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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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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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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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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Two beavers sat in the shallows of the Delaware River eating breakfast as I met Jim Fries, project manager at Riverfront North Partnership, for a tour of the living shoreline at Lardner’s Point Park in Northeast Philadelphia. True to their reputation, the large rodents busily stripped the bark off branches they had clipped from willows
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At the start of December, Philadelphia City Council passed a bill to restrict the use of pesticides on public land. Titled “Healthy Outdoor Public Spaces,” the legislation was originally introduced by Councilwoman Cindy Bass to include an all-out ban on synthetic herbicides. This was later walked back to be a restriction in response to criticism,
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My dad used to say, “If you have a simple answer to a complicated question, you’re probably wrong.” In my youth, I strongly disagreed with that sentiment, and, for the most part, still do. Some things are crystal clear, black and white, right or wrong. Saying an issue such as systemic racism or our dependence
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On October 12, Indigenous People’s Day, radio station WURD (96.1 FM/900 AM) held an on-air Environmental Justice Summit in partnership with Bartram’s Garden and From the Source Reporting Collaborative. Part of the station’s EcoWURD initiative, the day-long summit included speakers and panels discussing high-level topics such as leadership in environmental justice as well as grassroots
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Some classrooms keep guinea pigs or guppies as pets, but last year at Cook Wissahickon School in Roxborough, sixth-graders tended young freshwater mussels. “The students feed them and then, when they reach a larger stage, the Fairmount Water Works will place them in a creek,” says Jose L. Ramos, a middle-years reading and English language
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The sun is barely above the horizon when we creep between the trees and quietly enter the blind. I load the arrow into the crossbow, looking eagerly out of the mesh window. It’s the first day of my first hunt. I’ve never killed anything and I’m not sure that I can. “I like this spot,”
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Amidst shots and descriptions of swirling hurricanes, raging fires, and dying ecosystems, the documentary Can We Cool The Planet? begins with the words of climate strategist Jane Long, “We can’t go back, there is no path backwards.” But what if there was? Philadelphia filmmakers Ben Kalina and Jen Schneider, and their team of collaborators from
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