A drive from South Shore to Lakeview reveals a stark truth about Chicago: factories and polluting industries cluster on the South Side, while northern neighborhoods remain largely untouched. This disparity is no coincidence—it stems from decades of racially charged policies that shield white, affluent areas from the burdens of air pollution, waste accumulation, and toxic runoff.
Climate change can feel like an overwhelming, global challenge—but meaningful progress often begins at the community level. Across neighborhoods and cities, local activists are designing smarter, more connected approaches to environmental action. Today, digital collaboration tools, like those offered by Adobe, make it easier than ever for community leaders to coordinate, document impact, and share their results globally.
Since its inception in 1907, the forbidding Blackhawk Generating Station was the polar opposite of a friendly next-door neighbor to Beloit College’s quaint, leafy campus, located across Pleasant Street in Beloit, Wisconsin. Whenever winds blew from the west, the coal-fired, steam-generating electric power station’s 135-foot-high smokestack would belch plumes of polluted air toward the college green. This continued for years, as the brick, concrete, and steel plant expanded in stages until 1947, and finally ended in 2010 when its owner, Alliant Energy, ceased operations, slating the plant for demolition.
On May 29, 2025, the lawyers at Our Children’s Trust (OCT) filed Lighthiser v. Trump, on behalf of 22 youth from Montana, Oregon, Hawai‘i, California, and Florida, asserting their constitutional rights to life, health, and safety. This youth-led constitutional rights lawsuit challenges three of the Trump administration’s recent Executive Orders, each of which has the capacity to intensify the climate crisis and worsen the youth plaintiffs’ climate-related health injuries.
As I write this (July 2025), the air quality in Chicagoland (where I live) is labeled unhealthy for sensitive groups. In addition, the National Weather Service has issued an “extreme heat watch,” noting that over the next two days, residents can expect dangerously hot conditions with possible heat index values of 105˚ -110˚ . Elsewhere on our planet, devastating tornadoes, floods, forest fires, and extreme heat bring death and destruction, test bodies and spirits.
Completed in 2023, the former County Courthouse and adjacent Sheriff’s House in Woodstock, Illinois, of Groundhog’s Day fame, recently underwent a wholesale modernization and retrofit, designed by Studio GWA architects and managed by Bulley & Andrews. The three-tiered brick buildings, now known as the Old Courthouse Center, anchor the town square. Though they have been subjected to a string of modifications and repairs since their original dates of construction (1857, the Old Courthouse, and 1887, the former Sheriff’s House), they still look pretty much the same on the outside as they did over a century ago, except cars roll by instead of horse-and-buggies.
