Roughly half of the Swarthmore College field hockey team’s away games last season were played on “field hockey turf,” a water-based artificial turf standard for the sport. But because the college’s Clothier Field Stadium is “field turf” — which head coach Hannah Harris says varies widely from location to location and can affect player performance
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Update: Would you like to weigh in on the EPA’s proposed dissolved oxygen standards in the Delaware River? The public can provide comments about the proposed regulation changes through the EPA website no later than February 20, 2024. By Meg McGuire and Katherine Rapin In December 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency made a bold
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Update: On February 1, 2024, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a preliminary permit to York Energy Storage, LLC for the pumped hydroelectric storage project the company is proposing in York County. The preliminary permit gives York Energy Storage priority for building a project on the site (essentially calling dibs) and opens up a
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Tighter air pollution limits announced by the EPA on February 7 should have Philadelphians breathing easier. The new rule sets the limit, averaged over a year, of nine micrograms of tiny soot particles per cubic meter of air. “This final air quality standard will save lives and make all people healthier, especially within America’s most
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I am standing in the Meadows, at the southwest corner of FDR Park, in a 33-acre mud pit roughly the size of eleven city blocks. Where once stood a mature woodland, now stands a vast strip of nothing—with an unimpeded view of I-95. The pit is prickled with hundreds of almost indiscernible, twiggy saplings. I
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Nestled into the vast urban sprawl of Northeast Philadelphia sits the 1,600-acre historic green oasis known as Pennypack Park. Take a walk through the komorebi — the Japanese word for the dappled light created by sunshine filtering through trees — and you will find a hillside nook enclosed by deer fencing and tall tulip poplar
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I am desperate for American chestnut trees to make a comeback, even though I know that it’s not happening anytime soon. I long to see our woods as they were 150 years ago. The forager in me misses the chestnuts I never got to gather from the forest floor. As Jessie Buckner writes in her
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By Meg McGuire and Katherine Rapin In December 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency made a bold move for the Delaware River, proposing to raise the water quality standards in the estuary for the first time since the Clean Water Act of 1972. This upgrade would increase requirements for dissolved oxygen levels among the foundational
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Skeptics of the green energy movement have always asked: What do you do when there’s no sun for the solar panels and no breeze to stir the blades of the windmill, but you still need power? Batteries can store excess energy created when the conditions are favorable to be used for precisely those times —
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In a scene from the PBS docuseries “NOVA: Chasing Carbon Zero,” Chef Chris Galarza removes an ice cold frying pan from a freezer and places it on an induction burner. Only a moment later, he tosses some chopped peppers in the pan, which immediately start to sizzle. This impossible-seeming trick is one that Galaraza has
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