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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Recently my family tried out a new card game, Aqua Marooned! We are big fans of old classics like Uno, and we try out new games from time to time, usually when they end up in the gift pile on birthdays or holidays. Aqua Marooned! showed up at the Cobbs Creek Community Environmental Education Center,
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At the first hint of spring in March, thousands of voices ring out from our ponds and wetlands. It might still feel chilly to human skin, but the thawing ground and lengthening days tell hordes of frogs that life is returning to the earth. It’s time to get it on. Each male wood frog, spring
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February is environmental Justice Month, a fitting time for Philadelphia to launch its Environmental Justice Advisory Commission. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin or income, with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws,
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Sometimes a forest can feel like a time machine. A walk in the quiet, shaded woods takes you back to a world before there were crowded streets and computer screens. But in early January, as I walked through the Haddington Woods section of Cobbs Creek, I took a trip to what might be our future.
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By Nic Esposito After the credits rolled on Adam McKay’s new film “Don’t Look Up.”, I lay in bed for the next two hours, heart and mind racing as I tried to process the film. It could have been an allegory for the pandemic, plastic pollution or a number of other global crises that scientists
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This year, the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) celebrated 10 years of Green City, Clean Waters (GCCW), a 25-year plan that seeks to improve water quality in our creeks and rivers by using rain gardens, tree plantings and other green stormwater infrastructure to soak up stormwater. Sixty percent of our city is served by an old
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In early November Troy Bynum bagged his first deer and shared a photo of it on social media. Bynum, a tech worker from Mount Airy who is also a wildlife photographer, shot it with a crossbow as part of the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum’s Mentored Archery Deer Hunt. “A lot of people
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Tapeta Mayson, Philadelphia’s 2020-2021 poet laureate, knows that residents of Germantown can have mixed feelings about water. The area is susceptible to flooding during heavy rains and the loss and displacement that sometimes comes as a result. A native of Liberia who grew up in North Philly and Germantown, Mayson—in addition to being a poet—is
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On a cold February morning, a new birding group huddled up at the John James Audubon Center in Audubon, Montgomery County. Though there’s nothing remarkable about birders getting together at the museum, the former home of America’s most famous birder, what was remarkable was what they were celebrating—the launch of a more accessible kind of
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On a walk along Cobbs Creek in West Philadelphia I inspected some old ruins. On the opposite side of the creek I could see the tall earth bank interrupted by a stone block wall, covered in some parts by crumbling concrete. I walked to the water and found I was standing on a matching surface.
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