In the early 1980s, an animal rights group airlifted nearly 600 wild burros out of Grand Canyon National Park. The media ate it up – magazines sold full-page ads advertising the cause and families from the East Coast clamored to adopt the rescued animals. But conflict around wild burros in the West still exists today. What does one of the flashiest rescue stories of the last century tell us about the power of animal activism to make enduring change? Featuring Rebbel Clayton, Abbie Harlow, John M...
Feb 06, 2025•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in America. It may also be the most hated. Tennis and basketball players are complaining about losing court space because of an “invasion” of pickleballers. Residents are losing sleep because of the incessant noise. Fights over pickleball have led to a slew of petitions, calls to the police, and even lawsuits. So why do pickleball players love this sport so much? Just how annoying is it to everyone else? And what will it take for everyone to just get along...
Jan 30, 2025•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ever since fluoridation became widespread in the 1950s, cavities in kids have fallen drastically. The effort is considered one of the ten greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. But it’s also one of the most controversial. At really high doses, fluoride is toxic – it can calcify your ligaments and joints and even fuse your spine. It also potentially has impacts on our brains. There’s a small but growing body of research suggesting that fluoride can inhibit intelligence in childr...
Jan 23, 2025•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast What has Donald Trump claimed he would do when it comes to environmental policy in the U.S.? What happened during his last administration? And what are the limits on executive powers when it comes to treaties and global agreements? Just days before Trump’s inauguration, this episode comes to us from our friends over at Civics 101. Featuring Elizabeth Bomberg. This episode was produced by Hannah McCarthy with help from Nick Capodice and Marina Henke. For a transcript and full list of credits, go ...
Jan 16, 2025•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sardines are in vogue. Literally. They are in Vogue magazine. They’re delicious (subjectively), good for you, and sustainable… right? Recently, a listener called into the show asking about just that. “I've always had this sense that they're a more environmentally friendly fish, perhaps because of being low on the food chain. But I'm realizing I really have no sense of what it looks like to actually fish for sardines,” Jeannie told us. The Outside/In team got together to look beyond the sunny ill...
Jan 09, 2025•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast The next blue moon isn’t until May 2026, but luckily for you, you won’t have to wait that long to hear the Outside/In team answering listeners’ questions. This time, we’re exploring why blue moons are cool (or even what the heck a blue moon even is) and other seasonably appropriate curiosities. What’s all the fuss about a blue moon? Should we leave the leaves? Which is a more sustainable choice: real or fake Christmas trees? What happens to Christmas tree stumps? What does all that road salt do ...
Jan 02, 2025•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Appalachia is Bigfoot territory. In a big way. This week, we look at the mythical beast's legend, lore and sizable economic impact in the region. And we follow one reporter’s journey through the mountains and foothills of western North Carolina in search of Sasquatch. This episode comes to us from the wonderful folks at The Broadside from North Carolina Public Radio , a weekly podcast exploring stories happening in their home at the crossroads of the American South. Other topics include how the ...
Dec 26, 2024•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Coyotes are a sort of goldilocks animal. They can be active during the day, and at night. They can hunt in groups, or survive solo. They’re wolfish enough to survive in the wild, dog-like enough to blossom in the big city. That adaptability has arguably made coyotes one of the most successful mammalian predators on the planet. It’s also given them a reputation as opportunistic villains that prey on neighborhood garbage, livestock, and (occasionally) household pets. So what makes these animals so...
Dec 19, 2024•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Just a few weeks after we released the What Remains series, news broke that the Penn Museum discovered additional remains of 1985 MOVE bombing victims in the museum. How did this happen? And what's next for the thousands of other human remains still in their possession? Producer Felix Poon knew just the person to talk to for answers. Featuring Rachel Watkins. MORE ABOUT “WHAT REMAINS” Across the country, the remains of tens of thousands of human beings are held by museums and institutions. Scien...
Dec 12, 2024•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hear ye, hear ye! Winter is fast approaching, and it is time for our fifth annual ‘surthrival’ special, in which the Outside/In team reframes the endurance sport that is winter. We’ve got suggestions for thriving during the cold-season, which we hope will help you positively look forward to dirty snow banks and single-digit temperatures. This year, though, there’s a twist. A listener asked us for advice on what to do before the snow starts to fall, when it’s gray and bleak. This is that dingy in...
