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 engines. But in each community we visited, we met small town neighbors who summoned their nerve and...
Dec 19, 2024•14 min•Season 7Ep. 6
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 in rural eastern North Carolina never wanted any of this. They were told, back when plans were firs...
Dec 10, 2024•35 min•Season 7Ep. 5
"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 can accelerate a community's decline. But in Fair Bluff, North Carolina, town officials have responded...
Nov 01, 2024•41 min•Season 7Ep. 4
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 communities forced to host their polluting facilities. So what happens when one neighborhood decides...
Oct 10, 2024•34 min•Season 7Ep. 3
Is that fresh-caught fish safe to eat? In too many rivers across the rural South, the answer is a hard 'no.' Failing sewage systems, agricultural runoff, and politically powerful polluters have all contributed to worrisome water quality in some of our most treasured southern waterways. And, too often, state regulators are little help. It begs the question: Do people enjoying that water have a right to know what's in it? The team at Coosa Riverkeeper in Alabama has answered that question with a r...
Sep 19, 2024•34 min•Season 7Ep. 2
To call the Okefenokee swamp a treasure is to undersell just how special this watery world is. Tucked into the rural southeast corner of Georgia, this 438,000-acre swamp is one of the most ecologically intact places in our nation. Its shallow black waters not only provide habitat to a menagerie of flora and fauna, but also contain a massive peat-filled carbon sink – on a planet desperately in need of one. But now a private company with a checkered past is preparing to mine for minerals on the sw...
Sep 05, 2024•32 min•Season 7Ep. 1
CBS News journalist and author Jonathan Vigliotti joins Broken Ground host Leanna First-Arai to dig into his on-the-ground coverage of breaking climate stories across rural America, particularly in the South. Vigliotti translated this experience into the book Before It's Gone: Stories From the Front Lines of Climate Change in Small Town America, published in April 2024. Support the show
Aug 08, 2024•24 min
Photographer Cornell Watson's images recognize the camera can be a tool for connection, and action. Whether its pollution from hog farms, efforts to gut Black neighborhoods, or racism at the state’s flagship university, Watson's lens points us to see what so many choose to ignore. Support the show
Sep 28, 2023•30 min•Season 6Ep. 4
Whether its natural disasters or shifting political winds, Victoria Bouloubasis and Paola Jaramillo make sure Spanish-speakers in North Carolina have access to it. Ensuring that access fuels their work as a reporter and editor, respectively, at Enlace Latino NC. The outlet uses traditional journalism, podcasts, WhatsApp, social media and comics to connect North Carolina's Spanish speakers to each other and the news around them. Support the show...
Sep 14, 2023•29 min•Season 6Ep. 3
Listen to environmental journalist Cameron Oglesby discuss how highlighting Black joy and centering community narratives in her writing drives action. Support the show
Aug 31, 2023•27 min•Season 6Ep. 2
Hear what spurred the founding of Southerly, an online publication focused on environmental justice, and how it evolved from more traditional reporting to an outlet focused on putting reporters’ tools in community hands. Support the show
Aug 17, 2023•29 min•Season 6Ep. 1
As more and more news outlets close, writers, editors, and photographers across the South are reconsidering how communities stay informed. This season host Leanna First-Arai talks with the new storytellers of the South committed to keeping environmental information in communities' hands. Support the show
Aug 03, 2023•30 sec
Hear how a small group of neighbors in southwest Memphis built a coalition strong enough to defeat a crude oil pipeline. And listen for lessons you can take back to your own community. Join us this season as we head to Boxtown, Tennessee to uncover the stories behind how this community and its allies secured a victory once thought impossible through grassroots organizing, legal advocacy, and unwavering determination. Learn more at brokengroundpodcast.org. Support the show...
Oct 10, 2022•2 min
An announcement late on the Friday of a holiday weekend is a classic move. And in the case of the Byhalia Pipeline it is an end so abrupt many don’t believe it. But it’s true. What quickly becomes apparent is that, while Memphis has won this battle, the war against environmental racism and the systems that support it is far from over. From coal ash to Superfund sites, Memphians are now applying the lessons they learned to the continuing fight for thriving communities, ones with the clean air and...
