A carbon offset is a simple premise: if you take a cross-country flight and are responsible for a half ton of carbon emissions, spend a few dollars to fund the growth of a half ton worth of carbon in the form of a forest. A fossil fuel company can do the same: buy offsets to write off emissions and call it green. But is this just another form of greenwashing?

Do carbon offsets bring us closer to carbon-neutrality?

Featuring Kaarsten Turner Dalby, Heather Furman, Charlie Stabolepszy, Barbara Haya, Jim Shallow, and Adeniyi Asiyanbi.

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Throughout the 20th century, conservationists and environmentalists have looked to protect wildlife and biodiversity through the creation of parks and other forms of exclusionary wildlife zones. Zones that seek to preserve spaces devoid of human impact - or to create them, by displacing indigenous and poor people who already live there. Today, some academics call this strategy by a pejorative name: Fortress conservation.

In this episode, we look at medieval forest law, the early days of Yellowstone National Park, and spreading concern over how conservation efforts are enacted and enforced around the world.

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Featuring Karl Jacoby, Prakash Kashwan, Rosalyn LaPier, Hadrian Cook, and Vicky Tauli-Corpuz.

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Another year… another record-breaking wildfire season. Thanks to climate change the fire season now starts sooner and ends later.  Scientists also say climate change will make lightning more frequent, and winds more powerful. Basically, the world is a tinderbox.

But maybe the problem with these big, out-of-control fires is actually *not enough* fire.

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Featuring Luke Romance, John Bailey, Mike Crawford, Jeff Lougee, Paul Gagnon, Tony Harwood, Steve Pyne and Adele Fenwick.

This episode originally aired in 2018.

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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.

Featuring Liat Berdugo, Irus Braverman, Jonathan Kuttab, Noga Kadman, Iyad Hadad, Raja Shehadeh, Rabbi Arik Ascherman, Miri Maoz-Ovadia, and Nidal Waleed Rabie and his granddaughter Samera.

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Listeners submit their cases for the best fruit ever, and we explore the intersections of fruit, food, and colonialism.

Featuring Alicia Kennedy, Coral Lee, Lauren Baker, Grant Bosse, and Hallie Casey.

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Links

“On Luxury” by Alicia Kennedy

“C is for Colonialism’s Effect on How and What We Eat” by Coral Lee

Here’s the 2013 Scientific American article Taylor mentioned on America’s corn system.

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In one version of a sustainable, carbon-neutral future, the world’s cars will transition from fossil fuels to electricity. Right now that vision absolutely depends on lithium, a primary component of the lithium-ion battery.

But there is no “Lithium Central Planning Committee” balancing supply and demand or making sure that lithium is mined in environmentally and socially responsible ways. In fact, there is almost no lithium mining in the United States at all. So where does it all come from? And who is being affected?

Featuring Emily Hersh, Chloe Holzinger, Mike Wise, Patrick Donnelly, Thea Riofrancos, Emiliano Gullo, Ramón M. Balcázar, and Julian Brave NoiseCat.

Check out NHPR’s new climate reporting project, By Degrees.

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Fred Tutman is a voice for Maryland’s Patuxent River. In 2004, he founded Patuxent Riverkeeper, an environmental advocacy organization. His mission is to protect and preserve all 110 miles of the Patuxent—a mission that takes him to the courtroom and to the riverbank. Fred is also the only African-American "Riverkeeper" in the Waterkeeper Alliance in the U.S., which he sees as an indicator of an environmental movement that is incomplete—one the planet will pay the price for.

“It’s very hard in these big conservation movements for people of color to be ourselves,” said Tutman.

This episode was produced by Sidedoor, a podcast from the Smithsonian.

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There are places on the map where roads end.

The Darién Gap, or el Tapon del Darién, is one of them. It’s a stretch of rainforest in southern Panama, right on the edge of Central and South America. From a globetrotter’s perspective, the Darién Gap might seem to exist mostly as an obstacle to tourists dreaming of a truly epic road trip from Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego.

But, while a road is a way movement, it’s not the only way to get somewhere. What happens, or does not happen, in a place without roads?

Featuring Jorge Ahumada, Roland Kays, Hector Huertas, Ustin Pascal Dubuisson, and Alicia Korten.

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Are snow-making machines an example of climate adaptation, or an example of an emissions feedback loop? Does the fire risk posed by planting trees outweigh the benefits of their use as a carbon sink? Can the team talk big planet problems and still leave room for bad puns? We’ll answer these questions and more climate queries on this special edition of Ask Sam.

Check out NHPR’s new climate reporting project, By Degrees.

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The world of Skyrim is vast. The video game contains cities, villages, and rugged wilderness: high waterfalls cascading into deep pools, packs of wolves roaming the edges of misty alpine forests, echoes in the canyons. The game is celebrated for the intricacy of its environment, and is one of the top-selling video games of all time.

“The world itself was almost the main character of the game, in a way. To say that it's just the background I think is not quite enough,” said Noah Berry, Skyrim’s lead environment artist. “All the memories that you take away from playing a game…I think the world is sort of the larger encompassing vehicle that helps usher all that into you. We hope.”

But if you spend enough time in a fantasy, it might change how you relate to the real world.

Featuring Megan Sawyer, Ana Diaz, and Noah Berry.

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