Dec 05, 2024•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Humans are noisy. The National Park Service estimates that all of our whirring, grinding, and revving machines are doubling or even tripling global noise pollution every 30 years. A lot of that noise is negatively affecting wildlife and human health. Maybe that’s why we’re so consumed with managing our sonic environments, with noise-cancelling headphones and white noise machines — and sometimes, we get into spats with our neighbors, as one of our guests did… So for this episode, producer Jeongyo...
Nov 28, 2024•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast In Appalachia, Hurricane Helene was a thousand-year-flood. It flattened towns and forests, washed roads away, and killed hundreds. But this story is not about the flood. It’s about what happened after. A month after Hurricane Helene, our producer Justine Paradis visited Marshall, a tiny town in the Black Mountains of western North Carolina, a region renowned for its biodiversity, music, and art. She went to see what it really looks like on the ground in the wake of a disaster, and how people cre...
Nov 21, 2024•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast A few months ago, producer Marina Henke saw two skunks sprint under her porch. Since then, she can’t stop wondering what’s really going on beneath her feet. And as it turns out, she’s not the only one. Every day across the country, homeowners are waging wars with the animals who stake out our porches, decks and crawl spaces. Have we as humans inadvertently designed luxury apartments for “unwelcome” wildlife? And is that necessarily a bad thing? In a new edition of our (long-retired!) 10x10 serie...
Nov 14, 2024•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast For over ten years, biologist Mark Higley has been stalking the forests of the Hoopa Valley Reservation with a shotgun. His mission? To save the northern spotted owl. The threat? The more aggressive barred owl, which has spread from eastern forests into the Pacific Northwest. The federal government plans to scale up these efforts and kill hundreds of thousands of barred owls across multiple states. But can the plan really save the northern spotted owl? And is the barred owl really “invasive”… or...
Nov 07, 2024•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast For the past few weeks, we’ve been exploring the issue of human remains collections for our miniseries, “What Remains.” Today, we want to share another excellent series that has covered some similar, but also, very different ground. Introducing “Postmortem: The Stolen Bodies of Harvard,” the latest season of Last Seen from WBUR. In this first episode, the police find buckets of body parts in a basement in Pennsylvania. Throughout the series, WBUR reporter Ally Jarmanning tells us what happened a...
Oct 31, 2024•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast A scholar and an activist make an uncompromising ultimatum. A forgotten burial ground is discovered under the streets of New York City. In Philadelphia, two groups fight over the definition of “descendant community.” Featuring Michael Blakey, Lyra Monteiro, Chris Woods, aAliy Muhammad, Wendell Mapson, Sacharja Cunningham, Jazmin Benton, Amrah Salomon, and Aja Lans. MORE ABOUT “WHAT REMAINS” Across the country, the remains of tens of thousands of human beings are held by museums and institutions....
Oct 24, 2024•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast A classroom display of human skulls sparks a reckoning at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. A movement grows to “abolish the collection.” The Penn Museum relents to pressure. More skeletons in the closet. This episode contains swears. MORE ABOUT "WHAT REMAINS" Across the country, the remains of tens of thousands of human beings are held by museums and institutions. Scientists say they’ve helped lay the foundations of forensic science and unlocked the secrets of humanity’s shared past. But these b...
Oct 17, 2024•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast A 1,500 year old skeleton is diagnosed with tuberculosis. A visit to a modern-day bone library. A fight over the future of ethical science. MORE ABOUT "WHAT REMAINS" Across the country, the remains of tens of thousands of human beings are held by museums and institutions. Scientists say they’ve helped lay the foundations of forensic science and unlocked the secrets of humanity’s shared past. But these bones were also collected before informed consent was the gold standard for ethical study. 19th...
