Ecocide Podcast

To close out Season 1 of Ecocide, creators Tim Dobyns and Aaron Provencio introduce themselves, thank listeners for being part of the first season, share their favorite episodes, and preview what’s coming in Season 2. 

The story of how an ancient aquifer turned the land that blew away in the Dust Bowl into some of the most productive farmland in the country, and why today it's being drained faster than it can ever refill When the rains returned and the Dust Bowl ended, the land on the southern plains recovered. In the decades that followed, it once again became some of the most productive farmland in the co...

In the 1930s, drought and decades of overplowing created the Dust Bowl on the southern Great Plains. Tens of millions of acres of native grassland had been plowed under for wheat, stripping away the roots that held the soil in place. When the rains stopped, the wind lifted the exposed soil into enormous dust storms that buried farms, sickened families, and turned afternoon into midnight. "The...

 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 Mountains, the first of her kind to return to Big Bend National Park after hunters and ranchers wiped out the population four decades earlier. For thousands of y...

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-part series on the data center boom, we looked at what these projects demand from communities: electricity, water, land, and public money. Part two asks...

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. Hundreds of billions of dollars in new construction. Industrial complexes the size of small cities. Power demands measured in gigawatts. Most of it i...

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 an emergency closure of seven square miles of the lower Penobscot River and Penobscot Bay to all commercial fishing for lobster and crab. The reason? M...

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 from starvation. It was the largest die-off in the state's history. The seagrass they had eaten for thousands of years was gone, killed by decades of...

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 western gateway to the federally protected Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area in Washington State without permits. Clark County, Washington, issued six...

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.