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Northern California Public Media presents Living Downstream: The Environmental Justice Podcast, produced in association with the NPR One mobile app. Living Downstream explores environmental justice in communities from California to Indonesia and is hosted by NCPM News Director Steve Mencher. The podcast features some of the most experienced environmental reporters in the public radio system, as well as a handful of talented newcomers.
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For this final Living Downstream episode of the season, we're dropping in on three recent webinars: One gathering considered Social and Environmental Justice at Upaya Zen Center in New Mexico. Another knitted together poetry and a powerful environmental film. It was put on by the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program. And a third event was cheekily cal…
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This season, we’re looking at environmental racism across the country, and today that takes us to the sugarcane covered, oil-rich region at the intersection of southern Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico: Iberia Parish. In this episode of Living Downstream, we will hear from people who say they are fighting over something that their families have alr…
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From Northern California Public Media and Mensch Media, this edition of Living Downstream is guest hosted by Molly Peterson. This time, from the Coachella Valley, east of Los Angeles, we’re talking about the biggest lake in California — now starved of water — and the people who live around The Sea Next Door. The Salton Sea sits in a depression of l…
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On this episode of Living Downstream, we take you to a little city with big plans for changing the world. While we’re there, we ask what role local governments can play in the movement for climate justice — that’s where climate activism and the fight for social justice meet. Ithaca, New York sees itself as a living laboratory for climate justice. C…
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On this episode of Living Downstream, Texas Public Radio’s Yvette Benavides takes us to Central and South Texas where summer days are frequently in the upper 90’s, but where in many low income neighborhoods the mercury climbs even higher. And with climate change, these areas will be experiencing more extreme temperatures, more frequently and for lo…
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On this episode of Living Downstream: The Environmental Justice Podcast, Victoria Bouloubasis visits a rural county where the multicultural workforce kept America fed during the pandemic. We'll meet Esmeralda, who has become a community health worker, and her mother Marta, who works in a poultry plant. In the face of blatant mistreatment and inadeq…
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For decades, community members and allies have complained about the diesel truck traffic around the Port of Oakland. People who live in this neighborhood, between several freeways and backing up to one of the busiest ports in the nation, have elevated instances of asthma, and shorter life spans, than others in the county. We meet the activists who …
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On this episode of Living Downstream, we visit Houston's Greater Fifth Ward, to learn how creosote contamination has degraded the health of people living near a rail yard. We talk with residents, who describe all the cancer cases in the neighborhood and with Dr. Robert Bullard, widely considered the father of environmental justice. Residents have o…
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The 40th anniversary of PCB protests in North Carolina is about to be commemorated. To mark the occasion, we revisit one of the most listened-to episodes from our first season. This story comes from Warren County. In the early 1980s, Warren County became a flash point in the fight for something that didn’t even have a commonly used name at the time…
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On this episode of Living Downstream, we meet Catherine Coleman Flowers. In 2020, she released her first book, Waste: One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirtiest Secret. The book documents her two-decade crusade to expose the shameful conditions that many of her Alabama neighbors endure. Some Americans take for granted that when they flush the toi…
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More than a year into the pandemic, the Bronx is still the New York City borough with the highest death rate from COVID-19. That's where we begin the second season of our Living Downstream podcast. Last year, Ese Olumhense, former Bronx reporter at THE CITY, explored why residents there were dying from the virus at a rate double the city's average.…
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Season 2 of Living Downstream: The Environmental Justice Podcast premieres Earth Day (4/22/21). Producers are checking in from around the country, from California to North Carolina. And we'll talk with EJ warrior Catherine Coleman Flowers. Here's a preview.By Steve Mencher
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Last year we brought you the story of civilian workers at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, who tested the defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Today these workers are in their 70s and 80s and suffer from the same diseases that Vietnam veterans have shown were caused by their exposure to the herbicide. While surviving veterans receive disa…
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Non-Federally Recognized Tribes Struggle to Protect Environmental and Cultural Assets By Debra Utacia Krol and Allison Herrera Read more about federally non-recognized tribes. Valentin Lopez was handed a dilemma: how to honor his elders’ admonition to fulfill an ancestral directive to guard and protect the ancestral lands of the Amah Mutsun Tribal …
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This is the story of a 15-year conflict over what would be the biggest dam removal ever, a modern cowboys and Indians tale that shows how victories for Native American rights still come with fits of racism and armed conflict, and how rural folks learned to make peace (and collaborate on an 1800-page Congressional bill). It’s a complex story about a…
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This story comes from Warren County, North Carolina. In the early 1980s, Warren County became a flash point in the fight for something that didn’t have a commonly used name at the time: environmental justice. These days, members of this small, “majority-minority” community are taking new approaches to raising environmental consciousness. Jereann Ki…
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The peat swamp forests of Borneo are the site of a failed agricultural experiment. Planners believed that rice should grow in the swamps, but it couldn't. Even today, experiments with growing oil palms and other trees are changing the forests, with little positive to show for these efforts. As indigenous people lost their livelihood, carbon poured …
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You may be familiar with Coachella from hearing about the annual music festival there. But for 10 years, journalist Ruxandra Guidi has been visiting farmworkers in the area, learning about the deplorable conditions in which they live. There’s now some hope that community health workers are making a significant difference in the lives of workers. He…
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For the Navajo people Mother Earth is sacred. She places her mineral riches below ground. That’s where they’re meant to stay. If the Earth’s elements are hauled up to the surface, Navajos believe they can turn monstrous -- or they can unleash the monsters in humankind. Uranium mining produces radionuclides and other toxic wastes full of heavy-metal…
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"Smackdown" tells the story of Richmond California, a working class town that grew up in the shadow of a massive Chevron refinery. The refinery emits a toxic soup of chemicals and residents suffer an asthma rate that is double the national average. Explosions and fires have periodically shaken the refinery since 1989. But Chevron is also the bigges…
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During the Vietnam War the U.S. military defoliated large swaths of Vietnam with Agent Orange to deprive enemy forces of jungle cover. In the process it exposed American soldiers to this toxic chemical as well. Our own civilians back in the U.S. were also exposed to Agent Orange, along with other herbicides. They were involved in testing herbicides…
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When we imagined a podcast about environmental justice – it was before the Tubbs fire here in Sonoma County – and the deadly fire seasons of 2017 and 2018. Even so, we wouldn’t have thought of Indians and their relationship to fire as a matter of environmental justice. But producers Allison Herrera and Debra Utacia Krol have a different viewpoint. …
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Here's a preview of our 12-part podcast, featuring stories from California and the rest of the country (and the world). We're doing a deep dive on environmental justice issues. The timing couldn't be better, as the media is now turning its attention to this issue with full force. Most recently, the Washington Post ran a news analysis under this hea…
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In East Chicago, Indiana, authorities built a public housing project on land once occupied by a lead smelting operation. The area has been declared a Superfund site, and residents of the housing project, but not the surrounding area, have been moved. After we produced this episode of our podcast, the housing project was torn down. Nevertheless, in …
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