For Earth Week, tales of environmental projects that are making a difference: a pollinator garden in downtown Bridgeport; a close look at rising temperatures, globally and at home

Proud volunteers at Skateport’s pollinator garden in Bridgeport. Photo courtesy of Skateport.

April 22, 2025 — On the second day of our Earth Week series, we’re featuring a project in downtown Bridgeport and another from the atmosphere above Connecticut. The former started as a way to ease the heat island effect in a city; the other is based on a wish by two scientists to understand just how hot it has gotten, and how quickly it has happened.

Skateport
Takina Pollock Shafer, Bridgeport

“Skateport is a roller skating events and lessons service based in Connecticut. From 2023-2024, Skateport LLC partnered with different organizations to plant a 1,300 square foot pollinator garden in downtown Bridgeport.

“We had concrete poured in the heart of downtown in order to place a shipping container onsite to house our rental roller skates, and decided to plant a public pollinator garden to offset the heat island effect and support our local ecosystem and pollinators!”

Over two sessions in 2023 and 2024, 65 volunteers planted hundreds of native wildflowers and grasses.

“In 2025, Skateport’s Volunteer Squad is gearing up to clean and prune the garden all season.”

Takina Pollock Shafer is the founder of Skateport. You can read more about the project on Skateport’s website.

This graph from the editorial shows how Connecticut’s temperatures have risen steadily since the 1890s.

“Connecting records of global-to-regional climate”
John Jasper, Ph.D., Climate Change Scientist, Niantic

“Looking back over our approximately 40-year careers in natural environmental chemistry, Prof. Eric Lichtfouse, Ph.D., and I recently co-authored an invited editorial in ‘Environmental Chemistry Letters’ on global-to-regional climate, which is driven by atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2).

“Temperature affects virtually all physical and biological components of the Earth, not the least of which is birds. We believed that capturing the key variables of CO2 and temperature in three graphs spanning the last millennium-to-century was a succinct summary of the topic. We used data from NASA, NOAA, and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency).

“In brief, the global CO2 level increased, largely via fossil fuel and biomass burning; the global temperatures increased; and the regional (that is, Connecticut) temperatures increased.”

The editorial shows that from 1920 to 1960, there was a smooth increase in the global temperature, corresponding to industrialization with fossil fuels. A sharp rise after 1970 coincided with accelerating industrialization, urbanization, and petroleum consumption.

In Connecticut, the average air temperatures rose sharply, by 1.99 degrees C, from 1896 to 2023, consistent with the global temperature increase.

The suggestion is clear: human activities are the main cause of rising global temperatures.

You can read the Jasper-Lichtfouse paper here.