On my way out of the Cobbs Creek Environmental Education Center in October, I stopped to pick through the leaves around the American persimmon trees at the top of the driveway. It was a little early in the season, with plenty of fruit still on the tree, but I found a few little blobs of
More
Stephanie Kearney has taught middle school science for 20 years. She uses the outdoors as a classroom, even when what’s outside is a schoolyard and the blocks of rowhouses around Penn Alexander School in West Philadelphia. Grid talked with Kearney to learn what it takes to bring the natural sciences to life for urban students.
More
On an afternoon in late October, students from Sayre High School were trickling into the Cobbs Creek Community Environmental Center’s community room to take off their waders and to review what they had found in the creek. It was a scene you might expect at any environmental center, but a relatively fresh one now that
More
In June, the School District of Philadelphia’s long-running struggle to protect staff and students from asbestos in its aging buildings came to a head with federal criminal charges and an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department to take care of the problem once and for all. The Justice Department alleges that the Philadelphia School District
More
A couple of weeks ago, I visited the Comcast Technology Center. It was my first time inside that gleaming skyscraper, designed to knock your socks off with escalators rising above “Exploding Paradigms,” a sculpture of mirrored triangles that the company describes as “a steel vortex heading into the sky.” Just past the top of the
More
On Oct. 2, 2025, a swamp sparrow smacked into a glass door at the Independence Visitor Center and fell dead onto the entryway’s pavement. A volunteer window collision monitor with Bird Safe Philly found the bird and documented its demise. Volunteers found four dead or stunned birds that morning, with an additional 13 logged by
More
On Sunday afternoon I made the mistake of turning on a football game. For twenty minutes I sat on the sofa and watched about 18 minutes of advertisements and replays interspersed with about two minutes of actual game play. I used to spend hours doing this on Sundays, but over the past 20 years, I’ve
More
In early September I dropped by the West Philly Tool Library to return a detail sander I had borrowed for a canoe I’m working on. I can’t remember the last time I used a detail sander before that, and I imagine it will be a while before I need to use one again. The same
More
A human wrote this, and a human edited it. A human laid out this page too. I could have asked one of the popular generative artificial intelligence models to compose a 600-word essay, in this case about the concerns a middle-aged writer and editor holds about a flood of environmentally destructive new technology that threatens
More
I parked my bike at nine in the morning on a heat-dome summer day and walked down the path into the University of Pennsylvania’s James G. Kaskey Memorial Park (better known as the BioPond). Under the tree canopy I immediately felt cooler after my sweaty bike ride. I paused to admire a stately American elm
More