I am a 15-year-old resident of Chestnut Hill, and I live near Wissahickon Valley Park. In 2022, I started the group Monarch Defenders, which aims to plant native pocket meadows in Philadelphia and beyond to support endangered monarch butterflies and other pollinators. One of our local meadow restoration projects was done in partnership with Friends
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Running a grassroots environmental justice organization can be difficult, but you don’t have to do it alone. Here are ten resources for groups looking to build their efforts and connect with wider networks. The Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University offers training for students and community leaders, conducts community-based participatory
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As a child, Jerome Shabazz saw his father transform a vacant lot into a neighborhood garden that produced enough fresh fruit and vegetables to feed their whole North Philadelphia block. “It was just incredible,” says Shabazz, now the executive director of Overbrook Environmental Education Center, located at 6134 Lancaster Avenue in West Philly. Through his
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Imagine walking on an abandoned pier in Philadelphia and entering a lush park surrounded by a mosaic of wetlands. An elegant heron jabs downward with its long, sharp beak, and you peer into the clear water to see what it’s after. Schools of fish swim over mussels amid waving green plants. This is the concept
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It doesn’t take 40 days and 40 nights of rain to flood your basement in Germantown, or — if you live in Manayunk on Venice Island — the first floor of your apartment building. In parts of Camden you might not need any rain at all, just a high tide on a full moon. Global
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When was the last time you got lost in Home Depot, or cursed the amount of time it took to walk from one side of Walmart to the other as you checked off the items on your shopping list? The term “big box” captures their shape, but possibly understates their scale. A Walmart Supercenter and
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What’s the size of a toaster and uses three times the energy of an average Pennsylvania household? That would be a cryptocurrency mining machine — a computer that runs 24/7 and spits out numbers in an attempt to solve complex problems, creating proof-of-work cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, as a result. “We have companies that have 80,000
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In this issue we take a closer look at how environmental problems disproportionately affect communities of color, and particularly low-income communities of color. More than those of whiter and more affluent communities, their residents breathe air poisoned by industrial facilities like refineries or by the tailpipes of unending lines of cars and trucks. Often homes
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Antonette Russell’s house, like many others in Grays Ferry and neighborhoods across the city, has been in her family for decades. Her grandmother, community leader Irene Russell, was the first in the family to own the century-old, two-story brick row house on South Napa Street. The matriarch famously worked to improve nearby Stinger Square Park,
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Why is it that low-income and communities of color bear the brunt of industrial pollution? And when environmentally hazardous facilities move into their neighborhoods, why don’t people leave? These are some of the questions that guide the environmental justice movement, which seeks to address the disproportionate environmental harm marginalized communities face. Dorceta Taylor, professor of
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