Grid Magazine June 2020 [#133]

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Citizen scientists snap the perfect shots

Activists demand a swimmable Delaware

Soul food without the souls

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p. 12

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JUNE 2020 / ISSUE 133 / GRIDPHILLY.COM

T O W A R D A S U S TA I N A B L E P H I L A D E L P H I A

SO , SO CLOSE …

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The prototypes are now being evaluated by Drexel and 3M teams with the goal to receive the FDA Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). We are now manufacturing 100 prototypes for distribution to essential businesses. After COVID-19, we will go back to using these for fresh produce disinfection; so, there is use for these units beyond the pandemic.

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EDI TO R ’S NOTES

by

alex mulcahy

Wasted Opportunity

publisher Alex Mulcahy managing editor Alexandra W. Jones associate editor Timothy Mulcahy copy editor David Jack Daniels art director Michael Wohlberg writers Bernard Brown Constance Garcia-Barrio Siobhan Gleason Gabrielle Houck Alexandra Jones Alexandra W. Jones Emma Kuliczkowski Randy LoBasso Meenal Raval Lois Volta photographers Rachael Warriner Albert Yee illustrators Sean Rynkewicz Lois Volta published by Red Flag Media 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19107 215.625.9850 G R I D P H I L LY. C O M

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In another time, there would be vociferous protests.

But now, as we continue to navigate our newly complicated daily lives… it’s hard to find the time and willpower to speak out.”

our society is faced with so many urgent problems, it’s hard to find the time and willpower to speak out.

As the city opens up, will recycling service be restored? It should be noted that recycling costs the city more to process than trash, and the less often trucks are on the road, the less recycling they will collect.

Second, The Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet was eliminated. That a zero waste cabinet existed at all was progress, but it was a one-man show. How can you make meaningful change if resources aren’t allocated to it? Full disclosure: its director, Nic Esposito, is a good friend of mine—though that friendship was tested when Grid published a story in January 2019 documenting the city’s bungling of their recycling contract. In the story, we talked about how the city not only did not have a recycling department; for a while it did not even have a recycling director. Recycling is clearly not a priority.

Finally, our cover story. We were this close to the plastic bag ban, but doubts about implementation, especially as a well-funded industry group seeded consumers with fear that reusable bags were less safe than plastic bags, have delayed the ban. Which means another billion bags will be used in Philadelphia, some of which will inevitably end up in our waterways.

As we all struggle to make sense of our daily lives, we must also establish, or reestablish, our collective priorities. As our economy staggers, we must realize how many jobs should be devoted to providing food and shelter for everyone, regardless of ability to pay; protecting our air and water; eliminating the use of fossil fuels;, and putting an end to our throwaway society. If we don’t try now, it’s a wasted opportunity.

alex mulcahy Editor-in-Chief alex@gridphilly.com

P O R T R A I T BY J A M E S B O Y L E

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n the wake of COVID-19, priorities are shifting. Suddenly, the food supply chain is front and center on our minds.

Not surprisingly, local food delivery business Philly Foodworks is scaling up, and Primal Meats is going gangbusters.

There is a renewed interest in growing food as well. The subject of our March 2020 cover story, Truelove Seeds, has sold out of inventory that they expected would last them for the next three years. The urge to get more control of our food, and enjoy the therapeutic benefits of outdoor time, is extremely strong.

Some cities are changing their priorities as well, and rethinking urban planning and transportation. Paris is leading the way, banishing cars on some thoroughfares, leaving them for pedestrians and cyclists only. Locally, MLK Drive has been closed, giving us a taste of car-free streets.

But one area that Philadelphia is moving backwards in is addressing waste. As you may have noticed, recycling service in the city has been cut from weekly to biweekly.

This, unfortunately, coincides with a spike in the volume of trash we are creating, as reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer. In another time, there would be vociferous protests. But now, as we continue to navigate our newly complicated daily lives, and

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by

lois volta

DEAR LOIS,

How are you doing?

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ike so many, my small business has been closed since mid-March and I am finding myself contemplating how my identity had become so woven into my work. When my business partner and I first decided to close, we burst into a creative frenzy. It felt good to work so hard building an online platform and preparing ourselves for the massive change ahead.

It felt good until we were flooded with financial concerns, overwhelmed with managing accounts, and we had to accept that the development of COVID-19 could impact our business for years to come. I find myself in a place where I am mourning the loss of my blood, sweat and tears. And now, I am confined to the very place that my work is 4

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focused on: the home.

Although I like being at home, and I am happy that everything has slowed down, I find myself going through the many stages of COVID-coping. Now, more than ever, I am observing how I live; It’s almost like I am watching myself move through space.

I monitor everything everyone touches.

I sanitize everything that comes into the house—I am determined for my home to be classified as a safe space.

At first, this process was excruciating, but now I have accepted it. I still don’t like it, but I am at peace with the process. I have embraced the “new normal” of washing and sanitizing everything; I am determined to keep it up. We can hope that things go back to the way they used to be, but the chanc-

es are, that even if the country fully opens back up, we are still looking at an indefinite amount of time where we have to be vigilant about stopping the spread of the virus.

There was a certain point where I felt too tired to be scared. In a way, I had to surrender to what was happening, accept that life is now different, and learn how to cope in a sustainable way. The house being under control has been a lifeline for me. I have been enforcing many of our new house rules that, as a family, we decided were essential for keeping on top of the house. The most important rule being no complaining about having to do chores. It’s working, but it’s also exhausting. I get tired of being the taskmaster and enforcer, so I am learning how to delegate and walk away. I ultimately find this empowering.

Gender equality hasn’t been as big an issue for us; my husband is becoming increasingly understanding as we navigate where we fit in. I think all couples should take this IL LUSTRATIO N BY LO I S VOLTA

P O R T R A I T BY J A M E S B O Y L E

TH E VO LTA WAY

time to talk about roles in the home and take these conversations seriously. Home is better when we are all getting along, obviously.

Sometimes, “getting along” is the hardest thing we’ve ever done.

Listening to my husband’s exasperation, when I am already feeling overwhelmed is really challenging, and he feels the same about me. Sometimes I think, “If we can’t be there for each other now, what is the point?”

Although, I am finding that when we listen deeply and respect each other’s point of view, without judgment and without taking anything personally, we show up in a deeper, new way. It seems simple enough, but that is hard for us. It’s difficult for me to hear how I have been hurtful without being defensive. It’s a gift to one another to forgive, and choose to turn away from hurtful behaviors. We do this for each other, and it’s not easy.

Through all of the COVID-coping, we are learning how to fall in love again and again with new skills that are being born out of this pandemic. We are addressing fears, disappointments and loss. We are also dreaming in ways that are calling us to action: the kind of action that makes me want to change, grow and evolve. I am ready to leave whatever pre-COVID drama in the past. Our world will never be the same; our home will never be the same as well. The way our home is changing is for the better, and I will find ways to be thankful amidst dark times.

When it comes to sharing the load of the house, the kids and the garden, we have an opportunity to be there for each other without words. We can work out our differences with acts of service to each other and kind words. I feel certain that what we are learning during this time will make us stronger.

This keeps my heart filled with hope, and resentment melts away.

Now that we’re settled in, and not going anywhere for awhile, we might as well do the work. Dig in, plant a new seed and do the maintenance.

We reap what we sow. #GrowWithGrid

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lois volta is a home consultant, musician and founder of Volta Naturals. loisvolta.com.

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Clean Laundry Clean Planet Clean Slates

EN ERGY

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meenal raval

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still remember weeping at 13 years old as I ate my first tasteless sliced tomatoes in America, our new home.

My South Asian family reassured me that it would taste better with some Tabasco sauce.

I now know that migrant workers in California grow, pick and pack produce that travels thousands of miles to feed us in Philly, a city where the majority of people are people of color. On top of the fact that this process hasn’t been fair to the migrant workers in California, the produce that arrives here had been picked and processed days and weeks ago, leaving diminished nutrition. Along the way, refrigerated diesel trucks add to the greenhouse gas emissions in each state that they pass through.

After these trucks arrive at local distribution hubs, more diesel trucks are used to bring our produce to a nearby grocery store.

Then, there are the emissions used by your car or bus trip to that store.

We have to ask: Who does this arrangement benefit? Certainly it’s not the workers, the consumers or the climate.

My recent involvement with the Cooperative Gardens Commission has made me even more aware of food issues for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC).

Most of us who are people of color—including immigrants from Asia like myself—often cannot easily find the cultural foods we seek, nor do we have access to land on a family farm to grow it ourselves.

This is partially due to federal policies in the 1950s and ’60s that took around 12 million acres of land from Black Americans, according to a September 2019 article by Vann R. Newkirk II in The Atlantic. And of course, Native Americans were robbed of the vast majority of their land by the turn of

the 20th century. Today, our foods are often not found at the local farmers’ markets or supermarkets. My family regularly makes trips to Asian grocery stores to find grains and produce from India and other far-flung places.

The great pause offered by COVID-19 is giving us a chance to open up land access to BIPOC communities and allow more of us to cultivate our food cultures.

It reminds me of the Bhoodan Movement in India in the 1950s, which invited major landowners to gift their land to the landless to use for farming.

We could easily do the same thing in Philadelphia.

