Yale University

Planting Trees In New Haven

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From left, Jess Jones, Ed Rodriguez, Zach Herring and Joshua De-Anda, planting a crab apple tree at 10 Wolcott Street in the Fair Haven neighborhood of New Haven, Conn. Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Ed Rodriguez has a few years on me, but we have comparable tree counts. The caption of the second photo below captures my my own preference of activity on any given day. Having grown up in Connecticut and moved to Costa Rica decades ago, I note our reverse patterns of migration.

Colbi Edmonds, a member of the 2023-24 New York Times Fellowship class, reports from Seth’s previous hometown New Haven on an initiative I love reading about as much as I enjoy my own versions of the same kind of activity:

“I love to dig and mess around in the soil,” said Ed Rodriguez, who grew up in Puerto Rico but moved to Connecticut in the 1960s. Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

One Neighborhood, 90 Trees and an 82-Year-Old Crusader

Ed Rodriguez is on a mission to convince his neighbors that they need trees to help combat summer heat — and to make the world a better place. It’s not always so easy.

Maria Gonzalez, who lives in New Haven, Conn., was envious of the other side of her street. It was lined with trees, offering some beauty as well as a shield from this summer’s unusual heat. But the sidewalk directly in front of her residence was bare, with trash littering patches of grass. Continue reading →

Ensuring Public Access To Climate Science

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Sterling Library at Yale University in New Haven Connecticut, US. Photograph: Alamy

Thanks to John Abraham, and the Guardian’s team focused on the Environment, for shining the light on the good works of those who work to ensure our access to essential environmental science at a time when there are efforts to silence the science:

Yale Climate Connections: America’s beacon of climate science awareness

Stellar work by group led by Anthony Leiserowitz on putting climate change research into public domain is empowering citizens and institutions Continue reading →

The Legacy of U.S. National Park System

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Saint Mary Lake in Glacier National Park, Montana. All images from: Yale News

Thanks to Yale News for a wonderful commemoration to the history and value to the scientific community of the U.S. National Park system – visit our National Parks category page for over a hundred posts on the subject – as we celebrate its centennial today (US time, it’s still August 25th):

As the United States marks the centennial of the National Park Service, which was officially established 100 years ago this week, the nation’s parks are being widely celebrated for their natural grandeur and vistas, their wildlife, and their abundant recreational opportunities.

Far less appreciated though is the critical role that the U.S.’s 59 national parks and hundreds of other park service units play in scientific research, providing unspoiled, protected, and accessible landscapes that host research that can be done few other places. In fact, with a long history of data and field study on everything from wildlife to wildfires, the national parks offer scientists an incredibly rare living outdoor lab. And the high profile of the parks in the American imagination often provides an avenue for conveying that research to the public.

Continue reading →