One of the worst industrial disasters in our nation’s history occurred in West Virginia in the 1930s. Not in a coal mine – but in a tunnel chiseled out of a mountain for a hydroelectric power plant. Hundreds of workers, most of them poor and Black, quietly died from breathing in silica dust. For decades, the true scale of the devastation was buried by the companies behind the project.

Featured in this episode:

Catherine Venable Moore

Dr. Martin Cherniack

Sources:

Dr. Martin Cherniack’s book The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Disaster 

Catherine Venable Moore’s “The Book of the Dead” in Oxford American:

https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-94-fall-2016/the-book-of-the-dead

Muriel Rukeyser's Book of the Dead

George Robinson’s Congressional Testimony

NPR’s reporting on the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/20/685821214/before-black-lung-the-hawks-nest-tunnel-disaster-killed-hundreds

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The device you’re using to listen to this podcast almost certainly contains cobalt. It’s a vital component of rechargeable batteries, which are essential to electric vehicles, laptops, and smartphones. But most of the world’s known cobalt reserves are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where mines are plagued by child labor, human trafficking, and deadly working conditions.

Featured in this episode:

Siddharth Kara

Sources:

Siddharth Kara’s book Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives and his report “Blood Batteries” https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/beacons-of-excellence/rights-lab/resources/reports-and-briefings/2025/august/blood-batteries.pdf 

Nicolas Niarchos’ reporting in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/the-dark-side-of-congos-cobalt-rush 

Amnesty International’s report “This is What We Die For” https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/this_what_we_die_for_-_report.pdf

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In the late 1980s, Judi Bari was a fearless activist building an alliance between loggers and environmentalists to save the last of California's old growth redwoods. The same traits that attracted followers to her movement, also made her a lot of enemies. In 1990, a bomb exploded in Judi’s car while she was driving. Somehow she survived – but then the FBI showed up and told her she was under arrest.

Featured in this episode: 

Darryl Cherney

Sources: 

Darryl Cherney’s documentary Who Bombed Judi Bari? 

Josh Richman’s reporting in High Country News: https://www.hcn.org/issues/issue-229/earth-firster-judi-bari-avenged-at-last/ 

Judi Bari’s book Timber Wars

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When Florida state wildlife officials begin to suspect that someone is illegally harvesting alligator eggs, they launch Operation Alligator Thief. At its heart: a veteran officer named Jeff Babauta, who delays his retirement to go deep undercover as a real Florida Man, hoping to infiltrate the insular world of gator farming.

Featured in this episode:

Jeff Babauta

Rebecca Renner

Sources:

Rebecca Renner’s book Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In the 1980s, Philadelphia was in the midst of a trash crisis. A sanitation workers’ strike had left the city with an immense backlog of garbage. The solution: Ship it overseas, on a rusting cargo vessel called the Khian Sea. But when one country after another refused to take Philly’s waste, it turned the Khian Sea’s trash voyage into a trash odyssey, and shed light on a growing problem that critics came to call “garbage imperialism.”

Featured in this episode:

Kenny Bruno

Sources:

Simone M. Müller’s book The Toxic Ship

Alexander Clapp’s book Waste Wars

Planet Money’s reporting on the Mobro 4000: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/739893511

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Today, Lawless Planet brings you an episode from our friends at Drilled Media. Season 12 of their flagship podcast is called SLAPP’d, and it tells another side of a story we covered earlier in our episode “Surveillance and Sabotage on the Dakota Access Pipeline.”

Greenpeace, which was only tangentially involved in the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, has been slapped with a $666 million bill for damages...despite the fact that DAPL was built, and has been making Energy Transfer millions of dollars for years. How did we get here? Cody Hall, an Indigenous water protector who was a key figure during the Standing Rock protests and was initially also targeted in Energy Transfer's suit, walks us through how things went down back in 2016 and 2017, and where this suit began.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We’re doing something different on Lawless Planet this week. We’re sharing an episode from our friends Scamfluencers — a show that unpacks the wildest true stories of high-profile scams and the con artists behind them.

When Jeff Carpoff starts a business making portable solar generators, it becomes an instant hit among big corporations, Hollywood studios, and deep-pocketed investors. They think they’re getting a good deal on green energy – and a huge tax credit to go along with it. But Jeff’s clients don’t realize that he’s been playing them. And when he flies too close to the sun, it’ll blow the fuse on his whole operation.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When scam artist Gregory Zaoui got out of prison in 2004, he had a plan to go straight – by selling solar panels. But when he learned about a new carbon trading system that was supposed to reduce CO2 emissions, he saw an obvious loophole. And soon, he found himself at the center of a fraud scheme so extensive that it was hard to tell if the carbon market was doing anything to fight climate change at all.

Featured in this episode:

Jessica Camille Aguirre

Sources:

Jessica Camille Aguirre’s reporting in The Atavaist Magazine: https://magazine.atavist.com/2024/watch-it-burn-france-europe-carbon-fraud-scam-vat-betrayal 

Alec Henry’s podcast “Le Déclic” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkYkJiFl8Pg

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When oil tankers, freighters and cruise ships reach the end of their lives, nearly all wind up on just three beaches in South Asia. There, unskilled workers earning just a few dollars a day tear them apart with hand tools and blowtorches, to be sold as scrap. The shipbreaking industry has remained unchanged for decades, despite its well-documented dangers to the environment and worker safety. But after a deadly explosion in Pakistan, and a risky investigation in Bangladesh, are changes finally coming?

Special thanks to:

Julia Bleckner and Human Rights Watch: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/09/28/trading-lives-profit/how-shipping-industry-circumvents-regulations-scrap-toxic 

Ingvild Jenssen and NGO Shipbreaking Platform: https://shipbreakingplatform.org/

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Humans have a long history of deploying wild beasts in wartime, from horse-mounted cavalry to Hannibal riding into Rome on an elephant. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, a mysterious group of dolphins appeared in the Black Sea. It signaled a return to an old program that many thought had died with the fall of the Soviet Union. For years, the USSR trained dolphins to advance their military goals. And so did America. 

Special thanks to:

Pavel Goldin

Sergei Dobrynin and Mark Krutov

Blair Irvine

Sources:

Frontline’s The Story of Navy Dolphins: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/whales/etc/navycron.html

BBC's Secrets of the Spy Whale: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002504p

Sergei Dobrynin and Mark Krutov’s reporting: https://www.svoboda.org/a/31006448.html

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