In June, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro stood on the lawn of the historic Jackson Mansion in Berwick, Columbia County, to make an announcement in the works for nearly two years: Amazon, he said, would spend $20 billion to build two cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) data centers in Pennsylvania, one in Bucks County and
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I’m one of the last to arrive, which means the full spectacle of the protest hits me at once as I come around the bend. A crowd of 150 people holding banners and signs surrounds a massive inflatable of CEO Tim Buckley on the lawn in front of the Malvern headquarters of Vanguard. The likeness
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Like many American cities, Philadelphia is built on land that wants to be wet. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) Park sits in a particularly soggy corner, right at the junction where the Schuylkill River rushes into the Delaware. The park is perforated by several lakes and water channels, and flooding regularly renders pedestrian walkways impassible. Over
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Since Philadelphia’s 30th Street Amtrak Station announced in late March that it would switch from steam power to gas boilers, activists have been pushing back on the station’s claims that the move aligns with a sustainable future for the city. “That is simply a false narrative,” Clean Air Council Executive Director Joseph Minott says. “Everyone
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Flooding is the reason for the FDR Park master plan. It also could be its undoing. No one denies that FDR Park has been growing soggier over the years. Paths that once led walkers around the “lakes” now run through marshy ground at the edge of the water. Stormwater flows off of I-95 and the
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I’d been hearing about the South Philly Meadows for some time, so I finally paid a visit. I biked from Center City — a very manageable 29-minute ride — and started to wander. The sound of traffic on Pattison Avenue began to fade with every step into the open, unplanned expanse, and the birdsongs grew
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Grid has been hearing a lot lately about FDR Park. After our series of articles on the development of the Cobbs Creek golf courses, Philadelphians concerned about the fate of the South Philly Meadows got in touch to defend the park’s former fairways against a plan to develop the beloved greenspace into a complex of
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Ted pickett counts himself lucky. He and his wife were home when the flooding started. As Hurricane Isaias dumped rain over the Delaware Valley and Darby Creek crested its banks on August 4, 2020, he and his wife got to work. “We were able to mitigate a real nasty thing,” Pickett says. For five hours
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The Canadian high arctic is a great place to raise a family—if you’re a bird like the red knot. Bugs are everywhere, and the summer sun stays up pretty much all day, which means you can eat nonstop. Thanks to the long and brutal winter, there isn’t much competition from other sorts of insect-eating animals
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Philadelphia’s built environment is responsible for about 70% of its carbon footprint, making it a key sector to tackle in order to meet climate goals. Building new, efficient buildings is part of the solution, but experts say there’s a practical need to work with buildings that already exist, a large percentage of which are individual
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The challenges of climate change can seem overwhelming, but the city can take clear steps to protect the most vulnerable renters and homeowners while enforcing existing development standards. To do this, we need to look inside and outside of the home. When construction or demolition is taking place, dangerous substances like asbestos and lead can
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