The British countryside is increasingly under siege from a scourge of illegal waste dumping – polluting both water and air – but one man is bravely taking the criminals on, staking out their sites with night vision goggles, drones and more.

In a three-part, 'true eco-crime' podcast series for the Mongabay Newscast, investigative environmental journalists Lucy Taylor and Dan Ashby trace this illegal 'waste trail' from their quiet English town to the nearby countryside, and as far away as Poland.

Threatened, chased, but undeterred, waste investigator Martin Montague has also established a website, Clearwaste, to document incidents of 'fly-tipping' as the practice is known, and people use it daily to report tens of thousands of incidents all over the country, where illegal landfills are also on the rise.

Episodes two and three will air in the coming weeks and take the issue to a wider European scope, discussing it with Interpol and visiting a destination for U.K. waste in Poland.

Banner image: A mountain of UK plastic waste near Wespack Recycling Factory in Malaysia, via Greenpeace Media Library.

Please invite your friends to subscribe to the Mongabay Newscast wherever they get podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, or download our free app in the Apple App Store or in the Google Store to get access to our latest episodes at your fingertips.

This episode is "The Waste Mountain" and is part one of the podcast series, "Into the Wasteland," developed with the support of Journalismfund.eu.

If you enjoy the Newscast, please visit www.patreon.com/mongabay to pledge a dollar or more to keep the show growing, Mongabay is a nonprofit media outlet and all support helps!

See all our latest news from nature's frontline at Mongabay's homepage: news.mongabay.com or find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram by searching for @mongabay.

Please share your thoughts and feedback! [email protected].

Host Mike G. speaks with Mongabay reporters whose new investigations reveal a major and illegal shark finning operation by one of China’s largest fishing fleets, and the role of a giant Japanese company, Mitsubishi, in buying that fleet’s products.

Through an exhaustive interview process with deckhands who worked throughout the company’s fleet, Mongabay's Phil Jacobson and Basten Gokkon revealed that Dalian Ocean Fishing's massive operation deliberately used banned gear to target sharks across a huge swath of the western Pacific Ocean.

The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission is currently meeting to discuss policies that would crack down even further on use of this gear, and we speak with Jacobson who is there covering the event.

We also speak with Japan-based reporter Annelise Giseburt who was able to verify that the illegal operation benefited greatly from selling a massive share of its tuna catch to the Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi.

The investigations:

• Exclusive: Shark finning rampant across Chinese tuna firm’s fleet
• How Mitsubishi vacuumed up tuna from a rogue Chinese fishing fleet

Please invite your friends to subscribe to the Mongabay Newscast wherever they get podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, or download our free app in the Apple App Store or in the Google Store to get access to our latest episodes at your fingertips.

If you enjoy the Newscast, please visit www.patreon.com/mongabay to pledge a dollar or more to keep the show growing, Mongabay is a nonprofit media outlet and all support helps!

See all our latest news from nature's frontline at Mongabay's homepage: news.mongabay.com or find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram by searching for @mongabay.

Please share your thoughts and feedback! [email protected].

“How long do we keep pretending that capitalism works? How long are we going to keep pretending that there is such a thing as objectivity? How long are we going to keep pretending that we're not in a runaway climate crisis? Systems are literally collapsing – the UK is in massive crisis, the United States is in massive crisis. These countries are seen as the leaders of the western world in a lot of ways and the reality is neither country is even a democracy anymore. We're a corporatocracy at best.

“What happens in countries where there's not legitimate journalism in the mainstream is you end up with a society that's overwhelmed with information. In the United States, huge swaths of the country can't even tell truth from fiction, which is something that Hannah Arendt in Origins of Totalitarianism warned: the best subject for totalitarian rule is not someone with a certain political bias, but someone who literally just can't tell truth from fiction anymore.”

Dahr Jamail is an award-winning journalist and author, who was one of the few independent journalists to report extensively from the ground during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Dahr later became a climate reporter, tracking climate disruption around the world and collating his knowledge in the wonderful book, The End of Ice.

