In an average year, Michigan gets about 31.5 inches of rain. But 2019 wasn’t an average year — more than 41.5 inches came down and wreaked havoc across the state.

Since 2014, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department has shut off the water to 141,000 households whose bills were past due. Last year, more than 23,000 households reportedly had their water shut off.

The term “environmental justice” still may be unfamiliar to some people, but you don’t have to be familiar with it to understand what it means when you see it. With the Flint water crisis and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the people who were hit hardest were poor and black.

It may be frigid outside, but plenty of Metro Detroiters are still getting out on their local trails frequently. What they may not know is that some trails stretch all the way across the state.

The benefits kids reap from nature are well documented, which is part of the reason school field trips often involve excursions into the Great Outdoors. Children with disabilities, however, sometimes get left behind.

What does sustainability look like in Detroit, a city that is going through changes that some consider a renaissance? The Erb Institute talked with five people who are working to make Detroit more sustainable—in wildly divergent ways, from bees, to dirt, to real estate development, to stormwater.

Seven amputees who found themselves atop a 19,347-foot volcano in Ecuador last month probably never envisioned themselves there together.

Detroit Dirt makes waste into a commodity. It takes food waste, green waste, spent grains and herbivore manure and uses an aerobic process to make it into high-quality compost.

A little over two years ago, Timothy Paule and Nicole Lindsey started the nonprofit Detroit Hives, transforming vacant lots into urban bee farms. They also teach the community about the importance of honeybees and conservation.

Utah Diné Bikéyah (UDB) is a nonprofit organization that supports indigenous communities in protecting their ancestral lands. Along with the five sovereign nations of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, UDB got the 1.3 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument designated—the first tribally led national monument in American history.

Brian Merrill is the CEO of Western River Expeditions and the Moab Adventure Center, but he started out as a lawyer. He talked with Outdoor Insider about going from river guide to lawyer to operations manager to COO to CEO, and about the ways he has expanded the business.

Until the last couple of months, no one had used Detroit’s sole campground in more than a decade. In May, the first group of kids arrived to set up camp.

Is water a human right or a commodity? It’s treated like both.

Last month, 120 climbers descended on Horse Pens 40 in Steele, Alabama, for the first-ever large-scale celebration of diversity in climbing: the Color the Crag Festival.

What makes a strong leader in sustainability? Work in sustainability entails immense challenges, and much of the area is uncharted. To navigate it, strong leadership is essential.

Green spaces in a community are important, and not just because they look nice. That's why the city of Dearborn is full of parks and green spaces, from small pocket parks to the 300-acre Environmental Study Area at the University of Michigan-Dearborn campus, according to Dearborn Sustainability Coordinator Dave Norwood.

Kids who spend  time in wild nature reap all kinds of benefits, including improved physical and mental health, lower stress, and higher confidence. Yet many kids and their families have never camped nor hiked. The biggest  barrier to getting in the woods? The significant cost of outdoor gear. Now, “gear libraries” across the United States are addressing this challenge by enabling many organizations serving youths to use borrowed gear—for free.

Mapping Deeper Connections to Nature Through Outdoor Afro