By Mahmudur Rahman and Crista Castillo Crista and I first got to know each other during a Project Green Challenge virtual meet up. She was an intern and I was a campus rep and a former PGC finalist. Crista is an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan majoring in Earth and Environmental Sciences with a minor in Sustainability. She grew up in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a city bordering El Paso, Texas. And I’m Mahmudur Rahman, from Dhaka,...

By Crista Castillo and Mahmudur Rahman With our considerable geographic distance at the time of the meeting, with me being in Mexico and Mahmud in Bangladesh, my conversation with Mahmud began by chatting about the weather. He told me about the suitable, warm climate in Bangladesh, which is similar to the warm weather in Mexico, conditions we concluded to be very different from the extreme cold temperatures in Michigan, where I attend school,...

By Darya and Beth From the foothills of Almaty, Kazakhstan  to the neighborhoods of Chicago, Illinois, a shared truth is becoming harder to ignore: the air we breathe is changing—and not for the better. The sky may still look blue on some days, but the reality beneath it is growing more dangerous. Whether it’s the smog settling over Kazakhstan’s largest city or the suffocating heat gripping America’s urban neighborhoods, the signs are all...