Dahr joined me to discuss what’s going wrong with journalism and how to create a journalism which can respond to the climate crisis. We discuss information pollution in the mainstream media, the fallacy of objectivity, the corruption of profit-maximising goals, self-selecting biases, and how the abject failures of the mainstream media have disempowered, disengaged and confused populaces around the world—making them ripe for manipulation by populists.

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it.

© Rachel Donald

“How do we challenge the hegemony and change it, and start to plan for a future for our children, for our grandchildren, for our great grandchildren? That is the great challenge. But as I've been implying, it's really something which is or should be an incredibly mainstream and commonsensical point of view. Everybody cares about their children having a decent life, and that means they care about their grandchildren and their great grandchildren and their great, great grandchildren having a decent life.

“So this is why perhaps this can be a hopeful moment that the kind of shift that we're talking about here, which is very, very far from where the UK government in particular is right now, is one which should be and can be and, I think, is deeply and widely appealing to a broad spectrum of people.”

Rupert Read is an ecological philosopher and activist. Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, Rupert has written over a dozen books whilst campaigning for the climate with the Green Party and Extinction Rebellion. His recent work focuses on the precautionary principle—examining how humankind often fails to act cautiously despite not having enough evidence to warrant our choices and decisions. This can be applied both to the climate crisis and the development of AI.

Rupert joins me to discuss truth, counter-histories, chance, through-topias, and the moderate flank—the next branch of activism which seeks to recruit those resistant to the radical action which more commonly makes the headline. Don’t fancy throwing soup at paintings or shutting down roads? There are myriad ways we can all get involved in resisting the fossil-fuel economy and demand change. Rupert reveals the many campaigns happening in the UK for those who want to take action but don’t know where to start.

Planet: Critical is 100% independent and reader-funded. If you value it, and have the means, become a paid subscriber today!

© Rachel Donald

In a nation gripped by currency depreciation, harsh economic fallout and civil unrest, the Shouf Biosphere Reserve endures as a rare conservation success story in Lebanon.

Previously protected by landmines and armed guards, the region (a UNESCO biosphere reserve) forges ahead with community engagement in tree-planting projects while providing the community with food, fuel, and jobs.

Click the play button to hear this popular article by Elizabeth Fitt aloud: 

From land mines to lifelines, Lebanon’s Shouf is a rare restoration success story

Please invite your friends to subscribe to the Mongabay Newscast wherever they get podcasts or download our free app in the Apple App Store or in the Google Store to have access to our latest episodes at your fingertips.

If you enjoy this series, please visit www.patreon.com/mongabay to pledge a dollar or more to keep the show growing, Mongabay is a nonprofit media outlet and all support helps!

See all our latest news from nature's frontline at Mongabay's homepage: news.mongabay.com or find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram by searching for @mongabay.

Photo Credit: Farid Tarabay, forest guide, under the Lamartine Cedar, one of the oldest in the reserve. Image by Elizabeth Fitt for Mongabay.

Please send feedback to [email protected], and thank you for listening.

Ella Saltmarshe is “incorrigibly plural” — an anthropologist by training, Ella is a writer, activist, organiser, founder and narrative strategist with experience in public policy and international development. Ella works at the intersection of stories and the climate crisis, channeling her immense creative energy and agency into creating a world we can leave behind for generations to come.

Alongside discussing Ella’s impressive work in the narrative field, which includes helping policy-makers around the world reframe their understanding of the future to consider our long-term impacts and responsibilities, we delve into the principles of storytelling, the fight against propaganda, short-term vs long-term thinking, and the fascinating concept of considering oneself an ancestor to future generations.

© Rachel Donald

Healthy ecosystems are often noisy: from reefs to grasslands and forests, these are sonically rich places, thanks to all the species defending territories, finding mates, locating prey, socializing or perhaps just enjoying their ability to add to life's rich chorus.

