Outside/In

It’s Outside/In’s annual winter show, in which the team gathers around the proverbial fire to share our best ideas towards becoming better friends with winter. The dream is to not just survive, but thrive – dare we say, to “surthrive” – and embrace the season, both the cold and the cozy. This year, we’re joined by the wonderful Mara Hoplamazian, climate and environment reporter at New Hampshire Pu...

It’s high time to shine a light on an under-appreciated nocturnal visitor to America’s backyards and garbage cans: the opossum. The opossum is the only marsupial in North America, and they’ve been snuffling around since before the dinosaurs died. It faints at the slightest threat, yet can be struck by a venomous snake and, unfazed, turn right around and eat it.  Also, they have two vaginas, and an...

The premise of History’s reality TV show Alone is about as straightforward as it gets. Ten people are dropped into the remote wilderness with nothing but a handful of tools, a supply of GoPro cameras, and instructions to document their entire experience.  As contestants put their wilderness skills to the test, they face some of reality television’s most intense physical and emotional stakes; strug...

It’s time to open our mailbag and answer your questions about fall – and not just the season. We’ve interpreted the theme to include everything from dreams about falling to fallout shelters and, um, tornadoes.  Plus, we reveal the long-anticipated winner of our poll on best alternatives for replacing the term “leaf-peeping.” Question 1: Why do so many have recurring dreams about falling? Question...

Jack Rodolico knows exactly what scares him. Sharks.  But here’s what he doesn’t get: if he’s so freaked out, why can’t he stop incessantly watching online videos of bloody shark attacks?  Why would he deliberately seek out the very thing that spooks him? To figure it out, Jack enlists the help of other scaredy-cats: our listeners, who shared their fears about nature with us. Together, Jack and th...

When it comes to protecting the biodiversity of Planet Earth, there is no greater failure than extinction.  Thankfully, only a few dozen species have been officially declared extinct by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the half century since the passage of the Endangered Species Act.  But, hold on. Aren’t we in the middle of the sixth mass extinction? Shouldn’t the list of extinct species be… w...

If you've been having trouble getting in with a veterinarian, you're not imagining it. Across the country, pet care is increasingly hard to come by, and more vets are leaving the job. Alaska’s capital city, Juneau, has lost roughly half of its veterinarians since the pandemic began. Pet owners often have to wait several weeks for an appointment, surgery is scarce, and 24/7 emergency care doesn’t e...

Planting a tree often becomes almost a shorthand for doing a good deed. But such an act is not always neutral. In some places, certain trees can become windows into history, tools of erasure, or symbols of resistance. This episode originally aired in October of 2020.  Featuring: Liat Berdugo, Irus Braverman, Jonathan Kuttab, Noga Kadman, Iyad Hadad, Raja Shehadeh, Rabbi Arik Ascherman, Miri Maoz-O...

It’s that time again when we open our mailbag to answer your (oh-so-delightful) questions. This time, we deliberate over what seagulls are doing so far from the sea, the reason that staring at fire is so compelling, why dogs kick up dirt after they poo, and other timeless inquiries. Submit your own question (the weirder the better) on Instagram, via email at outsidein@nhpr.org, or by calling our O...

Ever have an unexpected animal encounter that leaves you filled with adrenaline? Or awed by the natural world? Or filled with fear?  On this episode, we hand over the reins to the folks at Every Little Thing, a Spotify-exclusive podcast hosted by Flora Lichtman. They asked their listeners for stories about extreme animal run-ins, and boy did folks deliver…. From a tangled antlers conundrum, to a l...

Some people see something special happening at the Berkeley Community Garden in Boston’s South End: a multicultural garden community built from the rubble of a demolished city block; a green oasis of Chinese plants like bitter melon, cultivated here for over half a century. But others… well, all they see is a trash pile. In the final installment of Yardwork, the story of how a predominantly immigr...

Welcome to Yardwork, a summer yard and garden miniseries from Outside/In. We’re sharing three stories about our relationships with the land around us: the front yard, the backyard, and down the block. This is part two. Sometimes, when Maureen McMurray is digging in her backyard garden, she encounters something she didn’t expect: a lump of coal. She’s planted vegetables in the same soil for a few y...