This is the time where the 40,000 vacant lots in the city could be cleaned up and turned into sites for fresh produce for the community—spaces where neighbors could feed each other. This is how we can recast the role of eminent domain—where city-owned land is used for the good of the community.

For those of us with land—whether at our homes, workplaces or places of worship—we imagine raised beds and bountiful produce and fruit trees in cemeteries and church lawns, nourishing the surrounding community. Consider inviting others to grow food on your land in exchange for some harvest for your own table.

Our city could begin by opening up access to stockpiled wood chips, leaf mulch and topsoil in Fairmount Park. Or making a public commitment to the demands made

by Soil Generation’s Threatened Gardens campaign, which includes initiatives that push for community ownership of gardens.

With COVID-19 keeping us in lockdown, it is time to think about building regional self-reliance.

meenal raval is a catalyst for the Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 campaign and Solarize Southeast PA, which assists those transitioning away from fossil fuels like coal, oil and gasoline.

P O R T R A I T BY J A M E S B O Y L E

We can help communities of color and the planet by shortening our food-supply chains

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says, “We only care about species that are attractive to us. But we kill everything else, right?”

It’s this holistic view of the world and focus on sustainability that caught the eye of Washington state native Keaghan Caldwell.

“It was really difficult finding a program in which sustainability was the focus and architecture was the lens through which Free online course offers an entrée into sustainable design it was studied. A lot of the time you find e’re not hardwired for susFor example, just how do we get beyond our architecture programs that state they are tainability,” says Rob Fleming, dibiological impulses to feed ourselves so that sustainably minded, but after you evaluate rector of the Sustainable Design we can focus on the future? their curriculum, [you discover] they only Program and associate professor at Fleming sees the key to our progress— offer a few credits in those topics. JefferThomas Jefferson University. “We’re and ultimately our survival as a species—is son’s program drew my attention because hardwired to get food, now!” the cultivation of four specific types of emthe curriculum looked like it was different.”

Fleming is one of the true pioneers of pathy.

While his curiosity was piqued by what higher education’s sustainability movement.

The first type of empathy he calls “empahe read, it wasn’t until he took Principles He began teaching full time in 1996 at Jefthy across time.” He asks, “How do you care and Methods for Sustainable Design online ferson, where he developed the undergradabout people that haven’t been born yet?” that he was ready to commit to the program. uate sustainable design studio, one of the The second empathy is “empathy across “While I felt like the program might have first in the U.S., which ran until 2007. Later space.” Fleming continues, “How do you been a good fit, graduate school is expensive that year, he co-founded the award-winning care about people that don’t live near you? and it meant moving my family across the Master of Science in Sustainable Design and For example, many villages near the North country. The online class allowed me to test assumed the position of program director. the curriculum, interact with Rob and ultiPole are sinking. mately make the decision to attend school On Monday, June 1, Fleming will be conWho cares?” ducting a free 15-week online course called Third is “empathy across difference.” “We in Philadelphia.”

Principles and Methods for Sustainable are hardwired for bias,” says Fleming. “It’s Caldwell has always been interested in Design, offered by The College of Architecbuilt into us to fear others that are different buildings, but as an undergrad he earned ture and the Built Environment (CABE). from us, even the slightest difference. And a degree in environmental science. Despite This course is open to anyone interested in we know empirically that if you’re in a disthe unrelated education, he pursued the criminatory environment, you can’t perform building track within Master of Science in pursuing a graduate degree.

Like any good designer, he’s keenly interto your highest level. So we Sustainable Design. He gradested in human behavior and motivations. uated in 2019 and is currently need to learn how to work He relishes posing provocative and chalpast those primal impulses.” working for ArchEcology, a lenging questions, and then digging deep Finally, there is “empathy green building design firm in with the students to search for the answers. across species.” Fleming Seattle. He is a LEED Green Associate and is also working on his AP certification.

“I did a little bit of archiRob Fleming, director of the tecture in my undergrad, but SustainableDesign Program I didn’t have the technical background. It just goes to show that you don’t necessarily have to be an architectural student if this is something that you’re interested in.”

He credits Fleming for helping him find the right path.

“He’s really inspirational as far as driving you to take your interests and figure out how they fit into the greater puzzle.”

Designed To Succeed

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Jefferson alum Keaghan Caldwell, now of Seattle-based firm ArchEcology, was part of the Skagit County, WA, YMCA project that opened in 2019.

THE MISSION OF Jefferson’s College of Architecture and the Built Environment is to educate the next generation of design and construction professionals to create an equitable and sustainable future.

Learn more at Jefferson.edu/Grid.

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bike talk

Middle of the Road A look at the anti-motorist, anti-bike path views of the late John Forester

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ou might not be familiar with the work of the late John Forester, but if you ride a bicycle, he’s had a huge impact on your safety and the way you interact with the roadway.

The godfather of “vehicular cycling,” Forester promoted the idea that cyclists should use the road just like any other legal vehicle, and that bike paths—paved paths designed specifically for bicycles—are dangerous and should be outlawed.

Forester died in April, at age 90, but his legacy lives on.

Every time you ride your bike on a street and get honked at by a driver trying to pass

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you, that’s Forester’s work in action. Why? Because perhaps the most influential bicycle advocate over the past 50 years wasn’t much of an advocate at all. His 1973 work Effective Cycling promoted the idea that bicycling should be an activity only utilized by the few.

Over the past decade, a great deal of criticism has gone Forester’s way over his idea that riding a bike in traffic is the safest possible way to ride a bike. His research is now considered obsolete—a few decades too late.

I’m not a fan of Forester’s work, but I find that something important is often lost in critiques: his never-ending fight against the supremacy of the automobile.

by

randy lobasso

The way he saw it, protected bike lanes and bike paths were the government-funded admission that cyclists had lost to the car— and he was onto something there.

Forester’s cycling story begins in Palo Alto, California, where, in the early 1970s, a bikeway—or bike highway—was built and a law was changed to force cyclists to use the off-street path instead of the street. An early advocate of biking in traffic, Forester staged a one-man protest in his adopted hometown, cycling in the middle of the street in front of a police officer and receiving a summons. He then began his career advocating against both Dutch-style cycle tracks (what we think of as raised, protected bike lanes) and the cultural and physical dominance of motor vehicles.

A year after his summons, he began writing the book on, and teaching and promoting, his vehicular cycling techniques.

Forester maintained that, in addition to being less safe than riding with motorists, separated bike paths would lead to novice cycling in cities and towns, creating a situation in which cyclists who want to ride fast in the street could not. As Forester’s book gained steam, his theories about vehicular cycling helped stop the promotion of separated bikeways in the United States, even as European cities saw bicycling grow with the promotion of off-street bikeways.

While bicycling groups have promoted cycling as a means for anyone to get wherever they want to go, Forester did not envision bicycle transportation becoming mainstream and widely used. Bicycling is a “minority activity and I didn’t expect it to be any more than that because I knew the difficulty,” he once told a reporter for Momentum Mag. Rutgers University Urban Planning and Policy Development Program and Research Associate John Pucher once noted, “the most far-reaching impact of Forester’s philosophy was getting an effective ban on separated paths written into the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Guide for the IL LUSTRATIO N BY S EAN RY NKEWI CZ

Development of Bicycling Facilities [which] was changed to denounce separated path treatments.”

This libertarian philosophy to road design has kept American roadways from realizing their full potential as safe places to ride bicycles and has led to the rise of both the motor vehicle and fossil fuel industries. Even the densest, flattest cities in the United States are jammed with motor vehicles, polluting our air and parking in pedestrians’ and bicyclists’ rights of way without consequence.

It’s important to note that that wasn’t Forester’s intention.

Throughout his life, he ceded no ground, whatsoever, to car culture. His idea remained, until his death, that if you separate motor vehicles and bicycles, motorists will have free reign to do whatever they want, with little consequence.

“The bikeway system was devised by motorists to provide the physical enforcement of these laws that, motorists think, make bicycling safe by keeping ‘their’ roads clear of bicycles,” Forester’s website claims. “The environmentalists were suckered into this bogus safety argument and now demand

bikeways to make bicycle transportation safe and popular. With the government spending more and more money on bikeway programs, lawful and competent cyclists are being more and more limited to operating on bikeways that are unsuitable for lawful and competent cycling.”

In his death, I give him this: Politicians regularly propose banning cycling outside of bike lanes, often believing they were the first to come up with the idea. Bicycle advocates too regularly have to fight back against governments that propose forcing bicyclists into protected bike lanes. From my experience, bicycles in traffic are seen as a nuisance to motorists, and bike paths are seen as a detrimental sacrifice of vehicle parking.

Protected bike lanes are proposed all the time, but local governments provide little to no funding for them, and advocates are too often forced to beg for small sections of protected bike lanes that have little chance of being built if opposed by people who live on the block where the path will be constructed. And, even if they are constructed, chances are nil that they will connect to a greater network of protected lanes. Protect-

ed bike lanes are often planned on streets where they will have minimal impact on drivers.

While we think of protected bike lanes as wins in cities—because they are—you’d never see a group of motorists forced to show up at a community meeting and make the point for widening a highway so they didn’t have to sit in traffic. It’s simply a given that highways are going to be built, whether the “near-neighbors” want it or not. A bike lane’s construction, on the other hand, can be (and has been) thwarted by the opposition of a single person.