Recording soundscapes in such places is one way to ensure we don't forget what a full array of birds, bats, bugs, and more sounds like, and it couldn't be more important, as the world witnesses a decline in many such kinds of creatures, due to the biodiversity crisis. Soundscape recordings provide a kind of sonic baseline which researchers can also pull data from.

On this episode of the podcast, host Mike G. plays a diverse selection of forest soundscapes from South America and Africa and discusses them with their creator, sound recordist George Vlad, who travels the world and shares the acoustic alchemy of nature via his impressive Youtube channel.

Join us to explore these sonic landscapes with Vlad and get inspired to find the richness of natural sounds near you.

Episode artwork: A writhed hornbill, a Philippines endemic species, singing. Image via Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0).

Please invite your friends to subscribe to the Mongabay Newscast wherever they get podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, or download our free app in the Apple App Store or in the Google Store to get access to our latest episodes at your fingertips.

If you enjoy the Newscast, please visit www.patreon.com/mongabay to pledge a dollar or more to keep the show growing, Mongabay is a nonprofit media outlet and all support helps!

See all our latest news from nature's frontline at Mongabay's homepage: news.mongabay.com or find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram by searching for @mongabay.

Please share your thoughts and feedback! [email protected].

Laurie Laybourn is a policy researcher and author. He leads Cohort 2040, which explores how to deepen rapid action toward a more sustainable and equitable world even as the effects of the environmental crisis get far worse. Laurie is a visiting fellow at Chatham House and at the Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter, as well as an associate fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). He is a regular commentator on TV and radio and co-author of Planet on Fire (Verso 2021). 

We discuss the opportunity in crisis moments throughout history, with Laurie revealing the best policies for navigating the climate crisis, nationally and internationally, as well as those for a sustainable future. He also explains how the our current fiscal ideologies, including our relationship to debt, impedes necessary climate action around the world whilst hobbling the global south’s capacity to respond to increasing catastrophes. Laurie says the climate crisis is a fiscal problem—could reimagining fiscal policies keep 1.5 alive?

© Rachel Donald

On Costa Rica's Carribbean coast, sloths are losing their habitat to houses and roads, forcing them to cross between forest patches on the ground, making them vulnerable to traffic incidents and dog attacks. 

However, the Sloth Conservation Foundation, created by British zoologist Rebecca Cliffe, is trying to change that by building rope bridges to allow these famously slow-moving animals to safely cross cleared patches of forest.

Read the popular article written by Monica Pelliccia and translated by Maria Angeles Salazar here:

Bridges in the sky carry sloths to safety in Costa Rica

Please invite your friends to subscribe to the Mongabay Newscast wherever they get podcasts, or download our free app in the Apple App Store or in the Google Store to have access to our latest episodes at your fingertips.

If you enjoy this series, please visit www.patreon.com/mongabay to pledge a dollar or more to keep the show growing, Mongabay is a nonprofit media outlet and all support helps!

See all our latest news from nature's frontline at Mongabay's homepage: news.mongabay.com or find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram by searching for @mongabay.

Photo Credit: Baby three-toed sloth hugging a stuffed panda in a Trio Indigenous community. Suriname, 2012. Image by Rhett Butler.

Please send feedback to [email protected], and thank you for listening.

Charlie Gardner is a conservationist, activist and writer. An outspoken member of Scientist Rebellion, Charlie left academia last year to focus on raising the climate alarm through civil disobedience and science communication.

Charlie joins me to discuss why scientists feel forced to choose activism. After decades of ignored data, warnings and suggestions, these same scientists who have been fighting to understand the crisis are taking to the streets to be heard.

We discuss ecological systems, energy policy, corrupt politics, media, Extinction Rebellion, how to engage the public and how people can get involved in the face of disastrous inaction. Just this week, a new report on the state of climate action looked at 40 indicators of change and found not a single one is on track to keep the world from heating to the level at which world leaders promised to try to stop global warming.

© Rachel Donald