Broken Ground

Walk out your front door, listen, and look. That’s the advice avid birder Christian Cooper gives to those wanting to take up his passion, birdwatching. Cooper is a lifelong birder, Emmy Award-winning host of National Geographic’s “Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper,” and The New York Times bestselling author of “Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World.” F...

Jo and Joy Banner envision a time, not too distant from now, when travelers visiting their small town along the Mississippi River don’t gawk at the concentration of polluting petrochemical plants nearby, but instead revel in the area’s rich cultural history. As founders of the non-profit Descendants Project, the twin sisters have dedicated themselves to preserving the histories of the Black commun...

On her group walking tours around Durham’s Hayti District, performance artist Aya Shabu brings Black history to life, transporting visitors back to Hayti in its heyday. Once known as a Black Wall Street, the community was founded by freed people from Stagville and other nearby plantations. But eventually it was torn apart by urban renewal and construction of Highway 147, leaving residents dealing...

A “keeper of memory” and Director of the North Carolina Division of State Historic Sites, Michelle Lanier has built a career on understanding layers of history underlying our Southern landscapes, not just battlefields and burial grounds, but native pine forests as well. Prized for their lumber and ‘bled’ for their multipurpose pine gum, Longleaf pines were exploited, much as the enslaved and inden...

Writer Latria Graham helps us unearth the surprising ways in which long-ago plantations and modern environmental injustices are intertwined in the South. From some of the earliest Freedmen’s communities built on frequently flooded land, to contemporary Black neighborhoods now hemmed in by polluting industries, we map the many ways that racist systems codified during plantation slavery still dictat...

On a map, you can often spot pollution sources like a power plant, a highway, or a factory. But why were these things built where they are, and who lives next door? Answering those questions reveals a surprising truth: it’s often a short distance from yesterday’s plantations to today’s pollution. In this season of Broken Ground, we’ll journey through history, from a remote turpentine camp where en...

This season of Broken Ground we spend time in the rural South with the people who call it home. Often celebrated for the quiet life close to nature, and a region that defines many perceptions of the South, it’s also a place polluting industries target, betting what they do will be out of sight and out of mind. Sometimes these polluters are even invited to town by local officials eager for economic...

We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about where our trash ends up but, when you live next door to a landfill, you don’t have that luxury. The burning smell of chemicals, the flocks of circling vultures, the constant rumble of truck traffic and the accompanying exhaust are just the most obvious impacts of living near acres of garbage, especially when that garbage isn’t managed properly. Neighbors...

"Inland flooding" was a phrase that often needed explanation. Now all you need to say is "Helene". The storm that ravaged Appalachia was a stark reminder of a phenomenon that’s becoming more and more common – residents living far from the coast watching as their local river jumps its banks and inundates yards, homes, and businesses. For small towns with even smaller budgets, di...

How can a power source that creates more climate warming emissions than coal be called renewable? This is the paradox of wood pellets, a type of biomass being burned at industrial scale to produce electricity overseas. And it’s not just the global climate that’s paying the price for this greenwashing. Pellet producers are fanning out across the southern U.S., razing forests, and wreaking havoc in...

Is that fresh-caught fish safe to eat? In too many rivers across the rural South, the answer is a hard 'no.' Failing sewage systems, agricultural runoff, and politically powerful polluters have all contributed to worrisome water quality in some of our most treasured southern waterways. And, too often, state regulators are little help. It begs the question: Do people enjoying that water h...

To call the Okefenokee swamp a treasure is to undersell just how special this watery world is. Tucked into the rural southeast corner of Georgia, this 438,000-acre swamp is one of the most ecologically intact places in our nation. Its shallow black waters not only provide habitat to a menagerie of flora and fauna, but also contain a massive peat-filled carbon sink – on a planet desperately in need...

CBS News journalist and author Jonathan Vigliotti joins Broken Ground host Leanna First-Arai to dig into his on-the-ground coverage of breaking climate stories across rural America, particularly in the South. Vigliotti translated this experience into the book Before It's Gone: Stories From the Front Lines of Climate Change in Small Town America, published in April 2024. Support the show

Photographer Cornell Watson's images recognize the camera can be a tool for connection, and action.  Whether its pollution from hog farms, efforts to gut Black neighborhoods, or racism at the state’s flagship university, Watson's lens points us to see what so many choose to ignore. Support the show

Whether its natural disasters or shifting political winds, Victoria Bouloubasis and Paola Jaramillo make sure Spanish-speakers in North Carolina have access to it. Ensuring that access fuels their work as a reporter and editor, respectively, at Enlace Latino NC. The outlet uses traditional journalism, podcasts, WhatsApp, social media and comics to connect North Carolina's Spanish speakers to...

Listen to environmental journalist Cameron Oglesby discuss how highlighting Black joy and centering community narratives in her writing drives action.  Support the show

Hear what spurred the founding of Southerly, an online publication focused on environmental justice, and how it evolved from more traditional reporting to an outlet focused on putting reporters’ tools in community hands.  Support the show

As more and more news outlets close, writers, editors, and photographers across the South are reconsidering how communities stay informed. This season host Leanna First-Arai talks with the new storytellers of the South committed to keeping environmental information in communities' hands. Support the show

Hear how a small group of neighbors in southwest Memphis built a coalition strong enough to defeat a crude oil pipeline. And listen for lessons you can take back to your own community.   Join us this season as we head to Boxtown, Tennessee to uncover the stories behind how this community and its allies secured a victory once thought impossible through grassroots organizing, legal advocacy, and unw...

An announcement late on the Friday of a holiday weekend is a classic move. And in the case of the Byhalia Pipeline it is an end so abrupt many don’t believe it. But it’s true. What quickly becomes apparent is that, while Memphis has won this battle, the war against environmental racism and the systems that support it is far from over. From coal ash to Superfund sites, Memphians are now applying th...

With a federal permit approved and state officials supporting the project, in the spring of 2021 the Byhalia Pipeline has momentum on its side. But opponents aren’t giving up as they bring national attention to the project and turn to local elected officials for help, all while still in court questioning a private oil company’s right to take property owners’ land. It’s a season of two steps forwar...

As aquifer advocates and the residents of southwest Memphis in the path of the pipeline began looking for help pushing back against Byhalia’s plans, they quickly learned not to assume who would join their cause. From city councilpeople and county commissioners to attorneys and media outlets, the first people to step up weren’t always who they expected. Support the show

While pipeline developers deploy common tactics to secure support, like spreading donations around the community, organizers look for allies among their elected officials. Reporter Carrington Tatum also starts covering the story and amplifying voices going unheard. Many of those voices belong to Black landowners getting legal notices that pipeline developers plan to take a portion of their land, f...

All of Memphis drinks from a world-class underground source, known as the Memphis Sand Aquifer. The realization that the Byhalia Connection crude oil pipeline, planned for southwest Memphis, could endanger they city's water draws new allies into the pipeline fight. Soon, environmentalists like Ward Archer and Sarah Houston of Protect Our Aquifer are organizing alongside MCAP co-founders Kathy...

It was a throw away line by an out of town pipeline representative but it struck a nerve and came to define much of the resistance to the Byhalia Pipeline. In this episode hear the origin story of the phrase that rang throughout the fight: “the point of least resistance.” Intended as an engineering answer to a question about the pipeline route, it came to encapsulate so much of what the pipeline f...