This, Forester noted, is the end result of relying on governments to build us things we think we need.

“Motorists, for their own convenience, denied cyclists important rights, thus making cyclists second-class road users, trespassers subject to discrimination by police and harassment by motorists, and unable to take advantage of the safety and efficiency of obeying the standard traffic rules,” Forester continued on his website.

I don’t subscribe to all of his ideas—but Forester’s philosophy was probably right.

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urban naturalist

Despite the pandemic— or perhaps because of it—the 2020 City Nature Challenge was a local and international success.

Science in the Time of covid-19 City Nature Challenge shifts from competition to by bernard brown collaboration amid pandemic

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ooking back at the start of the pandemic, I’ll remember everything closing in March. Walks around my neighborhood took me past locked storefronts with apologies taped to the doors, and almost every email announced a cancellation. I got an email about the City Nature Challenge the evening of March 12.

The City Nature Challenge (CNC) is a worldwide competition among cities to get as many people as possible engaged with nature during a four-day period. This year the dates were April 24 to 27. The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles 10 GR ID P H IL LY.CO M JU NE 2 0 20

County coordinate the competition globally, using the app iNaturalist as a platform. Philadelphia (the city as well as the six counties it borders) first took part in 2019. As a member of the local organizing committee, I had been working since last summer on the 2020 CNC, as had the other coordinators.

“In February we were doing our regular organizer call,” recalls Lila Higgins, senior manager for community science at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, “and we were listening to our organizers in China say, ‘We can’t go outside.’ In the Philippines, they were not allowed to gather in groups. At that point I thought this is never

going to happen in the United States—and then poof, everything changed.”

I was relieved to see that the March 12 CNC email did not actually cancel the CNC. It only cancelled the competition, shifting instead to an international collaboration.

The message, which we passed along to our local partners, also recognized that this year participants would take part individually.

The CNC usually features facilitated group events such as nature walks and BioBlitzes, in which participants gather and try to document as many species as possible. This year, if participants couldn’t take part in group events, they could do it by themselves. If travel was out of the question, the neighborhood park or even the household garden was also worth exploring.

“We were planning to host at least one guided walk on the Belmont Plateau,” says Lindsey Walker, a volunteer and environmental program manager for the Fairmount Park Conservancy. The Conservancy had planned to use the CNC to focus attention P HOTO G RAP HY BY RACHAE L WARRI NER

on East and West Fairmount Park.

“There are lots of trails that people aren’t familiar with. We thought this would be a great way to get people out there and to start exploring,” says Walker. With the walk cancelled, “we offered prizes for the people who made the most observations in East and West Fairmount Park.”

Weather turned out to be our biggest challenge once the City Nature Challenge opened.

Saturday, April 25 was pleasant and sunny, but Friday, Sunday and Monday were cool and wet. Nonetheless, Philadelphia beat its 2019 numbers for participants taking part (824 vs. 584), observations made (23,707 vs. 13,789), and species observed (1,785 vs. 1,417), the three categories in the previous year’s competition.

Though there were fewer observations worldwide this year than last (about 815,000 vs. 963,000), more participants (41,000 vs.

32,000) observed more species (32,600 vs.

31,000), a success celebrated by the CNC organizers.

“Even in a pandemic, more people are getting outside and getting connected to nature,” says Alison Young, co-director of Citizen Science at the California Academy of Sciences.

“I have a park right behind my backyard, and we took our kids through there and tried to identify as many plants as we could,” says Marie-Luise Farber, of Lansdowne. “We tried to identify every leaf we could find and some bugs.”

I took my family out to the woods near the Shofuso Japanese House and Garden in Fairmount Park West on the afternoon of the final day of the CNC. Though I did not log enough observations to place in the Fairmount Park Conservancy’s competition (iNaturalist user Andrew Conboy took first prize, earning a fanny pack and a $100-level membership with the conservancy), we enjoyed the time outside, looking at redbacked salamanders, miner bees, crayfish and other critters. It was a restorative break after yet another day of telework, remote learning and anxiety. We will continue taking nature breaks, and we hope you can too.

Higgins says this was exactly the idea behind the CNC this year.

“We really emphasized the healing power of nature,” she says. “The pandemic has been hard on us, physically, mentally, emotionally. You can do something healing for you and contribute to science.”

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waterway protection

An Upstream Battle Local environmental groups think the Delaware River should be held by emma kuliczkowski to higher water-quality standards

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his march, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network and other environmental organizations like the Clean Air Council, PennFuture, Environment New Jersey and Clean Water Action petitioned the Delaware River Basin Commission to increase regulations on pollutants discharged into the Delaware River for the sake of those that use the water for recreation.

“As you are aware, the Delaware River has come a long way from its polluted past in the late 1800s to mid 1900s,” the petition reads. “Even as late as 1964, on the order of a million pounds of waste was being freely discharged into the Delaware River every day, and more than 60 percent of that was coming from sewage treatment plants, predominantly from Philadelphia, Camden, and Wilmington. In that same year, the bac-

teria count at Philadelphia’s water intake at Torresdale was 39,300 fecal coliform units per 100 mL. In addition, slaughterhouse waste, chemical plant waste and acidic industrial waste were also freely dumped into the River.”

Thanks to the Commission’s Water Quality Regulations Act, passed in 1967, and the federal Clean Water Act, passed in 1972, the Delaware’s condition has drastically

P H OTO C O U R T E S Y O F D E L AWA R E R I V E R K E E P E R N E T W O R K

Maya K. van Rossum of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network is pushing to ensure that the local portion of the Delaware River is safe for swimming and tubing

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improved in the last several decades.

Currently, the Philadelphia-Camden portion of the river is considered clean enough for surface recreation—like kayaking, paddle boating and canoeing—but not safe enough for people to come into physical contact with the water. The groups’ petition requests the Commission enhance its protections of this portion of the river, which starts at the mouth of Pompeston Creek, in New Jersey, and ends at the Commodore Barry Bridge.

According to Maya K. van Rossum, the leader of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, the point of the petition is to ensure that the Philadelphia-Camden portion of the Delaware River is held to the same water-quality standards as the rest of the river, in order for the water quality to improve enough so that activities that involve primary contact (physical contact) with the water—like swimming, jet-skiing and tubing—would be permitted.

It’s the smart thing to do, she explains, because the river is already being used this way. The petition seeks to hold the commission accountable.

“State and federal agencies and the Delaware River Basin Commission are not recognizing that primary-contact recreation is happening,” Van Rossum says.

“The reality is that people are coming in primary contact with the water,” she explains. “They are swimming in the water, they are jet-skiing in the water, and they’re even doing yoga on paddleboards, where it’s very easy to fall into the water.”

One concern is Philadelphia’s Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) system, which pushes sewage into this section of the Delaware, usually after excessive rainfall, when the high water levels overwhelm the city’s sewers. Philadelphia is certainly not alone in the struggle against the impacts of CSO systems.

According to New York State’s clean-water advocacy organization Riverkeeper, more than 27 billion gallons of raw sewage and polluted stormwater goes into New York Harbor each year through CSOs. Estimates from the United States Environmental Protection Agency state that roughly 19 billion gallons of untreated sewage and runoff entered waterways in Detroit; Cleveland; Toledo; Buffalo; Hammond, Indiana; Chicago; and Milwaukee between 2010 and 2011.

The health of the river is so important to all of us, whether you’re using [it] for recreational activities or you just live in the city and drink our water.”

— ali stefanik , Philadelphia Independence Seaport Museum Other industries guilty of discharging excess contaminants into the PhiladelphiaCamden reach of the river, according to the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, include the Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority, Paulsboro Refining Company, Exelon Eddystone, Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Evonik Corporation and Philadelphia Gas Works. None of the above entities returned our request for comment concerning the petition and their emissions into the river in time for publication.

The Delaware River Basin Commission offers maps on its website that show certain dischargers within the area.

The Philadelphia Independence Seaport Museum is one group that hosts various secondary-contact recreational activities such as kayak excursions and paddle boating within the Philadelphia-Camden stretch of the river.

As Ali Stefanik, assistant director of waterfront and community programs at the Seaport Museum explains, during the warmer months, it usually offers kayak excursions, paddle boating and leadership programs on the Delaware for high school students.

“We try to center all of our programs around the river because the health of the river is so important to all of us,” she says.

“Whether you’re using the river for recreational activities or you just live in the city and drink our water.”

“We want to be cognisant that the river could always be cleaner,” Stefanik says.

The Seaport Museum takes precautions when CSOs occur. After heavy rains, it ceases water-related activities until the water quality is up to standard. The museum monitors the quality of its water regularly through its educational River Ambassadors program.

According to Stefanik, the museum also has a good working relationship with the

Philadelphia Water Department, so it can stay up to date with what’s happening in the river.

The petition has received pushback from industry and government agencies.

Laura Copeland, public relations officer for the Philadelphia Water Department, explains that activities like swimming and tubing are unsafe due to high levels of bacteria, slippery rocks, or potential underwater debris.

“The Philadelphia Water Department is immensely dedicated to working toward the goal of a swimmable river and proud of the water quality progress we have made to date, but we’re not yet in a position that warrants a change in the designated use,” Copeland says.

