A red-bellied turtle basking on a log next to a pocket of wetlands at Point Breeze on the Schuylkill River doesn’t know that it is threatened, legally speaking, or that its home is tiny compared to the once-expansive ecosystem that used to stretch far beyond its current territory. The controversy over a planned warehouse development
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In the 340 years since Philadelphia’s founding, the city’s landscape has constantly shifted, as waves of development and redevelopment shipped out with the old and in with the new. Unfortunately, on many occasions across the city, transitions went terribly wrong. Consider Logan Triangle, a 35-acre site in North Philadelphia where developers filled in a creek
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It’s hard to know which battles to choose. We are confronted with such an overwhelming list of environmental problems (global warming, biodiversity loss, air pollution, environmental racism, sewage flooding into our rivers…) — not to mention all the interrelated social ills such as systemic racism, poverty and unabating gun violence — that we can excuse
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The renovation of the Cobbs Creek Golf Course hit a small hurdle on May 10 as the Cobbs Creek Foundation sought approval from the Philadelphia Art Commission of the next phase of its construction, a pumphouse and reservoir for irrigating the golf course, with the commission asking the foundation to return at a future meeting
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On May 11 the EPA proposed carbon emissions standards limiting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. If adopted, the standards would reduce total carbon dioxide (CO2) by 617 million metric tons — the equivalent of reducing the annual emissions produced by 137 million passenger cars — through 2042. The rule would also reduce particulate emissions
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On April 15 the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education announced that it had parted ways with executive director Michael Weilbacher. Reached by Grid for comment, Weilbacher, who had run the organization since 2011, responded by email with a statement. “I am so proud of what the Schuylkill Center’s staff accomplished over the last 12 years
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If there’s one thing all Philadelphia’s mayoral candidates can agree on, it’s that Mayor Jim Kenney botched the water crisis that wasn’t. On the heels of a near-crisis that called into question Kenney’s emergency response and the City’s ability to protect its drinking water system, the candidates to succeed Kenney in office gathered Wednesday night
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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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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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