Outside/In

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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In this update, we tally your votes and announce the winner of our fruit fight. What seed-bearing plant ovary will be crowned the GFOAT, or Greatest Fruit of All Time? The pepper? The coconut? The gourd? The vanilla bean?

Or… none of the above? One listener challenges our candidates with a fruit of his own. Listen to his full 5 minute argument for the grape on the episode page for Fruit Fight. And we welcome you to send you own fruit pitch voicemail to [email protected].

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In 2016, we produced an episode about the ginkgo tree titled "Ginkgo Stink." With its fan-shaped leaves and golden fall foliage, the Ginkgo biloba is a beautiful tree with an incredible history dating back millions of years. It’s also a popular street tree among urban foresters, despite the fact that some ginkgoes produce malodorous cones. The episode was meant to be a celebration of the incredible ginkgo.

But the episode contained an offensive phrase and failed to consider a nonwhite perspective of this amazing species.

In this episode, we’re correcting our mistake, and adding some context about what exactly we got so wrong. First, Felix Poon shares his personal relationship with the ginkgo tree and explores the history of food-related racism in the United States. Then, a new version of the original story, edited to sound the way it should have when we first produced it four years ago.

Explicit Language warning: this episode contains repeated use of a swear word used in the original episode many times. It also contains an ethnic slur, spoken in the context of a conversation about racism. For those reasons, this episode may not be suitable for young kids.

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For months, producer Taylor Quimby has been trying to craft a story about spicy peppers. Every one of his pitches has been shot down…until now. On this episode of Outside/In, a CULINARY challenge, a DELICIOUS debate, a FANTASTIC food fight in which four producers argue about which seed-bearing delicacy is the ABSOLUTE best. Of course these fruits aren’t the ones you typically think of when you’re making a fruit salad…

*To Take our FUN and VERY SCIENTIFIC survey, click here. *

To cast your vote in the Outside/In Fruit Fight, click here.

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