After nearly 40 years of organizing nature walks, park cleanups, tree plantings and trail maintenance, the volunteer group Friends of Pennypack Park disbanded in March 2020. Its dissolution came about after being named alongside the city as a defendant in a personal injury suit, in 2019, filed by the family of a girl injured inside
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“What do you mean you can’t recycle this?” This is a question I get from my 6-year-old son all too often, especially when we’re bringing new items into our home. I want to tell him that we need to figure out an economy that can thrive without such an outsized focus on consumption. But he’s
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Sometimes referred to as the “voice of the Delaware River,” Maya van Rossum has served as the Delaware Riverkeeper since 1994. To her, protecting the watershed has always been deeply personal. She grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and returned to the area after law school to protect the Delaware and its tributaries. Van Rossum
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Eggplant and beets are not the kinds of vegetables Tanisha Muse typically buys, but through a program offering free produce from Sanctuary Farm in North Philly, they are now part of her family’s diet. “It’s still not my first thought to get beets at the supermarket,” says Muse, a West Philly resident. “That might never
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In 2019, after two years of saving, I was finally able to buy the bicycle of my dreams: the Brompton M6. Given Philadelphia’s tight living spaces, and the relentless thieves who often prowl for bikes locked up outdoors, the Brompton—a folding bicycle with 16-inch wheels—is a fantastic choice for the city. Because it quickly converts
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Everyday when I commute to work on my giant orange bike, American cultural values are on full display. There in the bike lane, a UPS truck has come to a halt. An Uber driver is looking at their cell phone, waiting for a passenger. A moving truck is slowly filling up with a lifetime’s worth
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Step into the outdoor space of Sunflower Philly, a community center at North 5th Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue, and you are surrounded by vibrant graffiti and street art. Christian “TameArtz” Rodriguez, art director and community manager for Sunflower Philly, explains that graffiti artists from all over the country and world came together
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When Emily Rodia and Jason Rusnock began pursuing a low-waste lifestyle, they started small. They replaced single-use items in their lives—trading up for things like reusable water bottles and bamboo toothbrushes. Before they knew it, the amount of plastic they put out on the sidewalk each week had dwindled. Three years after starting their zero-waste
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A decade in the making, the South Philly Food Co-op (SPFC) has opened its doors. Leigh Goldenberg, one of the first 100 member-owners at the co-op in 2011, joined before it had even begun searching for store locations. To Goldenberg, investing in the co-op early on was a commitment to a future vision of a
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