As of right now, PWD does not plan to make any substantial changes to allow the Philadelphia-Camden stretch of the river to be accessible for primary-contact recreation. However, Copeland says, the water department has already implemented a plan to minimize CSOs that will take place over the next 25 years.

The petition, which was submitted on March 11, has seen no response.

“The Commission has received the letter and petition from the Delaware Riverkeeper Network and other organizations,” Peter Eschbach, director of external affairs for the DRBC says. “Commission staff and the DRBC Commissioners acknowledged receipt of the letter when it arrived and are carefully reviewing the request. A response to the petition is not available at this time.”

Rossum notes that the commission has advanced other requests for natural gas and pipeline companies in a matter of weeks or even days.

“It’s a priority to the people,” Rossum says. “This river belongs to the people. It does not belong to the industry and it does not belong to the port operators.”

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BRING BACK THE BAN story by

siobhan gleason

A look behind Philadelphia’s postponement of its plastic bag ban

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ingle-use plastic bags are designed for a simple purpose: They carry purchased items from a store to a place of residence. After that they are no longer needed, but unlike paper bags, plastic bags do not quickly decompose.

Instead, they linger in our environment—on our streets, in our local rivers and streams, and in our parks and fields.

Though most plastic bags are thin and fragile, their effect on the environment cannot be underestimated. According to the Clean Air Council, Philadelphians use about 1 billion plastic bags per year.

In 2014, Mount Airy resident Brad Maule conducted a project called “One Man’s Trash” in partnership with the Friends of the Wissahickon. Once a week Maule collected all of the trash he found on his long hikes through the Wissahickon Valley Park.

“I picked up all the trash I could carry,” Maule says.

Single-use plastic was an abundant source of litter, including plastic bags. Maule recorded 3,768 total pieces of trash. He found 40 plastic grocery bags, as well as 190 dog waste bags during the course of his project.

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Single use plastics litter Wissahickon Valley Park.

“We had pretty good support for the fee on both plastic and paper. The administration would not support the fee. They thought it would be better to have a plastic ban, and no fee, for people who may have concerns of the city charging a fee to make it harder for residents to purchase products,” Squilla says. Squilla is waiting to see if a fee can be added at some point in the future.

On December 12, 2019, City Council passed the revised bill, and on December

30, Mayor Kenney signed the bill into law.

The law was set to go into effect on July 2 of this year.

However, the COVID-19 crisis has created new impediments to the “Bring Your Own Bag” law. On Earth Day, the City pushed this initiative back to January 1, 2021, saying the original effective date was no longer realistic. On April 1, 2021, retail establishments will be prohibited from providing single-use bags to customers.

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lastic waste usually ends up in the Wissahickon in two ways. Visitors littering is a major problem, but plastic is also carried into the creek through stormwater runoff, which then flows into the Schuylkill River.

“In Philadelphia we are drinking the Schuylkill and the Delaware,” Ruffian Tittman, executive director of the Friends of the Wissahickon, says. Removing plastic waste from our drinking water is an endless task and just another example of how much of it surrounds our environment.

When plastic waste becomes clogged in the sewer system, “It can act as a magnet for other materials and cause a partial or full obstruction of flow,” Lisa Copeland, public relations manager for the Philadelphia Water Department, says. “These obstructions can lead to sewer backups and result in the discharge of sanitary sewage to streets, rivers and streams.”

This ongoing environmental hazard has been a concern of lawmakers for at least 13 years. Councilmembers made two attempts to ban plastic bags in 2007 and 2009, but progress was elusive. After the second failed attempt, the issue was placed on the backburner.

In 2015, Councilman Mark Squilla proposed a 5-cent fee on all single-use bags.

Squilla’s work with environmental groups Clean Water Action and PennEnvironment, among others, inspired him to push for this legislation. At the time, other issues were considered more pressing.

“The administration, they were in the process of putting together the beverage tax. We certainly had a bill that would be supported by a majority of council, but we were asked to put a hold on it,” Squilla says. “We decided to hold off and not move forward until we saw how the beverage tax would play out.”

In 2019, Squilla worked to craft a new piece of legislation. He introduced the “Bring Your Own Bag” bill on June 20, 2019.

The bill amended a Philadelphia law that regulates city businesses and banned single-use plastic bags at the point of sale or for a delivery. In the original version of Squilla’s bill, retail establishments would also charge customers a fee for any single-use bags customers used to transport purchased goods from a store, including paper bags. Customers who used a reusable bag would not be charged a fee.

The plastic industry nationwide is cynically using this health crisis to wedge their foot in the slamming door on single-use plastics.

—stephanie wein, clean water advocate at PennEnvironment

“This is not an announcement we want to make during Earth Week,” Mayor Kenney tweeted.

“The climate crisis and plastic pollution remain very serious threats to our planet and society.”

Not all Philadelphians agree that the initial fee on plastic bags should have been abandoned.

While city officials have been laser-focused on COVID-19 since March and the health crisis has been dominating conversations about how the government can best serve citizens, PennEnvironment clean water advocate Stephanie Wein believes it was a mistake to delay the ban.

“The longer we put it off, the longer this is a problem. This is a unique suspension of an environmental protection,” Wein says.

In response to Kenney’s statement, Wein and David Masur, executive director of PennEnvironment, issued a press release challenging the delay decision. Masur and Wein were surprised by Kenney’s decision to move forward with a delay without consulting any environmental or community groups.

Wein considers a fee to be a practical idea for both customers and business owners.

“Paper bags are a little more expensive than plastic,” Wein says. “This is a way for retailers to recoup that cost. It gets the average person going to the store to think twice and bring the reusable bag, and it makes sure that retailers aren’t really hit. There has been a call for this policy from every income level in the city.”

Jeff Brown, CEO of Brown’s Super Stores, Inc., which owns 10 ShopRites and two

Fresh Grocers in the Philadelphia area, took issue with how the fee would have been collected.

“When the government sets the fee, I think that’s smarter,” Brown says. “It seems like without a fee, it just doesn’t work properly.”

In 2008, certain ShopRite stores, including its Roxborough location, implemented a 2 cents-back bag initiative, which gave customers 2 cents back for each reusable bag they brought to the store. This program was later disbanded due to a low participation rate from customers. “Some consumers liked it, but most consumers didn’t use it.

When confronted with a 10-cent fee, that would be a huge motivation to use reusable bags,” Brown says.

Still, Nic Esposito, the former Director of Philadelphia’s Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet, believes that although the delay was announced suddenly, the decision to delay the ban was the right one. (Editor’s note: This interview was conducted before the city announced the elimination of the cabinet in the wake of COVID-related budget cuts.)

“With the delay, it stinks that there are going to be more plastic bags that are going to turn into litter and be on our streets, but if we tried to push this thing through and roll it out, given all the restraints we have dealing with COVID, it would have gotten swallowed up and not implemented the way it needed to be. The reason for the delay is to do it right,” Esposito says.

Philadelphia is not the only city delaying a plastic-bag ban during the coronavirus crisis. Delays have also occurred in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Bellingham, Washington. San Francisco has gone one step further (or rather, backward), temporarily banning the use of all reusable bags in stores.

According to Wein, the delays are a result of a claim spread by the plastic industry that

plastic bags are safer than reusable bags— an opportunistic narrative used to push back against the recent wave of anti-plastic legislation.

“The plastic industry nationwide is cynically using this health crisis to wedge their foot in the slamming door on single-use plastics,” Wein says.

The Bag the Ban campaign, a program created by the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance (ARPBA), has been pushing the message that plastic bags should not be banned during the current crisis.

The Bag the Ban website tracks pending plastic-bag bans by state. Visitors to the website are urged to take action by signing a petition or sharing how they reuse their own plastic bags. The Bag the Ban website asserts that plastic bags are the safer option during the coronavirus outbreak, but it also claims that plastic bags are better for the environment than reusable and paper bags.

The websites of both the Plastics Industry Association and the ARPBA say plastic bags are the most environmentally friendly choice, claiming the bags “are 100% recyclable.” This is a highly dubious claim, considering the fact that Philadelphia does not recycle plastic bags. Plastic bags have even caused damage to the city’s recycling equipment.

According to Esposito, plastic bags and other plastic films cause about “10,000 hours of lost staff time” per year in the city’s recycling plants, due to the need to shut plants down about three times a day to remove plastics from the equipment.

However, when the Alliance claims that plastic bags are recyclable, it is referring to recycling programs in participating stores.

According to their “Find My Recycling Center” tool, Rite Aid, Wawa, Target, Pathmark and Superfresh all have plastic-bag recycling in Philadelphia.

This information is outdated because Superfresh and Pathmark have been out of business since 2015, after supermarket chain A&P filed for bankruptcy. Rite Aid and Target did not respond to a request for comment about plastic-bag recycling. Wawa’s customer service department says it does recycle plastic bags, handled by Wawa’s vendor, though it is unable to share the vendor’s name.

Esposito does not see these company initiatives as effective methods of recycling bags.

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Only 1 percent of plastic bags will ever get recycled.

—nic e sp osito, former Director of Philadelphia’s Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet

get recycled,” Esposito says.

When the ARPBA calls a plastic bag “100 percent recyclable,” they mean that in ideal circumstances, a plastic bag could be recycled. This may be confusing, since most plastic bags are marked with a recycling symbol around a number 2. The number surrounded by the three chasing arrows on a plastic bag classifies the type of plastic it is made of. Though the three arrows seem to indicate that a plastic bag is recyclable, in practice that is often not the case.

