Stories
When former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh took the stage at a 2017 ribbon-cutting in the Seaport District, he spoke with pride of a neighborhood “hitting its stride.” He spoke of new retail, housing, entertainment venues, and green space. He spoke of job creation and “smart growth.” He spoke of an area that represents “our future…
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Tidal flats and marshland once surrounded much of Boston, swelling and soaking as the rain fell and tides ebbed and flowed. But over the course of the city’s nearly 400 years, those sensitive areas were slowly filled in to make more buildable land, leaving just 200 acres of wild marsh along the border between Boston…
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Boston faces climate change threats from both rising seas and flooding during big rainstorms. These problems are complicated, and they’ll have a profound effect on residents and much of the regional economy. We cover a lot of this information in WBUR’s series “Boston Under Water,” but to help you wrap your head around the issues,…
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After decades of declining water quality, there’s new optimism surrounding the health of Great Bay. A new partnership between towns, scientists and advocacy groups has people thinking for the first time that they might find long-term solutions to restore the estuary. It will be a boon to ongoing research projects, like one at UNH that’s…
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Researchers at the University of New Hampshire are studying new ways to make syrup out of the northern forest — not from maple trees, but from beeches, birches, sycamores and more. They want to create new markets for an industry that, right now, depends on just one kind of tree – making it vulnerable to…
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Most of the Sarah Greenwood School in Dorchester’s Grove Hall neighborhood is surrounded by cement, with four-square courts and some basketball hoops. The corner of its block is occupied by the crumbling facade of a former church — which occasionally sheds trash, even a knife and syringes, into the schoolyard. Then, in between the two, on…
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Just off Route 1 in Newburyport, a bit of the future is under construction. A huge orange crane hoists a three-story concrete slab and flips it precisely in place, forming the wall of a home. The crane accomplished in five days what would have taken weeks using standard building techniques. “The construction system has not been…
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Cities around New England have declared racism a public health crisis. Scholar-activist Katharine “Kat” Morris is especially interested in the intersection between racism, health and environmental justice — something she talked about in her 2019 TEDxUConn talk . Morris noted that a fifth of Connecticut’s pollution is concentrated in five cities where the majority of…
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Nettie Lesser’s grave is tucked in the back of Mount Auburn Cemetery in a quiet area surrounded by trees and birds and a carpet of purple flowers starting to bloom. The plot blends into the scene around it, the only marker a small plaque the size of a hockey puck; you wouldn’t know it was a…
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