Ecocide Podcast

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 Dust" explores how railroad sales pitches, false promises of rain, and a wartime wheat boom helped create one of the worst environmental disasters in American history. Through firsthand accounts, including John Garetson and Louise Snyder's escape from the darkness of Black Sunday, the episode brings listeners into daily life amid the black blizzards. It also tells the story of a soil scientist's campaign to change how America farmed, and the hostility awaiting the families who left in search of work, branded "Okies" no matter which state they came from.

This is Part 1 of a two-part story. Part 2, "The Well," returns to the Garetson family's land in present-day Kansas, where the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer threatens another generation's future.

 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 years, this remote corner of West Texas has been a crossroads where wildlife moves freely between the United States and Mexico. In 2026, the federal government set out to change that. Citing border security in a sector that accounts for just over 1 percent of apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border, the Department of Homeland Security waived dozens of laws, including the Endangered Species Act and the 1935 law that created the National Park itself. In August, bulldozers began clearing riparian habitat along the Rio Grande to make way for patrol roads and vehicle barriers. "Breaking Big Bend" traces six months of shifting plans and broken assurances, the bipartisan coalition of sheriffs, ranchers, conservationists, Texas Republicans that forced construction to stop, and what listeners can do before the pause runs out. 

Recorded September 18, 2026. Some details may have changed since recording. 

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 why the public so often finds out only after the most important decisions have already been made. From The Dalles, Oregon, to Broadview, Montana, the pattern is consistent: secret negotiations, nondisclosure agreements, confidential utility contracts, and public hearings held only after projects have gained momentum. At the center of the episode is Stratos, Kevin O’Leary’s proposed data center and private power complex in Box Elder County, Utah. Residents were given only days to understand a project that could transform tens of thousands of acres and dramatically increase the state’s carbon emissions. Communities are fighting back through lawsuits, ballot initiatives, recalls, and moratoriums. But as the federal government opens public land to data center construction, many local tools may no longer apply. As tech companies spend hundreds of billions building the infrastructure of artificial intelligence, who pays, who benefits, and who gets a vote? 

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 is happening in communities that didn't ask for it, that aren't being told what's being built, and that, in some cases, are now paying for the electricity through their own utility bills. Part One of "The Server Farm" follows the data center boom from Northern Virginia to rural Georgia to the south side of Indianapolis, and asks what these facilities actually cost the people who live next to them. 

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? Mercury. The lobstermen who worked those waters had not been told the lobsters might be unsafe. They had been feeding them to their families for years.

The contamination came from a chemical plant 25 miles upstream. By the time the plant closed in 2000, somewhere between 6 and 12 metric tons of mercury had escaped into the river that had sustained the Penobscot Nation for more than 10,000 years. The plant has been closed for over 25 years, but the mercury is still there.

This is the story of how a 33-year industrial operation poisoned the largest river in Maine, why a 22-year lawsuit led to a cleanup effort that's still incomplete, and what it means when the people who lived on a river for millenia are the last ones consulted about how to save it.

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 pollution flowing into the Indian River Lagoon on Florida's east coast. 

Thirty years earlier, the state had passed a law meant to stop that pollution, but it only enforced half of it. In 2025, a federal court ruled that Florida's own pollution permits had violated the Endangered Species Act by killing the manatees' food supply, and ordered the state to get federal authorization before it could keep permitting that pollution. 

"Wasting" is the story of how the most protected animal in Florida came to starve in the water it had always called home, and how a lawsuit over dead manatees may end up rewriting what it means to protect a species at all.  

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 cease-and-desist orders, but the operator ignored all of them.

Below the hillside, Gibbons Creek is salmon spawning habitat that drains into Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Refuge and the Columbia River. Mining operations require containment systems to keep toxic runoff out of nearby waterways. Without permits, there are no required containment standards to meet, and no one to enforce them.

What followed became the largest and longest-running land use violation in the history of the National Scenic Area: a years-long fight involving a regulatory body that invented a neutrality obligation that didn't exist in the law, and a community that refused to accept that the Gorge could be carved up while everyone looked the other way.

The story of a Chilean mining giant's efforts to dig a copper mine at the edge of America's most-visited wilderness area | 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 for Antofagasta to pursue a copper mine five miles from the wilderness's edge.

This is a real-time episode, which means we're covering a story still unfolding. We trace how we got here and lay out exactly what's still in flux, and what you can do about it right now.

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 Washington State, the water looked clean. It wasn't. Sixty percent of the wells nearest the dairy operations that had been running there for decades exceeded the federal safety standard for nitrate.

None of these communities were the victims of an accident. The permits were followed. The lagoons worked as designed. The waste went exactly where the system allowed it to go.

This story is told from three states, across five decades, through the people who got sick, the scientists who proved it, the lawyers who fought it, and the family that built one of the operations at the center of it all. It's a story about a regulatory system that was never designed to protect the communities it was supposed to serve, and about the people fighting back.

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 feral goats were stripping the archipelago bare—destroying the cactus forests, collapsing the soil, and pushing the famous giant tortoises toward extinction.

What followed was one of the most ambitious conservation campaigns ever attempted: 9 years, $10.5 million, 150,000 goats killed, and a technique called the Judas Goat that turned the animals' own social instincts against them.

This is the story of how the Galápagos Islands nearly lost everything.