Welcome to Yardwork, a summer yard and garden miniseries from Outside/In. We’re sharing three stories about our relationships with the land around us: the front yard, the backyard, and down the block. This is part one. Americans love a lawn. Green grass grows everywhere: on baseball fields, in backyards, in front of strip malls. Collectively, we spend billions of dollars every year keeping them fe...

Humans have had an impressive run thus far; we’ve explored most of the planet (the parts that aren’t underwater anyway), landed on the moon, created art and music, and some pretty entertaining Tik Toks.  But we’ve survived on the planet for just a fraction of the time horseshoe crabs and alligators have. And we’re vastly outnumbered by many species of bacteria and insects.  So what is the most suc...

The National Park Service has changed immensely since its days of keeping poachers out of Yellowstone. So has its approach to telling the story of America.  Kirsten Talken-Spaulding of the NPS and Will Shafroth of the National Parks Foundation help us understand how this colossal system actually works and what it's doing to tell the true story of the United States. This episode was reported and pr...

The land had been cultivated and lived on for millennia when geologist Ferdinand Hayden came upon the astounding Yellowstone "wilderness." It wasn't long before the federal government declared it a national park, to be preserved in perpetuity for the enjoyment of all. Ostensibly. How did Yellowstone go from being an important home, hunting ground, thoroughfare and meeting place to being a park?  T...

Last summer, former Outside/In host Sam Evans-Brown quit journalism to become a lobbyist for clean energy. He’s not alone. Millions of people left their jobs or changed careers in the past couple years. But is the field of climate journalism going through its own “Great Resignation?” In a moment when the stakes are so high, are the people who cover the climate crisis leaving journalism to try to h...

Few bear witness to human decomposition. We embalm and seal bodies in caskets, and bury them six feet underground. Decomposition happens out of sight and out of mind, or in the case of cremation, is skipped over entirely. But at human decomposition facilities, sometimes known as "body farms," students and researchers see rotting corpses every day. They watch as scavengers and bacteria feast on the...

Anybody who supports the show RIGHT NOW, during our June 2020 Fund Drive, will be entered to win a $500 Airbnb gift card, and will receive an adorable limited-edition Outside/In axolotl sticker. Click here to donate to Outside/In right now.    A few weeks ago, we teamed up with the Civics 101 podcast to bring you the story of Happy, an Asian elephant living in the Bronx Zoo. Lawyers had petitioned...

Anybody who supports the show RIGHT NOW, during our June 2020 Fund Drive, will be entered to win a $500 Airbnb gift card, and will receive an adorable limited-edition Outside/In axolotl sticker. Click here to donate to Outside/In right now. When the smash-success Jurassic Park first hit theaters in 1993, it inspired a generation of dinophiliacs and helped to usher in a new “golden age of paleontol...

Anybody who supports the show RIGHT NOW, during our June 2020 Fund Drive, will be entered to win a $500 Airbnb gift card, AND will receive an adorable limited-edition Outside/In axolotl sticker. Click here to donate to Outside/In right now. Happy has lived in New York City’s Bronx Zoo for years. To visitors, she’s a lone Asian elephant. But to a team of animal rights lawyers, she’s a prisoner. The...

It’s that time again, when scientists everywhere hold their breath as we open our listener mailbag. It’s spring in the northern hemisphere, so the theme of the questions in this episode is “growth” — with the exception of the last question, which is… kind of the opposite. Question 1: Um, what are those frogs doing? (go to our website to see the picture) Question 2: What’s that white foam that form...

On a bluebird day in April of 2019, Snow Ranger Frank Carus set out to investigate a reported avalanche in the backcountry of Mt. Washington. He found a lone skier, buried several feet under the snow. The man was severely hypothermic, but alive. Wilderness EMTS can work for decades and never encounter this particular situation, and what happened next was an attempted rescue that people in Northern...

A few weeks ago our host, Nate Hegyi, was on the edge of a very high cliff in Utah’s Zion National Park when he heard a little voice inside his head whisper… “jump.”   He didn’t heed the call, thankfully, and when he got down safely he discovered that more than a third of all people might feel this urge, ominously known as “the call of the void.”  Most of us can wave off these impulses. But what i...

Three hundred years ago on Easter Sunday, 1722, European explorers landed on a South Pacific island that they called “Easter Island.” And they were shocked to see nearly one-thousand giant statues of stoic faces, called “moai”, placed all over the island. Who moved them? And how did they do it? The most popular theory was that this remote civilization destroyed itself – cutting down all the trees...