Esposito considers these recycling symbols “confusing by design.”

Both the Plastics Industry Association and the ARPBA did not respond to a request for comment.

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oncerns about reusable bags are shared by some in the city. “There is a big fear that there might be COVID-19 on the bags,” Brown says. At Brown’s ShopRite and Fresh Grocer locations, customers who bring reusable bags are required to bag their groceries themselves.

For M’Annette Ruddell, a resident of Mount Airy and a self-described “bag lady,” these concerns are reasonable during this tumultuous time.

“In this era, being very cautious should be the norm,” Ruddell says. “Ultimately the safety of everyone—the workers and the customers—is the most important thing.”

Ruddell is not worried about her reusable bags carrying germs. She takes care to keep her bags clean, washing them after “every second or third use.” While Ruddell has been using her own bags for 50 years, she has noticed more customers using reusable bags in recent years. When she used to bring her bags to the grocery store years ago, cashiers would sometimes give her looks.

“It would sort of be eye rolling, like, ‘What kind of weird person are you?’ I don’t get that much anymore,” Ruddell says. “It’s 18

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much more commonplace now for people to bring their own bags.”

According to Dr. Julie Becker, an environmental health specialist and member of Pennsylvania Physicians for Social Responsibility, there is no definitive evidence that reusable bags are any less clean than plastic.

“It depends on how the plastic is treated and handled. You can’t say that plastic bags are better than cloth bags. It comes down to who’s packaging the bag, for example the people on the front lines of the checkout.

There have been virtually no studies that looked at virus transmission with regards to the coronavirus and plastic bags,” Becker says. “This is a virus that is transmitted human to human. If you’re smushed in the [grocery store] aisle and not practicing social distancing, that’s the issue.”

One store that has not abandoned its focus on reusable bags during the coronavirus outbreak is MOM’s Organic Market, which stopped using plastic single-use bags in its stores in 2005.

At MOM’s nineteenth location, in Center City, paper bags are the only single-use option for customers, though many shoppers bring bags from home instead. Alexandra DySard, environmental and partnership manager at MOM’s Organic Market, says the chain decided early on “to be a grocery store that protects and restores the environment.”

In 2008, MOM’s implemented a 10-cent credit to encourage customers to bring in reusable bags. Customers get 10 cents back for each reusable bag they use while shopping.

“Our customers bring in about 7,500 bags a day,” Dysard says. Dysard believes the 10cent credit helped shape shoppers’ behavior early on. “I think in the beginning, having those monetary pieces is a great use to get you to start doing it. The monetary incentive is there in the beginning and then it becomes habitual,” Dysard says.

The real question is whether Philadel-

phians can change their habits even when they are not forced to by local government.

Shortly after announcing the ban’s delay, Mayor Kenney’s office also announced that the pilot street-sweeping program will not be expanded due to budget cuts. The street-sweeping program was supposed to eventually collect waste from all neighborhoods in Philadelphia.

Esposito believes the cut to street sweeping will not exacerbate litter accumulation for now. “I don’t view street sweeping as a solution to our issues,” Esposito says. For the time being, if street sweeping would have helped to combat plastic litter, Philadelphians won’t be given the chance to find out. Similarly, the city announced a week later that Esposito’s Zero Waste office would disband June 1.

Tittman anticipates a buildup of plastic waste in the Wissahickon, which will be compounded by the delay, the lack of street sweeping and the necessary suspension of trash pickup by crews of volunteers in the park.

“There’s going to be a lot of trash,” Tittman says.

At the same time, Tittman also trusts that many Philadelphians will do their part to reduce litter.

“There are always some folks in every neighborhood that are committed to cleaning up,” Tittman says.

The title of the “Bring Your Own Bag” bill may be a message Philadelphians can take to heart before the law goes into effect. The act of bringing a reusable bag to the store is an extremely simple and cheap one. By using reusable bags “we’re not reinventing the wheel,” Ruddell says.

Likewise, Squilla believes the law will still be effective if Philadelphians begin using reusable bags now.

“If we can build on the mindset of how can we do things in a way that doesn’t create so much litter, we’ll be in a better place,” Squilla says.

How can we convince Philadelphians to make this choice? Maule has an idea. He has a few reusable bags, but he often uses the same two bags again and again.

“I usually only use the coolest ones. I think that’s the key—to make bags that appeal to somebody, like the Philadelphia Eagles that dudes from South Philly would be okay with taking to the Acme.”

Reusable bags that serve as another way to rep Philly pride? Maybe it’s worth a shot.

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STRONG ENOUGH FOR A MAN Female-founded company offers boots to get the job done story by gabrielle houck

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Soloby started out as a courtroom advocate for women in domestic violence cases.

From there, she graduated from Temple University’s Beasley School of Law and became a trial attorney, helping disadvantaged women and children.

Sometimes we’re not meant to finish how we start, so Soloby decided after spending time in the courtroom, she needed a change of pace. She went back to Temple to get her master’s in communications. There, she met her husband, Ryan, who later became a musician and adjunct faculty member at New York University and Temple.

After both graduating with master’s degrees, the couple was presented with the

opportunity to take over his uncle’s truckdriving-school business. Even though the business was in neither of their fields, they decided to take the risk.

“We decided we both kind of were at a crossroads where we wanted to change our careers, so we thought, ‘Oh, well, if we do this, it’ll be our own business and it’ll be our opportunity to really grow [the driving school],’ ” Soloby says.

It was when Soloby and her husband were traveling and networking to help expand the school that she noticed she never had the right pair of shoes. As an owner of the company, not looking the part didn’t sit right with her.

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ave you ever thrown on a pair of someone else’s slippers to go to the mailbox or put the trash out because you didn’t feel like finding your own?

If you have, then you know how downright foolish it feels to wear shoes that don’t fit properly and that don’t look right. It’s like trying to walk in clown shoes.

That’s why Emily Soloby founded Juno Jones, a company that makes stylish, functional work boots for women.

“I always knew my career was going to be centered around helping women, I just wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to do it,” Soloby says.

One pair of boots at a time, she’s showing women in male-dominated fields that they are seen. The online footwear retailer sells steel-toed boots for women in fields like construction, architecture and manufacturing. Her trendy, Chelsea-style steel-toed boot proves that women don’t need to sacrifice their confidence to protect their feet.

As a long-time women’s rights activist, it is no surprise that Soloby started a business like this. However, her path to Juno Jones was not linear.

Frustrated by clunky men’s shoes, Emily Soloby was inspired to produce stylish work boots for women

I realized this was pervasive across multiple industries and that too many women just don't have the right shoes .”

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—emily s ol oby, founder of Juno Jones

“I’d be at a client meeting trying to represent my company, and when we’d go on the jobsite or the driving facility, everybody would be wearing safety boots and I’d be in my heels,” Soloby says. “I felt like it just undermined my credibility.”

Even when Soloby did wear safety boots, she said they still didn’t feel right. As silly as she felt not wearing the proper protective footwear, she felt just as silly wearing clunky work boots.

Soloby figured there had to be a way to fix her dilemma. So she took her love of shoes, experience gleaned from taking shoe-making courses at Brooklyn Shoe Space and her business expertise to develop Juno Jones.

The company came to life after countless prototypes, fit tests and a Kickstarter campaign, where nearly 200 backers pledged more than $30,000, collectively, in March.

The boots are certified for impact, compression and puncture resistance. They are also made of an elegant but tough locally sourced, environmentally friendly leather.

Before she started her business venture,

Soloby put the idea of fashionable safety boots out to colleagues and friends. When women were sending her photos and videos of themselves in shoe stores unable to find a safety shoe they liked, she knew she was onto something.

“I feel like when a consumer comes to you and is telling you about their issues and you can see their excitement about your idea, that’s when you know you have something and that’s when I knew I needed to do it,” Soloby says.

Originally, Soloby was going to market the shoes just for the transportation industry, but when other women started contacting her, she realized that the issue was more widespread than she thought.

“I realized this was pervasive across multiple industries and that too many women just don’t have the right shoes,” Soloby says.

One of the women who was enamored early on with Soloby’s idea was Jessica Senker, an architect who works in historic-building preservation.

Senker met Soloby when she was preparing drawings for exterior work Soloby needed done to her house in Rittenhouse

Square. It was during that time that Senker got to know Soloby and her mission with Juno Jones.

“Emily had mentioned that she had just started this company and she was getting ready to launch the site, and, of course, I was totally intrigued because I wear boots every day,” Senker says.

One day, on a whim, after the website had launched, Senker decided to look at what Juno Jones had to offer, and she was not disappointed.

“I fell in love with the boots. Having been in this business a long time, I go through boots like crazy, and I hadn’t been able to find a pair of Chelsea boots that actually held up,” Senker says.

The idea of boots that actually fit right was a breath of fresh air for the architecture veteran who remarked that women in her field never have things that fit right.

“Our harnesses never set right, you know our gloves are too big, things just don’t ever feel right for a woman,” Senker says. “So it’s so nice to know we can have boots that will look good, feel good and do what we need them to do.”

