Broken Ground is a podcast produced by the Southern Environmental Law Center digging up environmental stories in the South.
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Walk out your front door, listen, and look. That’s the advice avid birder Christian Cooper gives to those wanting to take up his passion, birdwatching. Cooper is a lifelong birder, Emmy Award-winning host of National Geographic’s “Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper,” and The New York Times bestselling author of “Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World.”…
Jo and Joy Banner envision a time, not too distant from now, when travelers visiting their small town along the Mississippi River don’t gawk at the concentration of polluting petrochemical plants nearby, but instead revel in the area’s rich cultural history. As founders of the non-profit Descendants Project, the twin sisters have dedicated themselves to preserving the histories of the Black…
On her group walking tours around Durham’s Hayti District, performance artist Aya Shabu brings Black history to life, transporting visitors back to Hayti in its heyday. Once known as a Black Wall Street, the community was founded by freed people from Stagville and other nearby plantations. But eventually it was torn apart by urban renewal and construction of Highway 147, leaving residents dealing…
A “keeper of memory” and Director of the North Carolina Division of State Historic Sites, Michelle Lanier has built a career on understanding layers of history underlying our Southern landscapes, not just battlefields and burial grounds, but native pine forests as well. Prized for their lumber and ‘bled’ for their multipurpose pine gum, Longleaf pines were exploited, much as the enslaved and…
Writer Latria Graham helps us unearth the surprising ways in which long-ago plantations and modern environmental injustices are intertwined in the South. From some of the earliest Freedmen’s communities built on frequently flooded land, to contemporary Black neighborhoods now hemmed in by polluting industries, we map the many ways that racist systems codified during plantation slavery still…
On a map, you can often spot pollution sources like a power plant, a highway, or a factory. But why were these things built where they are, and who lives next door? Answering those questions reveals a surprising truth: it’s often a short distance from yesterday’s plantations to today’s pollution. In this season of Broken Ground, we’ll journey through history, from a remote turpentine camp where…
This season of Broken Ground we spend time in the rural South with the people who call it home. Often celebrated for the quiet life close to nature, and a region that defines many perceptions of the South, it’s also a place polluting industries target, betting what they do will be out of sight and out of mind. Sometimes these polluters are even invited to town by local officials eager for economic…
We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about where our trash ends up but, when you live next door to a landfill, you don’t have that luxury. The burning smell of chemicals, the flocks of circling vultures, the constant rumble of truck traffic and the accompanying exhaust are just the most obvious impacts of living near acres of garbage, especially when that garbage isn’t managed properly. Neighbors…
"Inland flooding" was a phrase that often needed explanation. Now all you need to say is "Helene". The storm that ravaged Appalachia was a stark reminder of a phenomenon that’s becoming more and more common – residents living far from the coast watching as their local river jumps its banks and inundates yards, homes, and businesses. For small towns with even smaller budgets, disasters like this…
How can a power source that creates more climate warming emissions than coal be called renewable? This is the paradox of wood pellets, a type of biomass being burned at industrial scale to produce electricity overseas. And it’s not just the global climate that’s paying the price for this greenwashing. Pellet producers are fanning out across the southern U.S., razing forests, and wreaking havoc in…