The Chesapeake Bay is ballooning with an apex predator that can only be defeated with grease and breading – blue catfish! They were introduced to Virginia’s freshwater rivers in the 70s and 80s for recreational fishing. Now, the Bay is teeming with 700 million to 1 billion pounds of blue catfish. Michael Schwarz says that we can restore balance to the bay by eating the fresh, white saltwater catfish filet. And it’s best served fried! And: Growing up, Maurica Bynum smelled the funk of the Franklin County paper mill and collected water samples with her parents who were water treatment operators. Now, she brings her childhood experience with public health and environmentalism to the classroom, preparing the next generation of public health experts.

Later in the show: Indigenous people throughout the Amazon basin understand themselves to be deeply connected to the more-than-human world. So the pollution of waterways and loss of biodiversity is not just an environmental loss, it’s a loss of spiritual protection and livelihood. Jeremy Larochelle says that indigenous amazonian people honor poets as much as they honor the fishermen. And poets like Juan Carlos Galeans and Ana Varela Tafur are sounding the alarm about the urgent need to save the Amazon by honoring it.