Benita Cooper, a fellow architect and interior designer who owns her own business, shared the same sentiment. She wants people to know that these are not just another pair of boots, they’re a symbol of women being acknowledged.

“These shoes are carving out a space for women in construction and other related fields,” Cooper says.

While Cooper is an accomplished architect and business owner, she jokes that modeling has become her new side hustle. You can find Cooper donning the boots on Juno Jones’s Instagram page, @junojonesshoes.

Modeling for Juno Jones meant that Cooper was able to try out a pair of boots before they were for sale.

“To be able to wear them on my work site and not some staged set was incredible and it meant so much to me. Those photos have such a deeper meaning than just promoting the shoe,” Cooper says.

Soloby hopes that her shoes will bring a new norm to women’s safety apparel.

“We have to start realizing that we don’t have to just wear the men’s clothes, and we can actually make clothes for women too,” Soloby says.

Thanks to Juno Jones, women can make their own footprint in this man’s world, and it’ll be a footprint that is comfortable and chic.

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MAKE YOUR BED

• A student plants seedlings in a newly installed garden bed.

High school students build garden beds for Southwest Philadelphia residents

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n a city where arable land can be hard to come by, farmers and students from Sankofa Community Farm are building free garden beds for Southwest Philly residents with aspiring green thumbs.

The farm, located at Bartram’s Garden, has served as a place where neighborhood residents can rebuild relationships with the land and reconnect with traditional African foodways. More than 50 families grow their own produce in its community garden plots, and rows of tomatoes, cabbage, and okra, overlooking the Schuylkill River, are harvested to sell to the community at affordable prices through a weekly market near the garden’s entrance.

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sion of building connections between its community and the land to a new level. In addition to welcoming neighbors onto the farm for educational workshops, youth programs and communal dinners, they’d bring the farm to their neighbors—building low-cost garden beds at the homes of Southwest Philly neighborhoods surrounding Bartram’s.

The idea came straight from community residents who attended their seasonal workshop series—which typically kicks off in March with a session on building your own raised garden beds—and asked if there was a way that the farm could install beds for them.

“The major limiting factors for people are good soil and enough space to be able to grow,” says Ty Holmberg, co-director at

Sankofa. “We try as much as we can to listen to the community and what their needs are.”

Holmberg and co-director Chris Bolden-Newsome worked with youth interns to develop a plan, looking to cities like Pittsburgh, where the Phipps Conservatory has installed more than 225 garden beds for citizens through its Homegrown program, for inspiration. Sankofa was awarded a four-year USDA grant that would fund the construction of 20 beds each season, paying for materials and funding local high school students to take on the home garden beds project as part of their internships with Sankofa.

One evangelist for the program is Adriane Parks, who’s planning to grow red cabbage, collard greens and kale for her smoothies in the bed the program installed at her home.

TYLER HOLMBERG

story by alexandra jones

Parks lives just across from Bartram’s and serves as a member of its community advisory board. As captain of her block, she’s sharing the bounty of her garden with neighbors, some of whom have taken advantage of the opportunity to get beds of their own.

Growing up in Overbrook Park with a green-thumbed mother, Parks says, she jumped at the opportunity to have a vegetable garden of her own.

“I like to know where my stuff is coming from and what I’m putting in my system,” she says. “Once I had mine, I’m showing it off to people and letting them know that these are the best organic vegetables you can ever get.”

Most years, Holmberg and Bolden-Newsome work with 14 students during the school year and 26 in the summer. The Legacy Crew—seniors who have worked on the farm in past years—lead their peers and coordinate the program, from creating an online application for would-be home gardeners to designing flyers.

In 2020, the farmers had planned to have students execute building and installation of beds on site, led by program alum and entrepreneur Hajjah Glover. She started Glover Gardens, her own home garden installation business, in 2016 as a junior at The Workshop School, a project-based public school in West Philly that engages students to design, build and market everything from Christmas ornaments to robots.

And then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. The raised bed workshop that Glover was set to lead was cancelled, as was all onfarm youth programming. Spring unfurled as usual, and the seedlings the farmers had planted before the crisis kept growing—but the future of the program was uncertain.

After weeks of watching and waiting, Sankofa’s home garden beds program sprung back into action in April.

“We know this is really important for people. Markets are selling out, and nutrition is very important,” says Glover. “This is the perfect time for people to realize they can grow their own food.”

Currently, Glover is supervising the construction and installation of home garden beds for neighborhood applicants. If they can find a safe way to do so, Holmberg says, they hope to get the Legacy Crew involved in installations as well. But for now, students will be participating in Sankofa’s youth programming remotely—a challenge

This is the perfect time for people to realize they can grow their own food.”

—hajjah gl over, founder of Glover Gardens

that has presented both a problem and an opportunity for Sankofa’s co-directors.

How can they strengthen students’ relationship to the land and one another when being together in the sacred space of the farm puts them in danger? The same way they’re serving their community: by bringing the garden to them.

This way, students will still be able to experience the joy of growing their own food.

Rather than coming to the farm to plant, weed, harvest and cook, the program will provide students with garden beds or planters, soil and seedlings to grow on their own at home. Some parts of the program, like community outreach and surveying clients, will be conducted online, and the farmers are working on a series of instructional videos that youth participants and their families can watch to learn how to plant and care for their new gardens, then prepare the harvest into fresh, healthy meals.

Graduating senior Sadé Black is one of those students. After four years of interning at the farm, she’s disappointed that she probably won’t be able to see the work she and her fellow students did to develop the program come to fruition in person. But the West Philly resident is excited to put what she’s learned at Sankofa into practice with her own garden plot.

In addition to learning about African foodways and culture and other things she didn’t learn in school, “I also got a chance to experience how it feels to actually grow your own produce—how the flavor tastes totally different when you grow yourself,” Black says. “It made me want to teach other people how to do the same thing.”

This fall, she’ll enroll in nursing school at Temple University, where she hopes to combine her background in plants and her medical training to incorporate herbs and plant medicines into her work.

To Holmberg, it’s more important than

ever that students are given the tools and knowledge they need to grow fresh food for themselves.

“The idea is that we can do the program in a way that still allows the youth to develop those skills and have food in a food-insecure time,” he says. “The idea is creating real food sovereignty—people are having direct control of their food—and closing that gap so that whatever happens in the future, they’ll have the skills and the space to do it.”

While the program changes to impact its youth participants in new ways, the organizers hope to deepen its involvement with their Southwest Philly neighbors surrounding Bartram’s Garden. Rather than building 20 beds per season, as they’ve done in past years, they’re planning to more than double their output in 2020, by installing beds at 50 homes in the area over the next two to three months.

For Holmberg, this new evolution of the program is not only a nimble response to restrictions presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, but also a natural outgrowth of Sankofa’s foundational principles of community partnerships, food sovereignty, access to land and fresh food and youth empowerment.

“At first, it felt daunting. How do we do what we do, given that the best way we know how to build relationships is being physically active in the same space and eating together?” Holmberg says. “To see and have your own plants and watch them grow, being able to have that relationship and figure that stuff out, is a skill that’s really needed in terms of creating self-reliance.”

Southwest Philly residents can fill out the form at bartramsgarden.org/farm to apply for a low-cost garden bed to be built at their home.

Residents in other parts of the city can contact Hajjah Glover, at gloversgarden.com, to schedule a consultation.

J UN E 20 20 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 23

ANCESTRAL ENERGY

East Kensington café serves food, drink, history and community during the pandemic story by constance garcia-barrio — photography by rachael warriner

F

ranny lou’s porch is still rustling up recipes to sustain the community despite COVID–19. The East Kensington café is known for concocting beverages like Thank God for the Children, a locally sourced blend of calendula, elder, chamomile and hibiscus tea, and sandwiches like The Pro-love, with turkey sausage, egg, grilled onions, cheddar and fresh greens served on focaccia.

“My basic passion is hospitality and bringing people together,” says Blew Kind, 32, of Germantown, the café’s owner.

“I want a space where Black and Brown people, queer people and other marginalized folks feel comfortable,” says Kind, who opened Franny Lou’s at 2400 Coral Street

Café Owner Blew Kind, center, has set up a takeout window to continue to serve the neighborhood

24 GRID P H IL LY.CO M JU NE 20 20

in 2015. The café has comfy chairs, plants aplenty and bold colors, “like an Afro-futuristic Black grandma’s living room set in the South,” Kind says. “It’s a warm space to engage in community activism and to rest.”

Kind, who came to Philly from her native Lorton, Virginia, in 2006 to study acting at the University of the Arts, not only serves tasty fare but condiments it with Black history.

The café’s name honors author and abolitionist Frances E.W. Harper (1825–1911)— who helped bondmen fleeing to Canada on the Underground Railroad and wore Free Labor clothes, made with cotton raised by paid, not enslaved, workers—and voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer (1917– 1977), co-founder of the Mississippi Free-

dom Democratic Party, who sustained permanent eye, leg and kidney damage when beaten by police for trying to vote.

Patrons also drink up history with their beverages.

Jacelyn Blank, 42, a regular at the café says her favorite drinks are the hazelnut mocha Dorothy Stang (1931–2005), named after a Catholic nun murdered in Brazil for defending the Amazon, the peanut butter mocha MLK, and the almond-and-chocolate Father Damian (1840–1889), named after a Catholic priest who cared for people with leprosy in Hawaii.

