ENVIRONMENT

Can you identify 50 species of plants and animals native to your region? Naturalist Kenn Kaufman believes making the effort to do that will profoundly enhance your connection with the natural world. Kenn Kaufman has been an avid birder and naturalist since his childhood in the Midwest. In 1970, at 16, he dropped out of […]

Recently, I participated in a survey of mussels as part of a post-dam removal monitoring effort at the Densons Creek Nature Preserve in Troy (60 miles east of Charlotte). I joined folks from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the N.C. Natural Heritage Program as we donned wetsuits or waders and carried viewbuckets (imagine […]

When the flush of spring ephemeral wildflowers begins to fade, several shrub species come into their own. Mountain laurel ought to be at its peak in the coming week. Their enchanting masses of light pink flowers are found throughout the Uwharries, but some of our most interesting and attractive spring-blooming shrubs aren’t nearly so abundant. […]

Charlotte City Council members will consider strategies for lobbying against a state bill expected to be introduced that city officials fear would all but gut the city’s tree protection ordinance. The proposed bill won approval on April 30 from an Agriculture and Forestry Awareness Study Commission, a group of legislative and gubernatorial appointees. Officials with […]

Americans use an average of 60,000 plastic bags every minute – single-use disposable bags that we mindlessly throw away. It takes an estimated 12 million barrels of oil a year to make the plastic bags that Americans consume. And that’s just bags. Plastics surround us. Although Mecklenburg County now accepts most types of plastics for […]

The term “parasite” may bring to mind something that at best is an ugly nuisance, and at worst is a gruesome horror story – everything from common ticks and chiggers to one particularly disturbing story that popped up in my Facebook feed recently with images of a botfly being removed from someone’s eyeball. I did […]

In Charlotte-Mecklenburg, local ordinances do not require all businesses to recycle, and even when large companies provide space for employees to toss materials into bins, officials are unable to determine how much they recycle. In Charlotte and the county’s six towns, there is no requirement that apartments, townhouses, condos and other multifamily communities provide on-site […]

Recycling containers sit in classrooms in every Charlotte-Mecklenburg public school, and students at nearly half of them make the extra effort to dump leftover liquid from milk and juice cartons before tossing them into bins. “The recycling systems are in place in the schools,” says Laurette Hall, environmental manager for Mecklenburg County Solid Waste Services, […]

Tucked at the end of a dead-end street in an industrial area just north of uptown Charlotte, Mecklenburg’s recycling processing plant sits as a storyteller of the area’s challenges in figuring out how to reduce its dependence on landfills. KEEPING WATCH This article is part of the three-year KEEPING WATCH initiative. Learn more about the […]

Have you ever been out swimming or kayaking in the streams and lakes of North Carolina and seen turtles sunning themselves on rocks and logs? If so, then chances are that you have spotted the painted turtle at least once. The painted turtle (Chrysemys picta) is one of the most common and widespread species of […]