Grid Magazine

Grid Magazine Grid: Toward a Sustainable Philadelphia

07/10/2025

Almost any cyclist or pedestrian knows the pleasure of cruising down a trail without a car in sight. Usually, the open-road vibe only lasts for a limited time before the reality of near ubiquitous traffic reasserts itself. The mission of the Circuit Trails, one of the nation’s most ambitious multi...

💧 The morning after Hurricane Ida devastated Manayunk in September 2021, John Hunter stood looking over the intersection...
07/10/2025

💧 The morning after Hurricane Ida devastated Manayunk in September 2021, John Hunter stood looking over the intersection of Main Street and Shurs Lane, watching floodwaters carry away the back deck of the former Mad River building.

“As the waters were flying by, it got to the point where this bar became detached from its foundations and started to move and float,” says Hunter, zoning chair for Manayunk Neighborhood Council (MNC). “This whole bar just floated down the street.”

Manayunk is one of Philadelphia’s most flood-prone neighborhoods. When the Schuylkill River floods, the adjacent corridor east of Shurs Lane — referred to as lower Main Street — can be engulfed by feet of water, as the floodplain extends as far as Station Street, about halfway between Main and Cresson Streets. And projections show that this corridor has extreme levels of flooding risk over the next 30 years.

For years, MNC members have been pushing to transform the lots between Main Street and the Schuylkill River into a resiliency park. Hunter, an architect and Manayunk resident of 35 years, has been working with zoning in the neighborhood for nearly two decades. He maintains that this corridor is simply unsafe for residential development, as there are no evacuation routes from Main Street for nearly a mile from Shurs Lane to where Main Street meets Ridge Avenue.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/07/01/a-resiliency-park-along-manayunks-waterfront-could-beautify-increase-accessibility-and-mitigate-flooding/

✍️ + 📸 Julia Lowe

07/08/2025
💬 George Lakey has seen his fair share of grim political moments. He has, after all, spent nearly seven decades fighting...
07/08/2025

💬 George Lakey has seen his fair share of grim political moments. He has, after all, spent nearly seven decades fighting for civil rights, peace and environmental justice. At 87, Lakey recognizes that now is another one of those moments.

But his own personal experience as an activist and his research as a scholar of political movements — both examined in a 2024 documentary, “Citizen George,” which is now available to watch on Vimeo — tells him that our darkest hours can offer the greatest opportunity for radical change.

Grid spoke with Lakey about the challenges facing the environmental movement under Trump and the enduring power of nonviolent direct action.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/07/01/grid-interviews-legendary-activist-george-lakey-on-his-inspirations-the-current-political-moment-and-what-keeps-him-motivated/

✍️ + 📸 Jordan Teicher

🔌 "Now — the water is boiling,” says Jen Hamilton, calling attention to the pot on her stove. She lifts the pot and plac...
07/07/2025

🔌 "Now — the water is boiling,” says Jen Hamilton, calling attention to the pot on her stove. She lifts the pot and places her other hand flat on the cooking surface. She remains uninjured. “It’s safer!” she exclaims, explaining that her cats used to inadvertently turn on the gas on her old stove by bumping the k***s.

“We are now completely electric,” says Hamilton. With the induction stove for cooking and a heat pump for climate control, she and her husband, Phil Salkie, have eliminated the need for natural gas in their home. They even called PGW to have someone cap the gas line to their house and remove the meter from their wall. “That was a wonderful feeling,” Hamilton adds with a smile.

Electrification, à la Hamilton and Salkie, is catching on. But the International Energy Agency cautions that for electrification to make any dent in global carbon dioxide emissions, energy generation needs to shift to low-carbon sources. Think about it: if you buy electricity from a gas power plant, then your carbon footprint is about the same as if you had burned the gas in your kitchen. So, how do we know where our energy is coming from? And what can we do about it?

Unfortunately, whether you buy energy from PECO or a renewables-only provider, you can never control which generation sources you’re tapping, due to the complexities of the system we call “the grid.” But this doesn’t mean that consumers are helpless when it comes to choosing power sources. Far from it.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/07/02/home-electrification-and-increased-production-of-renewables-are-the-goals-but-challenges-with-infrastructure-policy-and-markets-complicate-the-green-transition/

✍️ Anne Hylden
📸 Chris Baker Evens

Events happening in and around Philadelphia this weekend!SATURDAY, 7.5Grow and Walk Philly: Back for the 5th year, Grow ...
07/04/2025

Events happening in and around Philadelphia this weekend!

SATURDAY, 7.5
Grow and Walk Philly: Back for the 5th year, Grow & Walk Philly is community wellness challenge that combines gardening, exercise, and joy to help community members improve their health, connect with nature, and build meaningful relationships with neighbors.

➡️ Learn More: https://gridphilly.com/event/grow-and-walk-philly-6/

SATURDAY, 7.5
Gardening for Ecological Resilience Tour: Gardening for Ecological Resilience emphasizes practical solutions to modern environmental challenges. Take an in-depth look at the gardens, discover how to create sustainable landscapes with native plants, and learn effective techniques for gardening for ecological resilience.

➡️ Learn More: https://gridphilly.com/event/gardening-for-ecological-resilience-tour-4/

SATURDAY, 7.5
The Intermission Part 2: The Colored Girls Museum is excited to celebrate the start of Women’s History Month and our significant milestone of 10 years in the community. We warmly invite you to join us for Part Two of our thought-provoking exhibition, “The Intermission.” This installment will feature new artists as well as some of our inaugural artists, all coming together to help us celebrate this amazing journey.

