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1 week ago | 
gridphilly.com | Bernard F. Brown
Philadelphia’s park system is many things. It is big, but much of it is difficult to access. Some sections are practically ancient, home to historic buildings hundreds of years old; one even dates back to New Sweden. At the same time, the system is constantly being renovated. If you’re lucky, you might have a new recreation center or playground down the street. But too few Philadelphians are so fortunate. A park is not just a plot of land, of course. It is a community.
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1 week ago | 
gridphilly.com | Bernard F. Brown
Every year the Trust for Public Land releases its ParkScore ratings, and every year Philadelphians have something to be disappointed about: how little the City spends on its parks.
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1 week ago | 
gridphilly.com | Bernard F. Brown
In the spring of 2024 the board of trustees of Parks & Rec Heroes, previously known as the Philadelphia Parks Alliance, voted to wind down the organization’s operations. Originally called Friends of Philadelphia Parks, the group was founded in 1983. It lobbied for increased funding as well as a more inclusive and transparent Fairmount Park Commission, which was then the park system’s governing body.
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1 month ago | 
gridphilly.com | Bernard F. Brown
Back in February, The Philadelphia Inquirer published an op-ed by former Mayor Michael Nutter that left me feeling confused. The piece argues for the role of fossil gas in the home energy mix for Philadelphians, because, Nutter claims, renewables are simply too expensive for low-income households. Yes, this is the same Michael Nutter who, in 2009, created the City’s Office of Sustainability and set aggressive energy savings and greenhouse gas reduction targets.
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2 months ago | 
gridphilly.com | Bernard F. Brown
A few years ago a friend moved to the suburbs after decades in Philadelphia. Last week she came over for dinner, and she joked about a chicken bone she stepped over on the sidewalk on her way to our West Philly door. There’s nothing like chicken bones to let you know you’re back in the city. It was a small thing, but it hit me as a powerful statement about litter. Did someone toss that bone out of their car window, not caring that they were littering?
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2 months ago | 
gridphilly.com | Bernard F. Brown
The attendees came out for the living birds at the September 22 “Little Sit” held by the In Color Birding Club, the Feminist Bird Club, Philly Queer Birders, Disability Pride Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Center for Adapted Sports, but John Eskate showed up with dead birds in his bag. Eskate, the volunteer and civic engagement senior manager for The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, brought preserved bird specimens from the research collection.
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Mar 1, 2025 | 
gridphilly.com | Bernard F. Brown
Are we in drive or reverse? The truth is that sustainable technologies are nothing new. The chain-driven safety bicycle (safer than the precarious penny-farthing) grew popular in the late 1800s. Electric cars date back to the mid-1800s, and Philadelphia entered the EV history books towards the end of that century, when locals Henry G. Morris and Pedro G. Salom debuted their Electrobat, a battery-driven carriage intended to compete with horse-drawn taxis.
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Mar 1, 2025 | 
gridphilly.com | Bernard F. Brown
There aren’t as many American bumble bees (Bombus pensylvanicus) as there used to be in the state the insect is named after. The big black and yellow bees are in decline, with the International Union for Conservation of Nature rating the species as vulnerable. Although the American bumble bee might need protection in Pennsylvania, there is currently no government agency able to coordinate its conservation, or that of any other land-dwelling invertebrate (animal without a backbone).
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Feb 1, 2025 | 
gridphilly.com | Bernard F. Brown
I had never heard of the Philadelphia Art Commission back in 2022 when I tuned in to a Zoom meeting about plans to build a driving range at the Cobbs Creek Golf Course. When reporting on a public meeting of a City commission, it’s not uncommon to find yourself waiting impatiently through all the other proposals on the agenda ahead of the item you are there to cover. But in this case everything on the docket was absolutely fascinating to an environmental journalist like me.
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Feb 1, 2025 | 
gridphilly.com | Bernard F. Brown
In 2003 former Tuskegee Airman and pioneering Black journalist Chuck Stone wrote “,” about a Philadelphia boy who bonds with a black squirrel in Fairmount Park. Squizzy was the only black squirrel the boy had ever seen in the park, but visitors today still spot them gathering acorns and running up trees. As Stone wrote in “Squizzy,” black and gray squirrels are simply color variations of the same species, the eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis).
