Outdoorsy types are the among the biggest ambassadors of Leave No Trace, a set of principles and best practices for sharing and conserving wilderness areas. But while most people agree on the broad strokes - DON'T SCREW UP NATURE! - sorting out the details can be an emotional and argumentative affair... especially when it comes to rocks.

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The 40-hour workweek is as American as apple pie, and it’s been around almost as long. So, is it finally time to re-think our Monday-through-Friday lifestyle? With modern mechanization and automation, should we all have more leisure time? And what would that mean for the environment? Producer Jimmy Gutierrez looks into the history of work culture, where it’s being challenged, and makes the argument that we ALL should be working less, you know, to save the planet. 

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Here's a humdinger of a thought experiment: How fast could people go before the combustion engine and other technologies drastically increased the speed of the human race? And how did they pull it off? Skis? Sled-dogs? Catapults? From ancient horseriders and viking ships to primitive luges and "Russian Mountains", the Outside/In team researches all sorts of old-fashioned methods of locomotion and presents biggest the speed trial of the millennium.

If you've got your own ideas about how humans hit record speeds during ye good olde days before the automobile, send us an email at [email protected] or call us on the Ask Sam hotline: 1-844-GO-OTTER!

Episode photo  by William James, courtesy of the City of Toronto Archives.

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Pirate trails are everywhere: the pioneers of mountain biking built them on private land, public land and everything in between. They were built by riders just looking for a place to take their new bikes, and in the process they simply appropriated land that they wanted for their trails.

But what happens when the evolution of a sport threatens the very thing that made it so attractive in the first place?

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Everyone's heard of Vikings - their daring North Atlantic voyages, their mysterious runes. But there's another ancient culture in Arctic Scandinavia that's much older, and just as fascinating - the Sámi. While the Vikings have been celebrated, Sámi music, language and traditions were forced underground. Why?

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There's only one place in the world that you can find the axolotl—the Mexican salamander—in the wild. This creature is the living embodiment of Xolotl, the Aztec god of heavenly fire, of lightning and the underworld, and the renegade twin brother of Quetzalcoatl. But the wild axolotl’s fate might be bound to the Aztecs by more than myth: its life in 21st century could rely on a landscape both very old and very human.

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Ask Sam: that special time when scientists worldwide cringe as Sam & the team speculate wildly on a diverse range of topics before picking up the phone to call in the real experts. 

This time, we've got another hirsute mystery: Are insect and plant hairs also made from the magical (seeming) protein called keratin? Also, do bugs get cancer? And which came first: the chachalaca (not a typo) or the turkey? 

The Ask Sam Hotline (1-844-GO-OTTER) is always open, so do your best to stump the gang and send us down another figurative rabbit-hole!

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Listener feedback is a big part of working in radio and podcasting. We try to look for the lesson in every critical email, phone call, or tweet (even the cranky ones). However, there is one listener who has probably gotten in touch with producers at New Hampshire Public Radio more than any other - a vegan advocate named Laura Slitt. Her approach hasn’t always made it easy to take her seriously.

Today, we’ve got a deeply personal story from producer Taylor Quimby, who last year decided to strike up a relationship with Laura, to try and understand where she’s coming from and what made her decide to give up meat and dairy.

Heads up: This episode features descriptions of people killing animals to eat them.

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Today the second in our two-part series on the politics of population. In this episode, we’re digging into the story of how around the turn of the millennium, population got all tangled up in immigration in one vote at the Sierra Club.

That ugly fight represents a pivot point for the movement: a transition from the environmental politics of the 70s and 80s to the environmental politics of today.

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Today, we’re talking about population. How it went from being on the front pages of our newspapers and all over late night television to being the issue that you’ll only hear from out of the mouth of comic book super-villain Thanos. It's a big story, so we're spending two episodes on it.

Also, we promised you a link to David Roberts' Vox piece, so here's that.

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