Sep 22, 2022•31 min•Season 5Ep. 7
With a federal permit approved and state officials supporting the project, in the spring of 2021 the Byhalia Pipeline has momentum on its side. But opponents aren’t giving up as they bring national attention to the project and turn to local elected officials for help, all while still in court questioning a private oil company’s right to take property owners’ land. It’s a season of two steps forward, one step back. Support the show
Sep 08, 2022•30 min•Season 5Ep. 6
As aquifer advocates and the residents of southwest Memphis in the path of the pipeline began looking for help pushing back against Byhalia’s plans, they quickly learned not to assume who would join their cause. From city councilpeople and county commissioners to attorneys and media outlets, the first people to step up weren’t always who they expected. Support the show
Aug 25, 2022•32 min•Season 5Ep. 5
While pipeline developers deploy common tactics to secure support, like spreading donations around the community, organizers look for allies among their elected officials. Reporter Carrington Tatum also starts covering the story and amplifying voices going unheard. Many of those voices belong to Black landowners getting legal notices that pipeline developers plan to take a portion of their land, forever, in exchange for a meager one-time payment. But a few of them aren't sold on the deal. Suppor...
Aug 11, 2022•30 min•Season 5Ep. 4
All of Memphis drinks from a world-class underground source, known as the Memphis Sand Aquifer. The realization that the Byhalia Connection crude oil pipeline, planned for southwest Memphis, could endanger they city's water draws new allies into the pipeline fight. Soon, environmentalists like Ward Archer and Sarah Houston of Protect Our Aquifer are organizing alongside MCAP co-founders Kathy Robinson, Kizzy Jones, and Justin J. Pearson. The fight, which started as a neighborhood struggle agains...
Jul 28, 2022•30 min•Season 5Ep. 3
It was a throw away line by an out of town pipeline representative but it struck a nerve and came to define much of the resistance to the Byhalia Pipeline. In this episode hear the origin story of the phrase that rang throughout the fight: “the point of least resistance.” Intended as an engineering answer to a question about the pipeline route, it came to encapsulate so much of what the pipeline fight was about. And getting it out publicly began to draw new resisters to the fight. Support the sh...
Jul 14, 2022•36 min•Season 5Ep. 2
This is Boxtown, a neighborhood in southwest Memphis founded by formerly enslaved people who put down deep roots and residents who cherish their ties to this land. It’s also a neighborhood that’s seen decades of government neglect, while more and more polluting industries moved into the area. So, when the community first heard about plans for a crude oil pipeline that would cut through their neighborhood, they wanted to know more. They didn’t like what they learned. Support the show...
Jul 01, 2022•34 min•Season 5Ep. 1
Brenda Mallory, former Director of Regulatory Policy at SELC, sat down with us in December 2020 before joining the Biden administration as Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and reflected on how the federal government can engage a broad coalition to embed environmental justice principles across the country. Support the show
Jun 03, 2021•21 min•Season 4Ep. 4
Chandra Taylor is the leader of SELC's Environmental Justice Initiative. Her ongoing work in North Carolina includes cleanups at contaminated industrial sites and an end to unchecked water pollution in Black communities. "It's not going to be just conservationists who turn the tide on global climate change. It's going to take a lot of people. It's going to take the everyday environmentalist." Support the show
May 20, 2021•25 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Catherine Coleman Flowers was recently named to the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. A 2020 MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, her environmental health research brought to light the failing wastewater infrastructure in rural parts of the South. She spoke with Broken Ground about how systemic racism and classism have played a large part in this crisis and how it led her to found the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. Support the show...
May 06, 2021•31 min•Season 4Ep. 2
Heather McTeer Toney stumbled into environmental justice work as the Mayor of Greenville, Mississippi. After moving on as EPA administrator and now as a Senior Adviser at Mom’s Clean Air Force, Toney talks about how to wrap climate justice around social justice and how her faith is inextricably woven into her work fighting climate change. Support the show
Apr 22, 2021•22 min•Season 4Ep. 1
The latest season of Broken Ground, featuring women in the South on the frontlines of fighting for environmental justice, launches this Earth Day, Thursday, April 22. Support the show
Apr 16, 2021•33 sec0
Find out what we learned about sea level rise in the South. Who will be hit the hardest? What can we do? How can we navigate a path forward? Support the show
Sep 23, 2020•14 min•Season 3Ep. 6
In Norfolk, Virginia scientists battling sea level rise enlist residents to help collect data that could help the city better understand its rising tides and flooding problems. Support the show
Aug 27, 2020•33 min•Season 3Ep. 5
In Charleston, South Carolina and its suburbs questions of environmental justice and wetland protections arise as development encroaches. Support the show
Aug 12, 2020•34 min•Season 3Ep. 4
In Norfolk, Virginia homeowners like Karen Speights are struggling with the hard decision of staying put in rising waters or finding a way to start over. Meanwhile, the city is hoping it can buy people time. Support the show
Jul 29, 2020•37 min•Season 3Ep. 3
With waters rising in Charleston, South Carolina we explore what, if any, breaking point there is for people living and working in this city. And we talk to city officials about making the big decisions of what, and what not, to build when trying to keep a flooding city livable. Support the show
Jul 15, 2020•30 min•Season 3Ep. 2