Original names, like “the Anti-capitalist,” distinguish the sandwiches, as does the fresh, organic produce in them. The ingre-

dients come from local farms as well as places like Bartram’s Garden and Greensgrow, an urban farm at 1400 Frankford Avenue.

Some partnerships go beyond commercial.

“Blew and I may do a nutrition workshop together,” says Meg DeBrito, 38, director of Greensgrow.

Besides the wholesome food, a kaleidoscope of workshops pull in different sectors of the community. In February, before the pandemic lockdown, Kind, a poet, offered the Love Poetry Workshop “to help us tap into our imagination to use love poems to ourselves and others to heal past trauma.”

A Black History Month Vending Village brought together artisans, businesses and potential customers of African heritage.

Family days, events for elders, a First Saturday discount of 10 percent for anyone wishing to hold an event in the space, and other special occasions helped bring in a racial and cultural mix of neighbors—no mean feat in this fast-gentrifying area.

When COVID–19 struck, in one respect, it meant little change.

“We’ve always had safe practices to pro-

tect our customers,” Kind says. “Three of my employees already had ServSafe certification,” she says, of the program that trains food handlers in protecting food. “We already observed handwashing and sanitation practices to prevent food-borne disease.

We started making our own sanitizer with essential oils, vinegar and peroxide when COVID–19 hit.”

But the city’s abrupt standstill slammed the café in other ways.

“Our profits dropped 80 percent at first,” says the pastry chef Ashley Huston, 29, who bikes to work from West Philly due to SEPTA’s service cutbacks. “We weren’t sure we could stay open.”

However, Franny Lou’s rolled with the punches.

“We’re an essential business, so we could stay open,” Kind says. “We opened a take-out window, and business has slowly, steadily climbed.”

The community is showing its support too.

“People have been so gracious with tips,” Huston says, “but we’re taking things week

I love their ability to adapt and re-imagine how the coffee shop can operate even though we can’t go inside.”

—jacelyn blank , regular customer at Franny Lou’s Porch

by week.”

Huston has also come up with creations to lure patrons. “There’s the cornbread cookie [$1.85], made with organic flour and honey. The flavor is familiar to Black people, and they like it. There’s the cherry blossom shortbread [$1.85], and a new biscuit made with collard greens and bacon for $3.50.”

With the café’s physical space unavailable due to health guidelines, Kind has found ways to go on reaching the community.

“With every purchase, we give out a newsletter with inspirational quotes,” she says. “It might say, ‘Peace and blessings to you and your family.’ ” Sometimes, she pulls in ancestor energy by quoting people who’ve faced and overcome adversity. Words from Sojourner Truth (1797–1883), for example, provide a bulwark in these uncertain days: “I feel safe in the midst of my enemies, for the truth is all powerful and will prevail.”

“We’ve also established a YouTube channel and use Instagram Live to communicate our values and educate folks on healthy and aware lifestyles,” Kind says.

Neighbors seem to realize that they can seek not only food but emotional sustenance at Franny Lou’s Porch.

“One day, a man called up not to order food, but to talk with me because he felt isolated,” Kind says. “He believed I would listen, and I did.”

Although Blank can’t enter the café, it still anchors her.

“Blew lets me putter around in the side yard and show off my horticultural knowhow with the planters and window boxes,” says Blank, a certified arborist. “I’m grateful for a sense of normalcy, to be able to see Blew and ‘the tribe’ on a continued regular basis. I love their ability to adapt and re-imagine how the coffee shop can operate even though we can’t go inside.”

Kind also responds to the financial distress that has pushed some families to the brink.

“We linked up with a program to give out free meals to families,” she says. “Thirty meals a day is the initial goal.”

Kind acknowledges the uncertainty of these times, but sees it as a potent reason to have faith and go forward. “Lots of people are having a hard time,” she says. “The light of Franny Lou’s Porch is needed now more than ever.”

J UN E 20 20 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 25

GENTLE SOUL

South Philly catering company offers Southern comfort food with a vegan twist story by alexandra w. jones

S

ometimes a single Instagram post can change your life—or at least that was the case for Bryon and Natasha Dockett.

A few years ago, as vegan bloggers, they posted a shot of their homemade dinner online and got a message in their inbox. It looked so good that one of their followers wanted to know where he could order the same meal.

It was then that the idea of starting a vegan catering business clicked.

“We just sort of stumbled into serving food to people,” Bryon says.

The Docketts have been catering private events and vending at pop-up markets as UnSoul Food for about a year now, serving veganized versions of popular soul food dishes. They also post a rotating menu on their Instagram page every week, offering personal platters that feature foods like BBQ UnRibbs, fried oyster mushrooms, collard greens, and mac and cheese. Customers direct message @unsoulfood to order and pay via Cash App or Paypal.

“We have a commissary kitchen that we cook in but we’re not allowed to have people show up there,” Bryon explains, so customers pick up the meals from the Docketts’ home in South Philly.

The couple has a dozen years of experience in the restaurant industry between them and Bryon went to culinary school, but before starting UnSoul, neither were working closely with food. Bryon was working as the night auditor for the Ritz Carlton and Natasha was a client coordinator for a custom suits company in Center City.

“We had really good jobs so people were looking at us kind of crazy, like, ‘Why would you leave those good jobs and go do your own thing?’ But we just had this feeling,” says Natasha, who has been cooking since she was eight years old. “It was a passion that just started igniting.”

26 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M JU NE 2020

Part of their drive, Bryon says, comes from a period of time in 2015 when they were homeless.

“During that time, we stayed in an RV that we owned and we didn’t have jobs,” Bryon says.

They used the last of their savings to buy the RV, but it wasn’t in good shape. It didn’t have a bed, a working shower, and the gas and septic tanks both leaked, Bryon says. They lived under I-95 near Columbus Boulevard before relocating it to southern New Jersey.

“We were vegan at the time and it was so important to us to stay vegan that we foraged dandelions for weeks because we didn’t have anything to eat,” he says. “We reached a point some would consider rock bottom.”

The strength that they gained working through these hard times gave them the courage to quit their jobs and go into business. “I think all the fear’s gone at this point,” Bryon says.

Both went vegan in 2014 after watching the documentary Earthlings—but for different reasons.

“My mind was definitely on the emotional side of things,” says Natasha. “When I saw what happened to the animals, it was disgusting to me, and I did not stand for anything that was going on whatsoever.”

Bryon’s reason was more personal.

“It really made me consider what I was putting this on my body,” he says. “At the time, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and he passed away months later. I thought to myself, ‘Why wait until the doctor tells me?’ Why not make the decision not to walk the same path that my father followed—and as a bonus I don’t have to eat the animals that are coming from these tragic conditions.”

Looking back on things now, he says it’s

Bryon and Natasha Dockett are passionate about the vegan soulfood they make, including their award-winning mac-and-cheese

the best decision they’ve ever made.

The idea behind UnSoul, as Natasha puts it, is that they’re making soul food without “souls.”

“The problem with classic soul food in the South is there’s animals in everything,” Bryon says. “If you look at the collard greens, there’s turkey, and if you look at, even the simple vegetables, the string beans, there’s fatback and pork in everything.”

UnSoul is “one hundred percent vegan food,” Natasha says. “No animals whatsoever, no byproducts—nothing.”

It’s a message Joe Filaseta, a pharmacist from Graduate Hospital, can get on board with. He’s been a customer of UnSoul since 2018, when he stumbled across their Instagram page.

“Everything I’ve had from them has been outstanding,” he says.

Filaseta is a connoisseur of vegan comfort and junk food and runs an Instagram blog under the name @phillyveganmonster with P HOTO G RAP HY BY AL BERT YEE

This is the perfect time for people to realize they can grow their own food.”

—hajjah gl over, tk id how you want to say it

This diet is an open door to a greater discussion about how we can save our planet and save the integrity of our species.”

—bryon dockett, co-founder of UnSoul Food

more than 4,000 followers.

“I’d have to say their mac and cheese is one of, if not, the best I’ve had at any restaurant anywhere,” he says. “A good vegan mac and cheese is hard to pull off, especially when you are making them in bulk for a large amount of orders. They really have got it down.”

Another customer, Raelia Lewis, of Northern Liberties, agrees.

“They have the best mac and cheese,” she says. “I’m not a huge fan of vegan cheese, but theirs changed my mind.”

UnSoul’s mac and cheese took first prize last year at Philly MAC-Down, V Marks the

Shop’s vegan mac and cheese competition.

The Docketts are also behind the Philly Vegan Night Market, a Thursday night market where customers can shop for vegan meals and products. Although the market has been on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Docketts hope to bring it back once social-distancing restrictions relax.

Paul Carmine, who co-owns the South Philly vegan café Batter & Crumbs with his husband, John Schultz, says the market was a great addition to Philly’s vegan events scene.

Batter & Crumbs served as a dessert vendor.

“It really gave the vegan community

a chance to gather,” Carmine says. “You know, these events were being done by others like every couple of months, but Brian and Natasha turned it into a weekly event.”

UnSoul customer Kathy Katz adds that the markets also give small-business owners a way to connect with customers. She’s shown up a few times to support the Docketts herself.

“These two exude such enthusiasm, positivity and warmth, you cannot help wanting to be a part of their journey,” says Katz.

