Delaware Riverkeeper Maya K. van Rossum always knew 45 feet was a stopping point on the way down to 50. As head of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, she led a three-decade battle against the Port of Philadelphia’s plan to deepen the Delaware River’s main shipping channel. Despite environmental concerns and a lengthy lawsuit, the project
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In 2018, at 42 years old, I finally became a homeowner. I had landscaped my previous rental properties, only to have contractors destroy the plantings, or I would move, wondering if my plants persist. Now, I had autonomy over my property and could alter the grounds as I saw fit. More accurately, I had the
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So you want to save the world? Start small: save your backyard. That’s the message University of Delaware professor Doug Tallamy has been trumpeting for decades. His work in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology fuses scientific scholarship with rhetorical flair, packaged into practical advice for everyone who owes their life to an ecosystem
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Gardening was woven into Victor Young’s life at an early age. His mother and aunt introduced him to the concept of growing your own food as he helped them in their gardens as a kid. The West Philly resident tried to carry these lessons into adulthood — but not without hitting some obstacles. “I was
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Most mornings, Victoria Miles-Chambliss walks down the street from her home in Kingsessing to the Cecil Street Community Garden to drink a cup of coffee. Among the newly-planted native trees and echinacea plants, she sees something that was once a rare sight in her neighborhood: birds. “Our block has really changed since we put in
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Bekah Carminati spent her childhood making mud pies and inspecting insects in her backyard in Montgomery County. When she grew up, she took up landscaping as a way to channel her love for craft and nature. But there was a problem. The company she worked for insisted on applying black dyed mulch, planting annuals and
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From April 26 to April 29, Philadelphia and its adjacent counties will be competing against cities around the world to recruit the greatest number of people to find the most species in their regions. Using the iNaturalist app as a tool, the City Nature Challenge encourages us to explore and document the biodiversity right where
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By Noah Raven and Francis Raven We filled our backpacks with over a dozen trees: chestnut oaks, black cherries and red mulberries, as well as two shovels, a pair of clippers, two pairs of gloves and several wooden stakes to label each of the seedlings. Our goal was to plant them in a degraded area
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A keen observer can sometimes hear a “boom” over the row houses on summer evenings in Philadelphia. The sound marks a male common nighthawk defending his territory, flexing his wings as he dives. The insect-eating birds nest on flat, gravelly surfaces. These can be bare patches of ground in a forest, but they can also
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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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