At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
 There’s never been a time in my life, which now spans 51 years, when the conversation in communities is so distanced from what state lawmakers choose to talk about. And the gulf only gets wider between the concerns knocking around state capitols and what Congress and the White House think is important. This isn’t a partisan problem. It’s a national disgrace. Our state government here in Michigan, for example, is led by a two-term …
John Bebow, the executive director of The Center For Michigan and a former reporter for the Detroit News and Chicago Tribune, reports in his weekly update that M and M Energy, a Florida-based energy development company, has proposed building a multi-billion dollar “polygeneration” coal-fired electric generating station on the site of a shuttered oil refinery in Alma. The company presented its plan to the state Senate Energy Committee in mid-April and has been busy shopping the idea in …
In the fall of 1993, when I moved to northwest Michigan, Poppycocks was the only decent place to eat on Traverse City’s Front Street. The city had plenty of surface parking lots where buildings once stood, a delapidated State Theatre on Front Street, and a ghostly 100-year-old psychiatric asylum on its western boundary. On the sprawling outskirts, the Grand Traverse Mall had just opened and the South Airport ring road at the mall’s doorstep was so fry pit-ugly and congested that it was a metaphor for …
 While visiting last month in New Buffalo, a summering village along Lake Michigan’s southeastern coast, I learned that realtors and developers were preparing a campaign to significantly weaken or entirely repeal the 31-year-old state law that protects Michigan’s magnificent fresh water sand dunes. The reason: the law was deemed to be an affront to “property rights” and an impediment to the development of some of the most compelling maritime geography on the planet. Earlier this year, while researching …
 Among the priority hazards of joining capital and technology the way we do in the 21st Century is that it can blow up the ordinary and familiar — a farm, for instance — into shapes and sizes that are extraordinary. That is what’s happening in Michigan and in many other states in animal agriculture. American meat, poultry, and milk, increasingly, are produced on immense sites that have come to be known as “factory farms.” For those who haven’t followed …
The New York Times, my favorite newspaper, today published on its Web site a very useful and remarkably up to date online interactive map and directory of building permits issued by New York City. The building permit feature is a collaboration between New York City, the Times, and Google and represents another vivid display of the Internet’s capacity to store, organize, and disseminate useful land use and economc data in a way never possible previously. I can imagine all …
 CLEVELAND — I.M. Pei’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a masterpiece of glass and steel on Lake Erie,  is a great pyramid playbox for people who love the music, the messages that changed the world, and the men and women of my generation who, unlike nearly all of us,  lived as far out on on the creative edge as it is possible to be. A lot of the very best didn’t dwell there long. This weekend I visited the Hall for the first time and came away …
 The Canadian province of Ontario, which lies across Lake Huron from Michigan, and is home to about the same number of people (10.3 million there, 10 million here), has supported one of the planet’s active conversations on the ties between a strong economy and a clean environment. Much of the dialogue centers of global climate change and the province’s coal-fired power plants, one of which, the Nanticoke plant on Lake Erie, is among the largest on the …
 BLISS TOWNSHIP — There are a few things that Michigan still does very well. Its three big universities — Michigan, Michigan State, Wayne State – and network of smaller public colleges and universities, are terrific. Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, and Traverse City compare with anyplace in America as great places to live and do business. And we have Blissfest, the affirming, heartening folk/blues/acoustic music festival founded in 1981, and ever since has held the second weekend in July, on a …
 There still isn’t much to be happy about when it comes to the political conversation in Lansing, our state capital. Though she won more than 50 counties in the 2006 election, more than any Democrat running for any state office in Michigan history – she also delivered a Democratic-led  House; Republicans hold the state Senate by a slim majority – Michigan’s governor hasn’t done anything with her influence. Politics is a full contact body sport. Ms. Granholm, …