Ecocide Podcast

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is the most-visited wilderness in the U.S., boasting over a million acres of pristine lakes on the Minnesota-Canada border. On April 16, 2026, the Senate voted to strip its 20-year mining moratorium, using an obscure 1996 law meant for regulatory rules to bypass the usual 60-vote threshold. President Trump signed it into law 11 days later, clearing the way...

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 Carolina, the air grew so thick with gases from hog waste lagoons that families couldn't sit on their own porches. In the Lower Yakima Valley in Washi...

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. When permanent settlers arrived in the late 1800s and started releasing them by the hundreds, they became a catastrophe. By the late 20th century, 250,000 f...

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 into Cement Creek—a tributary of the Animas River. Within hours, the river had turned a vivid orange. By the time the plume reached New Mexico, water intakes...

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 pods that passed knowledge, dialect, and culture from one generation to the next. Then, in August 1970, a commercial whale-catching operation drove more tha...

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 left behind may be uncontainable. 177 underground tanks, some of which are leaking, hold 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste, making...

The story of the use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War and the origin of the term "Ecocide" | In the autumn of 1942, a graduate student named Arthur Galston was working alone in a laboratory in Illinois, studying soybeans. What he found would eventually contribute to one of the most ecologically destructive chemicals ever deliberately released into a living landscape. Between 1962 and 1...

A brief introduction to Ecocide, a new narrative documentary podcast about environmental destruction, those who cause it, and those who fight back. This trailer introduces the series and the stories we'll be telling in Season 1, including environmental disasters, cover-ups, court battles, and the communities still living with the consequences.