Bryon and Natasha say they’re working toward opening a food truck and are happy right now with the traction their business is gaining.

“Our hope is that it doesn’t stop growing,” Bryon says. “The message that we’re trying to spread with UnSoul Food is that good food is vegan food—and not just that, but that this diet is an open door to a greater discussion about how we can save our planet and save the integrity of our species.”

J UN E 20 20 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 27

LEARNING FROM NATURE

Horticultural center at school for the blind teaches invaluable skills story by constance garcia-barrio

A

t the overbrook school for the Blind (OSB), situated on what was once Lenni Lenape land, staff members seem to have embraced the Native American belief that the Earth is a wise teacher. The school’s new million-dollar M. Christine Murphy Horticulture Education Center allows OSB to blend technology and horticultural therapy using that ancient material, dirt, to help students learn, heal and enlarge their lives.

“Horticultural therapy uses plant-based activities to reach the same goals students 28 GRID P H I L LY.CO M JU NE 2020

would achieve through physical and occupational therapy,” says horticultural therapist Rich Matteo, 37, of Langhorne. “In addition, children get a biology lesson from planting a seed and observing how it grows into, say, a tomato plant.”

Opened last year, the 1,780-square-foot greenhouse soon became popular. “I like the greenhouse because it’s warm and it smells good in there from the flowers,” says Dante M., 19, who’s blind. “It’s interesting, and Mr. Rich does fun activities with us.”

The horticultural education center may

hark back to the school’s roots in innovation. Founded in 1832 as the Pennsylvania School for the Instruction of the Blind by German immigrant Julius Reinhold Friedlander (1803-1839), it was one of the first such schools in the country. Located at 20th and Race streets in the beginning, the school moved to Overbrook in 1946. Today, this private, nonprofit school sits on 26 acres in West Philadelphia.

The horticultural center, built thanks to a donation from the family of M. Christine Murphy, an OSB trustee who died in 2011, and a $200,000 grant from the Green Mountain Energy Sun Club, includes the greenhouse, a classroom, a utility area where the produce is weighed and processed and the office of OSB’s Farm to Table Program.

Diligent planning ensured that the center would meet students’ needs. OSB superintendent Jackie Brennan, as well as an experienced horticultural therapist and other staff members visited horticultural programs at the Magee Rehabilitation Hospital, Delaware Valley University and other

P H OTO C O U R T E S Y O F OV E R B R O O K S C H O O L F O R T H E B L I N D

Horticulture therapist Rich Matteo encourages student Lingsen to use his sense of touch.

institutions to develop the optimal design.

“OSB has more than 200 students, ages 5 to 21, 25 percent of them blind, 75 percent with low vision and some with other challenges too,” says Brennan, 60, of East Goshen. “We kept in mind visual and tactile accommodations and wheelchair accessibility.”

For example, table tops can move to let students in wheelchairs come close. The team also sought to conserve water.

“We have a rainwater harvesting system,” Matteo says. “That technology, combined with low-flow plumbing fixtures, means we use 82 percent less water than a conventional greenhouse of similar size. We use gray water to flush toilets and water plants.”

Solar panels on a nearby field house help to supply energy for the center, says Matteo, adding that the roof of the greenhouse is lightly colored so that it traps less heat.

A friend working in horticultural therapy urged Matteo to consider the field.

“I’d been teaching history in middle school for several years, but I love gardening,” he says. “It took time because I was working full time, but I earned my certification in horticultural therapy from Delaware Valley University.”

Now he feels more deeply engaged in education.

“Is it really important in life to know about the Gold Rush of 1849, the kind of fact that I used to teach?” he asks. “Here, I’m teaching bedrock skills like how to grow food, eat well and care for the Earth. Not to say that challenges don’t come up. Some students have an extremely sharp tactile sense, and it can take weeks for them to get used to touching dirt. But you introduce them to gardening in this safe setting, and, pretty soon, most of them look forward to getting their hands in the soil.”

The plants provide another way to learn.

“We have lamb’s ear, which has a fuzzy leaf, and jade, which is smooth and glossy,” Matteo says. “Students light up when they make that distinction.”

Herbs give students a feast of fragrances and help them pinpoint other differences.

“This lemon geranium has a grassy-citrus scent,” Matteo says, of the plant with a narrow leaf, “and this citronella is lemony but floral, with leaves shaped something like parsley. I encourage students to smell and touch plants. Besides making distinctions, they’re also reaching, a movement that many of them benefit from practicing.”

Matteo seems to have a repertoire of ac-

I encourage students to smell and touch plants. Besides making distinctions, they’re also reaching, a movement that many of them benefit from practicing.”

—rich matte o, horticultural therapist

tivities to address students’ vulnerabilities and familiarize them with growing food.

“I’ve watched a little girl go from a wheelchair to a walker to walking on her own,” he says. “When she’s ready, I’ll give her a task like putting seeds in a seed bed. She’ll learn about plants, use fine-motor skills, and, by standing up, strengthen her legs.”

Once the seedlings have grown, Matteo and the students head outside. “We transplant seedlings from the greenhouse to raised beds located all over campus,” he says. “Students water, weed and harvest produce, as time allows. Many of them love being outdoors and having a job they’re responsible for. It gives them ownership, a stake in what’s being done.”

Odds and ends and donated gadgets sometimes help Matteo meet students’ needs. “Joann McNamee, OSB’s director of therapy, gave me a Waterpik for cleaning your teeth. I had no idea what to do with it.

Then I had a student who found a watering can unwieldy. He used the pik instead to water plants.”

Matteo gives cardboard boxes new life, too. Taken apart, they provide rectangular surfaces where students paint pictures. It doesn’t stop there. “I also re-use old telephone directories to dry and press flowers.

Students sell items like bookmarks and stationery made with dried wildflowers at the Christmas sale. Proceeds go back into the program. It helps us be self-sustaining,” says Matteo.

Children take special delight in one aspect of harvesting petals. “Kids love ripping the petals from the roses to make potpourris,” Matteo says. “It helps with both fine and gross motor skills. For the students who have vision, it helps with hand-eye coordination.”

Activities in the greenhouse dovetail with

those of the Farm to Table Program, begun in 2009. OSB’s orchard, on the western edge of campus—said to be third largest in Philadelphia—has some 60 trees that produce figs, plums, peaches and persimmons.

Asparagus, peppers, eggplants, lettuce and spinach grow in raised beds throughout the grounds. Lots of the greens wind up in the dining room’s salad bar, but many land on the produce cart students push around campus each week to sell to the OSB staff.

“Loading the cart teaches skills, from counting—‘Let’s put 10 tomatoes in this bag’—to arranging items to make good use of the space,” Matteo says. Selling produce from the cart teaches students to engage with others and handle money, skills they can use later on in life.

“Last year, we raised more than 1,000 pounds of produce,” Matteo says. Sharing that bounty strengthens OSB’s ties with the community. “We donated fruit to a food pantry in Upper Darby and to a restaurant in Media,” he says, noting a give-and-take in community contact. “The Philadelphia Orchard Project advises us about tending our trees.”

OSB lost some newly planted greenery right after the COVID-19 shutdown, but now Matteo stops by to take care of the orchards, gardens and greenhouse, a building which just achieved Zero Energy Certification. He’s helped in that respect from the OSB maintenance crew, considered essential staff. In addition, students continue to hone their gardening skills in their backyards.

Meanwhile, Matteo envisions more possibilities. “I’d like to turn the area around the greenhouse into a butterfly garden with nectar-producing plants,” he says, “and I’d like to start composting. It would bring their knowledge of the Earth full circle.”

J UN E 20 20 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 29

For more than 50 years, Stroud Water Research Center has focused on one thing – fresh water.

Our scientists apply their unique interdisciplinary approach to critical questions that affect water quality and availability around the world.

Our educators foster boots-in-the-water programs that translate across generations and continents.

Our watershed restoration team works hand in hand with landowners, helping them to use their land more effectively through whole-farm planning and watershed stewardship.

Learn more about the future of fresh water at www.stroudcenter.org

30 GRID P H IL LY.CO M JU NE 20 20

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friendscentercorp.org J UN E 20 20 G R I DP HILLY.COM 31

A NDRE W A B B OT T A LON A BRA MSON CH A RLES A DZ EMA CA RINA A HR EN G REGORY ALOI A VICTORIA AQU I LON E CH RIS A RG ERA KI S

Dear readers: Like many other small businesses, Grid has been adversely and dramatically affected by the economic fallout caused by the coronavirus. We will continue to post COVID-19 related resources online at gridphilly.com, and to devote the pages of our print publication to sustainability, which has never felt more relevant. I’d like to thank all of our subscribers for supporting us, and I’d like to invite anyone who has considered subscribing—$2.99, $4.99 or $9.99 a month—to do so. Thank you.

—alex mulcahy, publisher

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ALB E RT YE E J E N YUAN H I LLE L ZARE M BA BARBARA ZARSKY JACLYN Z E AL CURTI S Z I M M E RMANN

This moment of nature ‌

brought to you by Natural Lands, which has been preserving our region’s open space for six decades.

Our preserves and public garden are open free of charge to all. Plan your visit at natlands.org.

land for life. nature for all.

Green HIlls Preserve, Mohnton, PA | 201 acres Photo by Jim Moffett