In Our Backyard Podcast

Elizabeth Gillispie is Soil Scientist and Soil Health Vineyard Manager at Washington State University as well as a member of the Soil Science Society of America (SSSA).  Soil is the loose surface material that covers most land. It consists of inorganic particles and organic matter. Soils are not only the resource for food production, but they are the support for our structures, the medium for wast...

Lisa Sorg is the Assistant Editor and Environmental Reporter at NC Newsline. She helps manage newsroom operations while covering the environment, climate change, agriculture and energy. She talks with me in two other so listen to episodes 8 and 11 to hear more from her. Within the episode we mostly reference NC drinking water suppliers, although you can apply this same information to your own area...

Ben Tettlebaum is the Director & Senior Staff Attorney at The Wilderness Society. Across the U.S. there are 618 million acres of federal public lands, including national parks and forests, wildlife refuges and federally managed desert and prairie lands. Many of these special places are threatened by climate change and poor management decisions that favor development over conservation. And they...

Serenella Linares is a naturalist at Mt Rainier Nature Center and also on the board of The Mycological Association of Washington, DC. (MAWDC for short)  This episode we talk about mushrooms. When we think of mushrooms, most of us think of the edible ones we can buy at the grocery store, but really they are everywhere and are vital to our ecosystems. First to give some mushroom terminology , myceli...

Andres Chang is the Senior Research Specialist at Greenpeace. Just last year in 2023, Greenpeace came out with a report that Andres was the lead writer on, called Dollars VS. Democracy. The report talks about how Americans overwhelmingly support government action on the climate crisis. As a result, the fossil fuel industry has expanded its playbook to delay the transition to clean energy and prote...

Jesse Howe is the Assistant Director of the Coastal Conservation Association, Maryland (CCA) whose purpose is to advise and educate the public on the conservation of our marine resources. They seek to conserve, promote and enhance the present and future availability of coastal resources for the benefit and enjoyment of the general public. One of the main projects CCA does are living reefs, which a...

Ann Rodgers is BREDL’s Grant Writer. In 2021 BREDL received a grant from the EPA, which Ann wrote to fund an air monitoring program, called CARE-4-Air, for our chapters who are experiencing air quality issues in their community.  I misspoke in my intro as there will be 10 air monitoring sites in TN,NC, SC, GA, and VA. These sites are all currently subject to significant sources of air pollution, i...

Matt Rutherford is one of the CO-Directors & Expedition Leaders of Ocean Research Project, which is a nonprofit whose mission is to observe the unknown and monitor humanity’s impact on the Ocean through dedicated interdisciplinary field expeditions. Two of the main projects they focus on is research on the melting glaciers in Greenland as well as marine plastic pollution.  Greenland has a vast...

Elissa Huffstetler and Theresa Ahrens are Residents of southeastern Person County, NC where Dominion Energy is wanting to put a facility that would include a 25 million gallon liquified natural gas storage tank, and plans submitted by Dominion suggest that a second tank could be built there in the future. The facility could emit 65,579 tons of greenhouse gasses, specifically methane, each year and...

Adam Ratner is the Associate Director of Conservation Education at Marine Mammal Center.  The Marine Mammal Center advances global ocean conservation through rescue and rehabilitation, scientific research, and education. They are the world's largest marine mammal hospital and rescues more marine mammals than any other organization in the world, covering a rescue range that spans 600 miles of C...

Sarah Ludington is a Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the First Amendment Clinicare and Kyle Compton is a Local News Fellow of the Clinic.  The First Amendment Clinic at Duke University provides students the opportunity to work directly with clients facing free expression concerns, including defamation, content-discrimination, and reporter’s privilege. Their services are pro bono and open...

We’re back to continue our conversation with Jay Feldmen who is Executive Director with Beyond Pesticides. Go back to the previous episode to learn the background of Beyond Pesticides and what they are doing. And now here is the rest of our conversation. Beyond Pesticides are science and research based. They seek to protect healthy air, water, land, and food for ourselves and future generations. B...

