On October 4th, our Sustainability students spent a beautiful fall afternoon on an environmental kayak tour of the Schuylkill River. The Schuylkill, which flows through the heart of Philadelphia, has a long environmental history as a shipping lane, a source of municipal drinking water for Philadelphia (Charles Dickens and Mark Twain both wrote in admiration of the technology and beauty of Philadelphia's water works), and as a disposal system for industrial waste. Major efforts in the past couple of decades to improve the water quality have begun to show results, with native species returning to the river. Students on the tour rowed upriver to get a close-up view of the historic water works, and then floated downstream to see some of the industrial facilities that are still discharging into the river, while their guide explained the history of the river's water quality and ecosystems.
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