Everyday Environment

When the Everyday Environment team first looked at water as our season two topic, we brainstormed a lot of different approaches. Unlike our first season, where we covered climate change, water is an overarching part of our environment. Yes, water can be a challenge, flooding for example, but it can...

Over a decade ago, I was sitting in a city council meeting in Illinois and on the agenda was a water rate increase. Over-pumping deep groundwater aquifers had degraded water quality, forcing the community to choose between upgrading infrastructure to meet standards or switching to a new water...

Do you know where your drinking water comes from? If you are like most people, the answer is no. While the City of Chicago and many of its surrounding communities access water from Lake Michigan, the rest of northeast Illinois relies primarily on groundwater aquifers for its drinking...

Community systems to manage water were built a long time ago and since then, historical hydrological patterns, or how water moves through the landscape, have changed. Changes in rainfall distribution is increasing the risk of flooding in some regions and leading to water scarcity in others. These...

Urbanization has not historically been too kind to the health and well-being of rivers. It’s a rough irony that something so important to the foundation of human society – rivers flowing through major population centers – has been negatively impacted by the very groups that rely so heavily on them...

Rain gardens are bowl-shaped landscape features that capture and absorb rainfall and snowmelt. These nature-based solutions can help to reduce local flooding issues while improving downstream water quality and recharging groundwater. They also provide a variety of other benefits, like habitat...

It’s a crisp spring morning, and I’m driving by the Rock River, watching as the water reflects the newly emerging leaves. Like most others across Illinois, this river is part of a complex system that connects to the Mississippi River and ultimately flows to the ocean. Hidden beneath the river...

Unexpected guests can be a drag, especially when they show up uninvited, eat all your food, and wreck the place. Now, imagine if your unexpected guest could duplicate themselves from a single small fragment of their body!Spare a thought for aquatic ecosystems — ponds, rivers, and lakes — when non-...

As a child, my friends and I played in a neighborhood stream, catching crawdads. What I didn’t know then was this small waterbody was mainly comprised of stormwater runoff and was connected to everything on our landscape.What is stormwater runoff?Stormwater is rain or melted snow that flows off...

From microplastics to pharmaceuticals, contaminants of emerging concern, CECs, are increasingly making their way into our environment, but with awareness and simple actions, we can all play a role in reducing their impact. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,...