Jay Feldman is the Executive Director of Beyond Pesticides.  Beyond Pesticides are science and research based. They seek to protect healthy air, water, land, and food for ourselves and future generations. By forging ties with governments, nonprofits, and people who rely on these natural resources, they reduce the need for unnecessary pesticide use and protect public health and the environment. The...

Emily Scarr is with the Maryland Public Interest Research Group.  Maryland PIRG is an advocate for the public interest. They speak out for the public and stand up to special interests on problems that affect the public's health, safety and wellbeing. For every issue they work on, they have a bold vision of how to transform our country. Although, they understand that change comes one step at a...

This is the continuation of last week’s episode of interviews from my week at the International Peace Camp in the Netherlands. Go back to the last episode to get the background of why we were there and actions we did, and those stories. And without further ado, here are the rest of the conversations. 45 of us from around Europe and the U.S. gathered together for a week of actions in protest agains...

This week's episode is a compilation of short interviews from my week at the International Peace Camp in the Netherlands. 45 of us from around Europe and the U.S. gathered together for a week of actions in protest against the U.S. Nuclear bombs stored at the Volkel Air Base. The Netherlands is one of five NATO members to host US nuclear weapons on its territory as part of a nuclear-sharing agr...

Steve Preston is the Director of Parks with Parks and People. Parks and People have a single goal in mind: to improve the quality of life for residents of Baltimore by ensuring that everyone is connected to nature through vibrant parks and green spaces.  According to the Parks and People, the act of reclaiming a vacant lot or beautifying a neglected open space, by even a few residents on a single...

We’re back with the second part of Dr. Claudia Miller’s talk on Toxicant-Induced Loss of Tolerance (TILT). Go back to part 1 to listen to more of an explanation, but TILT seeks to explain the mystifying range of symptoms suffered by people with chemical intolerances. To listen to the full talk with presentation slides, I have linked the youtube video by Beyond Pesticides below as well as anything...

I’m airing Dr. Claudia Miller’s presentation on her theory of TILT. Dr. Miller is a Professor, Allergy/Immunology and Environmental Health at the University of Texas. For decades Dr. Miller has championed a new theory of disease to join the germ theory and the immune theory: Toxicant-Induced Loss of Tolerance (TILT). TILT explains the mystifying range of symptoms suffered by people with chemical i...

Susan Crane is a Peace Activist.  Susan and I met last year at the 2022 International Peace Delegation in Germany. This year that same peace delegation will be held again in the Netherlands at the Volkel Air Base. The 2023 Volkel Peace Delegation will focus on the climate and a nuclear free world. Activists from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, the United States and possibly other countries get...

Todd Thiele is the president of the Norris Lake Protection Alliance (NLPA).  Norris Lake, also known as Norris Reservoir, is a reservoir that is located in East Tennessee. The lake was created by the Norris Dam on the Clinch River in 1936 by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) for flood control, water storage, and hydroelectric power. And today, Norris Lake is a recreation hub with 809 miles of s...

Trey Sherard is a Riverkeeper with Anacostia Riverkeeper. As an organization they aim to create meaningful encounters with the river for all people in order to open opportunities for enjoyment of the Anacostia River. Their primary programmatic goals are centered on trash mitigation, advocacy, water quality, stormwater reduction, and river access.  The Anacostia River is a river in the Mid Atlantic...

Mike Ross is an assistant professor in the University of Tennessee Department of Plant Sciences’ Sustainable Landscape Design concentration and in the School of Landscape Architecture. Originally he was trained as an organismal biologist and evolutionary ecologist. And now, he translates ecological systems and relationships into design and management strategies. In the episode we talk about city d...

Julie Griffin and Julie Owen, are residents in Ringgold, VA where they have an industrial, open air landfill in their backyards. The landfill is owned by First Piedmont where they created the landfill after the community had already existed there for 50+ years. The residents have to look at that mess every time they come out of their houses’ and deal with the odor from it 24 hours a day. There is...

We’re back with Jason Burns who is Executive Director at Last Call Foundation and he's been a Firefighter since 2006. He has spent much of his career advocating for better and safer working conditions for his firefighters. I talked with Jason at the end of last year in episode 24, about how there is PFAS in firefighters PPE. We ended the conversation on how when they wash their PPE, the PFAS e...