Sitting by the front door at my house are a couple bags of old toys. The next time one of us plans to be near the Goodwill, we’ll drop them off. A few weeks ago I bought our oldest (11) a new/used bike from Neighborhood Bike Works and dropped off two outgrown ones that had
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Over the years I have learned to pay attention to crows. A group of crows — also known as a “murder” — making a persistent racket often points the way to a hawk or owl that they are mobbing, a common behavior in which smaller birds gang up on predators. A few weeks ago a
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Mrs. Brenda Whitfield moved to Eastwick over 40 years ago and settled in a house at the edge of the neighborhood, near the confluence of Cobbs Creek and Darby Creek. At the time she had one daughter and was expecting another. A third followed a year later. Whitfield says there were no fences to stop
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Philadelphia’s government is replete with plans to make the city more environmentally friendly. From climate change resilience, to reducing traffic fatalities, to urban agriculture, the City, its consultants and community stakeholders have spent enormous amounts of time and brainpower contributing to and drafting plans to make this a more sustainable city. It is intoxicating to
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On February 23, 2023, Philadelphia’s Department of Parks & Recreation (PPR) released the Philly Tree Plan: Growing Our Urban Forest. The product of two years of outreach and engagement that gathered input from more than 9,000 people, the plan attempts to chart a course to expand the city’s tree canopy while balancing the benefits of
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Surveyors have begun marking property lines through what some neighbors of the Cobbs Creek golf course had thought were their backyards. Deborah Harris-White, who has lived on the 7600 block of Brockton Road in the Overbrook Park neighborhood for 23 years, says that the orange spray paint and stakes with “property line” written on them
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed limits on six per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in drinking water. If enacted, these limits would require public drinking water utilities to reduce the levels of these chemicals, which have been linked to cancers and other illnesses. The EPA published voluntary limits for some PFAS in June
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A group of 30 community gardening organizations and allies have issued a letter asking the Philadelphia Land Bank to change how it preserves properties for community gardening. At issue is the land bank’s practice of attaching a 30-year mortgage to properties that it gives to garden organizations. The “self-amortizing” mortgages are for the market rate
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You hear birds talking (or at least singing) all the time. Maybe sometimes you have something to say back to a bird, perhaps some select words early in the morning when a house sparrow won’t stop chirping outside your window. For a true dialog, though, visit the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University through
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On February 23, 2023, Philadelphia’s Department of Parks & Recreation released the Philly Tree Plan. Philadelphia’s trees help clean the air, slow stormwater runoff, soak up carbon dioxide and cool a city suffering from rising temperatures. With these and other benefits of trees in mind, in 2008 Mayor Nutter set a goal of making sure
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