Life on Land

To address the critical need to increase pollinator habitat for beneficial insects, such as honey bees, monarch butterflies and others, The Scotts Miracle-Gro Foundation and the National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) have teamed up on a new “Parks for Pollinators” campaign aimed at raising public awareness of pollinator health and encouraging local action through public parks and pollinator gardens.

Every year on Comcast Cares Day, our employees get their hands dirty to give back to their communities – and this year was no exception. At so many of our 1,200 community service projects that were part of our 17th Comcast Cares Day, our employees and other volunteers – a record 115,000 turned out – worked to make a positive impact and inspire environmental responsibility in all we do.

Expansion of agriculture is one of the main drivers of global deforestation and loss of habitat. Like many other countries in the world, Uganda has experienced severe deforestation, with forest cover declining by nearly 60 percent from about 5 million hectares in 1990 to just under 2 million in 2015.

Today, Whole Kids Foundation announced the Give Bees A Chance Campaign to showcase the vital role that honey bees play in our food and gardens. The month-long fundraising effort to support the Honey Bee Grant Program, which provides educational honey beehives to schools and nonprofits, will take place during June, National Pollinator Month.

Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens today announced the much-anticipated opening of The Scotts Miracle-Gro Foundation Children’s Garden, a two-acre immersive experience designed to connect children with nature.

A recent study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that instances of tick and mosquito-borne diseases like Zika virus and Lyme disease have increased more than 350 percent since 2004 in the United States. With warmer weather on the horizon and more people heading out of doors, the experts from the SC Johnson Institute of Insect Science for Family Health offer three useful tips to help protect you and your family from mosquitoes that may carry Zika or West Nile virus and ticks that may carry Lyme disease.

The Scotts Miracle-Gro Foundation convened its national network of environmental grantees in Oyster Bay, Long Island, last week with one goal: Addressing America’s toughest water resource challenges. Dr. Christopher Gobler, head of the Gobler Laboratory at SUNY Stony Brook, presented the keynote address on his research exploring the causes and effects of harmful algal blooms, as well as potential solutions.

Mentors come in all forms, shapes, and sizes and communicate in uniquely diverse ways. I’ve been fortunate to have several mentors who have shaped my life—from the profoundly eloquent and sharp, to the rambling, and tangential, and even the completely silent. When I was in college, I had a professor named Mike. Professor Mike (who is still teaching) taught Fluvial Geomorphology—the dynamics of how rivers and lakes change and evolve over time, on their own. He was the kind of teacher who was more of a person than a professor and treated students like peers, rather than pupils.

In less than five years, the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) Project has recycled or reused nearly 194 million pounds of materials and diverted more than 97 percent of the project’s total waste from landfills.

Earth Day at the FCA US headquarters often brings out the “wild” in our employees, but this year, we were schooled on the ways in which we can do our part to help mitigate the effects of global climate change in our homes. As part of an on-going collaboration with FCA US, Avondale High School students were tasked with designing and building model homes with a system that used chemical reactions of plants and other autotrophs, as well as pollinators, to help reduce the effects of human activity on the environment.