• People

Remembering Adam Kolton

• ANWR

It was with great sadness that we read of our Friend of the Planet, Adam Kolton’s passing yesterday. Adam was not only an ODP reader but a tireless advocate for our planet and its most precious and delicate ecosystems. As the Alaska Wilderness League, where Adam worked for many years and most recently as its […]

• People

Hero: Linda Zall Pioneered Climate Intelligence at the CIA

• Central Intelligence Agency
• CIA
• climate change
• environment
• satellite
• spy

Earlier this year, the NY Times’ Bill Broad shone a spotlight on the fine work of Linda Zall, who was a leader in using the CIA’s spy satellites to gather and analyze climate change data and intelligence for the government.

• People

COVID’s Toll On The Environmental Community: Remembering NOAA’s Jen Pizza

• COVID-19
• NOAA

This week, we marked the grim milestone of 500,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19.  We know that many among them cared deeply about the environment and climate change, and many were public servants.  In their honor, we want to tell the story of one — Jennifer “Jen” Pizza, who died suddenly last Sunday of […]

• People

Recognizing the Contributions of America’s Black Coal Miners

According to the National Park Service, between 1870 and 1930, hundreds of thousands of white people, African Americans, and European immigrants came to West Virginia to work in the coal mines. For Black coal miners, this backbreaking work was an opportunity to escape the Jim Crow South and build a better life for themselves and […]

• People

Historical Hero of the Week: Hazel M. Johnson

• Black History Month
• Chicago
• Environmental Justice

Hazel Johnson was an environmental activist from Chicago’s South Side who is known as the mother of the environmental justice movement. As Block Club Chicago wrote, Becoming an environmental activist wasn’t something the New Orleans native had set out to do, but when her husband, John — a bricklayer — was felled by cancer in […]

• People

Heroine of the Week: Shreya Ramachandran

• grey water
• laundry
• soap nuts
• soapberry

By Ashira Morris, ODP Staff Writer Today we’re celebrating Shreya Ramachandran, a 17-year-old Californian who came up with an efficient way to reuse grey water — the water first used for sinks, showers, and laundry machines — for irrigation. She was spurred to take action after living through a water crisis as a preteen. When her […]