By the Philadelphia Climate Justice Collective (Mantua Civic Association, SEAMAAC, Overbrook Environmental Education Center, Esperanza, and The Environmental Collaboratory at Drexel University) Philadelphia is heating up — and too many of our neighbors can’t escape it. In parts of North, West and South Philadelphia, summer temperatures can soar 20 degrees higher than in greener, wealthier
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Could anything be worse than an early spring? In February, as we shivered under a shell of icy snow, we all looked forward to the melt. We imagined saying goodbye to our parkas and snow boots so that we could swap them for linen shirts and sandals. When that April heat came, we took to
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Farmers are worried, but they don’t want to talk about it. Evidence is mounting that the nutrient-rich sewage sludge many have applied to their farmland for decades as a low-cost fertilizer often contains perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, a class of “forever chemicals” that resist degradation in nature and are hazardous to human health. Typically vocal
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When Grid visited the LandHealth Institute (LHI) nursery in May, community nursery operations lead Sara Mae Henke and native plant nursery associate Marcelino Smith were repotting hundreds of tiny bee balm plants from flats into pots to prepare them for sale. Behind them rose the arching end of a high tunnel greenhouse sheathed in plastic
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Ihad expected the logs, half-deflated basketballs, plastic bottles and other assorted urban debris when I tagged along with a crew from the Philadelphia Water Department tasked with cleaning out the Fairmount Dam fishway back in 2012. What I hadn’t expected was to see the workers pull out two flathead catfish the size of toddlers. The
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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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Flanked by cardboard signs reading “Free 5-Minute Tuneups” and “We Come to Your Bike!” Lauren “Mittens” Mitten lifted another bike — one of about 25 that day — onto a stand under the bright sun and got to work. Mitten, owner of The Mittens Pop Up Bike Shop, spent the afternoon of May 16 outside
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“The Weight of Time,” a Morton Contemporary Art Gallery exhibition of paintings by 10 artists serving life sentences at Montgomery County’s Phoenix prison, lays bare heartache, hope and the crushing force of hour piling upon hour. “I served 20 years with [the artists],” says Eddie Ramirez, who was formerly incarcerated at Phoenix. “We painted together
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From April 24 to April 27, Philadelphia and its adjacent counties will strive to recruit people to find as many species as possible, alongside hundreds of other cities around the world. Using the iNaturalist app as a tool, the City Nature Challenge encourages us to explore and document the biodiversity right where we live while
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In the nine years Julia Jackson lived in Manayunk, just a few streets from the Leverington Avenue bridge, she witnessed her fair share of flooding — and Venice Island residents using the bridge to evacuate from their homes during floods. When she saw that the paper mill site at the island’s northern tip had been
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