187 Billion Gallons

by Keith Schneider0

NOTTAWA, MI – In early July, a breeze slipped over a treeline of tall maples and stirred shoulder-high stalks of corn on Larry Walton’s 500-acre farm. It was an encouraging sound, like whispered words of stability, security, and profit. But how long can that last?   At age 60, Walton was raised on his family’s farm here in St. Joseph County, along Michigan’s border with Indiana. The agriculture that he and some 850 other county farmers …

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Frontline Journalism Is A Foundation of Environmental Achievements and Institutional Strength

by Keith Schneider0

“The walls of the valley are made up of rocks, mountains in size, partly separated from each other by side cañons and gorges,” wrote John Muir of magnificent Yosemite Valley. “They are so sheer in front, and so compactly and harmoniously built together on a level floor, that the place, comprehensively seen, looks like some immense hall or temple lighted from above.” With this frontline account, published in the August 1890 edition of Century Magazine, the …

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Biden Working Hard To Sideline GOP Mash-Up Of Madness

by Keith Schneider1

BENZONIA – I’ve waited for this one from the Department of Justice. It’s been coming for weeks. Attorney General Merrick Garland sued Georgia on June 25, 2021, asserting that its despicable voter suppression law passed in March is illegal. The law, like others by Republican Legislatures in 13 more states, is designed to make it much harder for people of color to vote. But under the U.S. Voting Rights Act, discriminating against groups of people …

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Craft Distilleries Are More Numerous Than Ever. The Pandemic Looks To Have Helped.

by Keith Schneider0

GETHSEMANE, KY. – Conditions last year could hardly have looked worse for craft distilling in Kentucky or any other state. Built on the intimacy of locally-produced spirits, virtually all of the more than 2,000 craft distilleries that operated around the country were imperiled by state health directives that closed tasting rooms.  Yet while the virus produced financial pain, it did not lead to many distillery deaths. Federal pandemic-related aid, consumer demand, important changes in state …

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Report Cites Progress, Impediments to Universal Access to Clean Water, Safe Sanitation, and Hygiene

by Keith Schneider0

My first months of 2021 were consumed with reporting and writing a three-part Circle of Blue project on global trends in water, sanitation, and hygiene. Our collaborator was the Wilson Center, the D.C. think tank that has been one of of our partners since 2010 in reporting the Global Choke Point chapters in China and India. As I noted in WASH Within Reach, as a Circle of Blue correspondent in Africa, Asia, and Latin America …

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Kentucky Coal Fields Display How Hard It Is To Redevelop Rural America

by Keith Schneider0

PAINTSVILLE, KY. – On April 23, 12 weeks after President Joe Biden signed an executive order that promised to help rural regions of the East and Great Plains move past their dependence on fossil energy markets, the administration identified $37.9 billion in existing federal grant and loan accounts to meet the president’s job creation and revitalization goals.   One of those accounts, administered since 2016 by the Department of the Interior, helped start a high-tech manufacturing …

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On The Side of Fact, Truth, and Decency

by Keith Schneider1

BENZONIA, MI — Though I never attended a formal class in journalism my career, now over 40 years in the making, is firmly centered in sturdy principles of reasoned conduct and examined execution. Stripped of adornment those principles encompass seven rules of engagement: Follow stories that matter.  Interview thoroughly. Research carefully.  Gather views from disparate quarters.  Make the complex simpler to understand. Write with energy and grace.  Follow the facts wherever they lead.  Given that …

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Pandemic Breakout Tour

by Keith Schneider0

NEW YORK — Thanks to the expertise and doggedness of contemporary science, which delivered a vaccine capable of warding off Covid-19, Gabrielle and I departed from our pandemic-safe home in Somerset, KY, and ventured out in April for a nine-day trip to Virginia, New Jersey, and New York. It was an adventure ripe with highlights: 1) reunions with my 91-year-old mother, my two brothers, my sister, their spouses, my nephew and niece, my sister-in-law and …

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