Category: Climate Change
Our Broken Spring
March 20, 2023Later today at 5:24 pm, a vertical shaft of sunlight grazes the equator: it’s the first moment of spring. Greetings of the season, usually worth celebrating. Not this year.
For our weirdly snowless winter has already yielded an eerily early spring. While perhaps you’ve already noticed too-early crocuses, daffodils, and even dandelions, our forests have fast-forwarded into spring.
At the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Roxborough, painted turtles started sunbathing on pond edges in February. At the Briar Bush Nature Center in Abington, red-backed salamanders were spotted out of their burrows at the end of February. Skunk cabbage popped…
Lankenau Students Wins Meigs Youth Award
May 9, 2022We established the Henry Meigs Youth Leadership Award in 2005 as a memorial tribute to one of our center’s founders. The award honors students who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, interest, curiosity, or accomplishment in the environmental arena. While nominations were solicited in prior years, the Center held an essay contest to determine this year’s recipient, a contest open to students at Roxborough’s three public high schools-- Lankenau Environmental Science Magnet High School, Walter B. Saul High School, and Roxborough High School-- with the winner receiving a $1,000 scholarship gift.
Candidates submitted essay responses to the prompt “What is the biggest…
December’s Weather: Hot, Hot, Hot
December 27, 2021[caption id="attachment_273548" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Since 1970, temperatures in Philadelphia during The Twelve Days of Christmas (December 25 to January 5) increased over 5 degrees.[/caption]
It’s been a December to remember on the weather front.
Two weeks ago, a series of high-intensity tornadoes tore a 200-mile path from Arkansas and Missouri into Illinois and Kentucky, killing more than 85 people (as of this writing), with many more still missing. But then last week another-- very powerful and equally unusual-- system swept through the Great Plains and Midwest under weirdly warmed skies, spawning hurricane-level winds in Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota, killing another…
The Winters of Our Discontent
December 6, 2021[caption id="attachment_273514" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Wissahickon Valley Park under a recent winter's thin coating of snow. What will this winter bring?[/caption]
Last winter, Philadelphia received over 22 inches of snow at the airport, just a hair above the long-term 20.5 inch average. But that’s 73 times the amount that dropped during the snowless winter before; if anything, our weather has become erratic and prone to extreme mood swings like this.
So I was intrigued by the Old Farmer’s Almanac prediction that this winter would be a “Season of Shivers.” The new season, they wrote, “will be punctuated by positively bone-chilling, below-average…
Mindy Maslin and Philadelphia’s Forest
November 15, 2021[caption id="attachment_273419" align="aligncenter" width="255"] The PHS's Mindy Maslin, founder of Tree Tenders, is being honored for helping plant 20,000 trees across the region.[/caption]
Philadelphia has a bold plan for reforesting the city, making sure 30% of our city is blanketed under a canopy of trees, which will go a long way to mitigating heat waves and cooling our city's rapidly changing climate. It’s also an environmental justice plan, as-- no surprise-- economically challenged portions of the city have fewer trees than more advantaged neighborhoods.
Mindy Maslin supports this ambitious goal. As the founder and director of Tree Tenders, an important…
Another Fall in Philadelphia
November 8, 2021[caption id="attachment_273384" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The changing leaves on our trails.[/caption]
I drive into work one Monday morning in October, enjoying the intense green of the trees here at the Schuylkill Center, and am greeted by a shock of yellow leaves covering the sweet birches looming over the driveway. Further down, I notice that the poison ivy winding up the cherries, too, has turned to gold since the previous Friday. A week later, the maples and sumacs turn to impossibly intense shades of scarlet and amber. Firewood reappears at the grocery store, pumpkins materialize in every shop, and I suddenly develop…
The Amazing Monarch Migration: A Status Report
October 18, 2021[caption id="attachment_273343" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] How are this year’s monarch’s doing? Join us and National Monarch expert Dr. Chip Taylor for our free, virtual event to find out.[/caption]
The monarch butterfly, that large insect perfectly decked out for Halloween-- or a Flyers game-- in its orange and black cloak, undergoes one of the most extraordinary migrations in the animal kingdom. Butterflies across America and even Canada.
The monarch butterfly defies logic, for embedded in a small collection of nerve cells generously called a brain is a GPS directing the insect to fly from Roxborough all the way to a mountain valley…
Something wicked this way comes
July 26, 2021[caption id="attachment_272978" align="alignnone" width="300"] Severe Storms Bring Damaging Winds, Hail and Power Outages to Region[/caption]
Last Wednesday, I was standing in the parking lot of a nature preserve in Blue Bell, wondering what to do-- should I stay and gut it out, or get the heck out of the way?
I was looking up and west, and the sky above me was dark and getting darker, the angry sky of a powerful storm quickly moving in. I thought of a witch’s line from Hamlet that became a Ray Bradbury novel that morphed into a Jason Robards movie: something wicked this…
The New Abnormal
June 14, 2021With the mercury rising into the 90s most of last week, it felt like August already, the air heavy and humid. The bad news, of course, is it’s not only not August, it’s not even summer. The solstice is still a few days off…
Welcome to life in the New Abnormal, the climate changing before our very eyes.
It’s not only getting hotter, it’s getting wetter. The skies opened up last Tuesday evening, flooding the region-- again-- with a dumping, a good downpour here in Roxborough, but a startling 7 inches of rain near Coatesville. For perspective, that was two…
Fate of the World Hinges on a Pickup Truck
May 24, 2021Two news stories appearing on the same day last week were remarkably well timed.
In one, Ford unveiled the all-electric Lightning, the latest in its bestselling F-150 truck series, the world’s most popular vehicle for the last, unbelievably, 43 years, selling more than 900,000 of these monsters. And that truck alone rakes in $42 billion in revenues, twice the revenue of McDonalds, three times that of Starbucks.
And it’s well named. Its twin electric motors take the heavy duty vehicle from zero to 60 in 4.5 seconds. “This sucker’s fast,” noted President Biden in a test spin the day before,…
