There’s an iconic scene in the 1987 film Dirty Dancing in which a dance instructor practices a lift with his young student in a beautiful lake at sunset. The water in that lake is disappearing, and Skip Watts and George Stephenson (Radford University) are studying why. And: Virginia’s shoreline is expecting a sea level rise of as much as three feet or more by 2060. Ray Toll (Old Dominion University) says the White House has chosen ODU to lead a pilot project to create a comprehensive local response to the flooding to be used as a model for the rest of the nation. Plus: The earliest environmentalists weren’t tree-huggers; they were hunters and colonialists. Historian Stephen Macekura (Indiana University) traces how African conservation has been closely tied with colonialism and development.

Later in the show: Early struggles between Native Americans and the U.S. government centered on gold claims. But James Allison (Christopher Newport University) says the tension now centers on the new black gold—coal. Plus: Emily Satterwhite (Virginia Tech) talks about two very different images of Appalachia: the pastoral, small towns of literature and the often violent cannibals of horror films. And: In the mid-90s, Latino immigrants started to migrate to smaller towns in the South. Barbara Ellen Smith (Virginia Tech) says the new Appalachia includes chicken enchiladas and tamales.