Ecocide Podcast
Ecocide is a narrative podcast about environmental destruction—part environmental history, part stories still unfolding. Each episode documents an ecological disaster: who caused it, who paid the price, and who fought back.
The stories fall into four categories: infamous disasters you've heard of but may not know the full story; local and regional cases that never made national news; historical episodes that explain how ecosystems break and sometimes recover; and real-time conflicts you can still do something about.
Environmental stories usually get covered as breaking news that's gone before the consequences arrive, or as advocacy with the conclusion already built in. What's missing are stories told in enough depth to establish the facts, name the people who made the decisions, and learn about the communities left behind. And to do it without telling listeners what to think. That's what this show is.
Every episode is built on primary sources. Court documents and legal filings, agency records, peer-reviewed scientific and academic research, nonfiction books, and investigative journalism. When the facts are damning, they'll be presented without editorializing. And when the story is complicated, it'll stay complicated. The goal isn't to tell you how to feel. It's to make sure you know what happened.
Because the earth doesn't forget. And neither can we.
Episodes
14 episodes
Ep. 13: Breaking Big Bend
The story of how the federal government waived decades of environmental law to build roads and barriers through Big Bend National Park and adjacent lands | In the 1980s, a black bear swam across the Rio Grande and climbed into the Chisos ...
Ep. 12: The Server Farm (Part 2)
Part two of Ecocide's two-part series on the data center boom | Across the United States, enormous data centers are being approved behind closed doors, often before the people who will live beside them know they exist. In part one of our two-pa...
Ep. 11: The Server Farm (Part 1)
The story of the data center boom and the communities fighting back | Since late 2022, one industry has accelerated its expansion to the point of totally reshaping the country's land, water, and power grid at a speed and scale without precedent...
Ep. 10: Panawahpskek
The story of how the HoltraChem chemical plant poisoned the river that sustained the Penobscot Nation for 10,000 years, and how a 22-year lawsuit produced a cleanup that still isn't finished | On February 18, 2014, the State of Maine announced ...
Ep. 09: Wasting
The story of Florida’s starving manatees, the pollution that destroyed their food supply, and the lawsuit challenging what it means to protect a species | Between December 2020 and April 2022, more than 1,200 Florida manatees died, most of them...
Ep. 08: The Zimmerly Mine
The story of an illegal gravel operation that carved into the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, and the decades-long fight to hold the operators accountable | In 2017, a mining operator began tearing into a 122-acre hillside at the wes...
Ep. 07: Mining on the Edge of the Boundary Waters Wilderness
The story of a Chilean mining giant's efforts to dig a copper mine at the edge of America's most-visited wilderness area | The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is the most-visited wilderness in the U.S., boasting over a million acres of pr...
Ep. 06: The Lagoon
The story of what concentrated animal feeding operations—CAFOs—do to the people who live beside, downstream, and downwind of them | In Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, the water coming out of the tap turned the color of rust. In Bladen County, North...
Ep. 05: The Galapagoats Islands
The story of how feral goats nearly destroyed the Galápagos Islands | For centuries, goats in the Galapagos were a living pantry, released on islands by pirates and whalers who needed a reliable food source waiting for them when they returned. ...
Ep. 04: The Color of Poison
The story of the Gold King Mine spill | On the morning of August 5, 2015, an EPA contractor working at an abandoned mine in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado punched through a plug of debris and released 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater i...
Ep. 03: Penn Cove
The story of the capture of wild orcas for human entertainment | For thousands of years, the Southern Resident killer whales lived in the inland waters of the Pacific Northwest, following salmon runs through the Salish Sea in tight-knit family ...
Ep. 02: Fallout
The story of the Hanford Nuclear Site | In 1942, the U.S. government chose a remote stretch of desert along the Columbia River in eastern Washington to build the reactors that would produce the plutonium for America's nuclear arsenal. What they...