➡️ Learn More: https://gridphilly.com/event/the-intermission-part-2/

07/03/2025
🚲 Almost any cyclist or pedestrian knows the pleasure of cruising down a trail without a car in sight. Usually, the open...
07/03/2025

🚲 Almost any cyclist or pedestrian knows the pleasure of cruising down a trail without a car in sight. Usually, the open-road vibe only lasts for a limited time before the reality of near ubiquitous traffic reasserts itself. The mission of the Circuit Trails, one of the nation’s most ambitious multiuse trail networks — right here in our own backyard! — is to provide hundreds of miles of connected car-free paths across the region.

That might look like biking from Center City out to the bucolic woods of Bucks County, or from Camden’s waterfront to Bartram’s Garden, or from Fox Chase to the Pennypack Trail, without ever sharing the road with a motorized vehicle.

Circuit Trails was formed in 2012 by a coalition of nonprofits, agencies and foundations, springboarding off earlier successes like the Schuylkill Banks trail. The vision was to raise the public and political profile of bicycle and pedestrian trails and position the Circuit Trails concept as a high-level regional priority. It’s now overseen by leadership and steering committees; members include representatives from entities like Disability Pride Pennsylvania, Natural Lands, Fairmount Park Conservancy and the East Coast Greenway Alliance.

Patrick Starr, executive vice president of the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, is Circuit Trails’ chair. He has been involved with trail work since the early aughts and was one of the founding Circuit Trails members. The early Circuit Trails coalition set ambitious short- and long-term goals: to have 500 miles of completed connected trails by 2025 and 800 miles by 2040. There were around 225 miles already completed at the time.

Cut to June 2025: there now are 417 miles of fully completed trails with another 88 miles in active design or construction and a number of exciting projects in the planning stages. But with the Trump administration signaling a lack of support for bicycle/pedestrian infrastructure and federal transportation programs, there is new uncertainty about the future of some of these projects.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/07/01/since-2012-circuit-trails-has-made-strides-connecting-the-region-local-governments-and-residents-are-on-board-but-will-the-trump-admin-stymie-its-progress/

✍️ Emily Kovach
📸 Jared Gruenwald

🌎 It’s easy to feel hopeless. A global disaster-in-progress can do that to you. There are 8.2 billion of us humans on th...
07/01/2025

🌎 It’s easy to feel hopeless. A global disaster-in-progress can do that to you. There are 8.2 billion of us humans on this planet, and we are each so tiny, and, on our own, we each have so little we can do to fight climate change and adapt, when adaptation so clearly requires large-scale action.

In this section we hope you learn more about the nuts and bolts of how a shift to renewable energy would have to work, how electricity gets from a fossil fuel power plant or a solar panel to your house via the PJM grid.

Unfortunately federal policy backslides could make it costlier to electrify your home or transportation or to improve the energy efficiency of a property. Going green is a massive undertaking, and it looks like this country isn’t undertaking it.

So what can one 8.2-billionth of the world population do? We hope that the life and work of activists like George Lakey suggests a path forward: Keep trying, even when it feels hopeless.

➡️ Read the full Climate Change Issue now at gridphilly.com!

🌡️ A new climate resiliency plan is in development for Philadelphia, with a new focus: community vulnerability. The work...
06/30/2025

🌡️ A new climate resiliency plan is in development for Philadelphia, with a new focus: community vulnerability. The work is being funded by $600,000 the Office of Sustainability (OOS) received in March from the William Penn Foundation.

The City’s resiliency plan outlines climate change’s impacts on Philadelphia and how the City will meet the challenges they pose. The City aims to reevaluate regional climate projections every five to 10 years, identify vulnerabilities based on the data and, according Abby Sullivan, OOS’s chief resilience officer, devise solutions. A plan was last released in 2015.

The 2015 plan had a “public health” section that touched on heat-related health risks, but discussion of flooding focused on threats to City-owned property rather than to Philadelphians generally. And the plan was developed without community involvement.

That will be different this time around.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/06/27/city-gets-residents-input-about-how-to-weather-changing-climate/

✍️ Gabriel Donahue
📸 Jarosław Kwoczała

Events happening in and around Philadelphia this weekend!FRIDAY, 6.27Summer Fridays in the Field: Practice your scientif...
06/27/2025

Events happening in and around Philadelphia this weekend!

FRIDAY, 6.27
Summer Fridays in the Field: Practice your scientific skills of observation, identification, and questioning with local flora and fauna in the Wagner’s Teaching Garden! The Wagner’s Teaching Garden is our most valuable classroom. Not only is our green space full of pollinator gardens, but it is also a certified Wildlife Habitat, Bird Habitat, and Monarch Waystation—our milkweed plants provide valuable nutrients for Monarch butterflies during their cross continental migration.

➡️ Learn More: https://gridphilly.com/event/summer-fridays-in-the-field/

SATURDAY, 6.28
Tree Tending in Neshaminy State Park: Help reforest 2.5 acres in Neshaminy State Park, PA. This is a reforestation project remediating 2 acres covered by invasive plants back into native habitat.

➡️ Learn More: https://gridphilly.com/event/tree-tending-in-neshaminy-state-parkpa-river-trail-spring-fall-2025/

SATURDAY, 6.29
Birding with Pride with FOW and Philly Q***r Birders: Come celebrate Pride Month in the Wissahickon with a morning of birdwatching and community building! Join Friends of the Wissahickon and Philly Q***r Birders for a gentle hike along Forbidden Drive as we keep our eyes and ears out for birds spending the summer in the park.

➡️ Learn More: https://gridphilly.com/event/birding-with-pride-with-fow-and-philly-queer-birders/

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