Oct 10, 2024•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast When KALW’s Marissa Ortega-Welch hit the Pacific Crest Trail, she used her preferred method of navigation: an old-fashioned trail map. But along the way, she met a couple who only used phones to guide them, a Search and Rescue team that welcomes the power of GPS, and a woman who has been told her adaptive wheelchair isn't allowed in official wilderness areas (not actually true). So… does technology help people access wilderness? Or does it get in the way? This week’s episode comes to us from “Ho...
Oct 03, 2024•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Perhaps you’re familiar with our Outside/Inbox hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER. Anyone can leave us a voicemail sharing questions about the natural world, and we periodically answer them on the show. A few weeks ago, it came to our attention that we hadn't gotten a new voicemail in some time. Turns out our hotline has been bugging out for at least six months, and we have a lot of catching up to do. So, we present: Outside/Inbox, the lost voicemails edition. Featuring Stephanie Spera, with contributions ...
Sep 26, 2024•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the early 1900s, people didn’t trust refrigerated food. Fruits and vegetables, cuts of meat… these things are supposed to decay, right? As Nicola Twilley writes, “What kind of unnatural technology could deliver a two-year old chicken carcass that still looked as though it was slaughtered yesterday?” But just a few decades later, Americans have done a full one-eighty. Livestock can be slaughtered thousands of miles away, and taste just as good (or better) by the time it hits your plate. Apples...
Sep 19, 2024•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast For more than two hundred years Americans have tried to tame the Mississippi River. And, for that entire time, the river has fought back. Journalist and author Boyce Upholt has spent dozens of nights camping along the Lower Mississippi and knows the river for what it is: both a water-moving machine and a supremely wild place. His recent book, “The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi River” tells the story of how engineers have made the Mississippi into one of the most enginee...
Sep 12, 2024•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Helium is full of contradictions. It’s the second most abundant element in the universe, but is relatively rare on Earth. It’s non-reactive, totally inert—yet the most valuable helium isotope is sourced from thermonuclear warheads. And even though we treat it as a disposable gas, often for making funny voices and single-use party balloons, our global supply of helium will eventually run out. That’s because, at a rate of about 50 grams per second, this non-renewable resource is escaping the atmos...
Sep 05, 2024•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jack Rodolico knows exactly what scares him. Sharks. But here’s what he doesn’t get: if he’s so freaked out, why can’t he stop incessantly watching online videos of bloody shark attacks? Why would he deliberately seek out the very thing that spooks him? To figure it out, Jack enlists the help of other scaredy-cats: our listeners, who shared their fears about nature with us. Together, Jack and the gang consider the spectrum of fear, from phobia to terror, and what it might mean when we don’t look...
Aug 29, 2024•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast From the perspective of Western science, plants have long been considered unaware, passive life forms; essentially, rocks that happen to grow. But there’s something in the air in the world of plant science. New research suggests that plants are aware of the world around them to a far greater extent than previously understood. Plants may be able to sense acoustics, communicate with each other, and make choices… all this without a brain. These findings are fueling a debate, perhaps even a scientif...
Aug 22, 2024•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast GPS is essential these days. We use it for everything – from a hunter figuring out where the heck they are in the backcountry, to a delivery truck finding a grocery store, to keeping clocks in sync. But our reliance on GPS may also be changing our brains. Old school navigation strengthens the hippocampus, and multiple studies suggest that our new reliance on satellite navigation may put us at higher risk for diseases like dementia. In this episode, we map out how GPS took over our world – from S...
Aug 15, 2024•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Once again, it’s that wonderful time when scientists everywhere hold their breath as the team opens the Outside/Inbox to answer listener questions about the natural world. Today’s theme is smell : how it works in the nose, the mind, and how much is still unknown about the fifth sense. Question 1: Does it gross you out to know that every time you smell something, a little bit of that thing… is in your nose? What happens to the molecules we smell? Question 2: Why do smells have such a powerful con...
Aug 08, 2024•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Redwood National and State Parks are home to giants: coast redwoods that can grow as tall as a thirty-story building. These ancient California forests support hundreds of different species, and store more carbon than any other forest on the planet. But in the last century, 95% of them were felled by loggers. Now, scientists have discovered a surprising strategy to foster the next generation of old-growth redwoods… and it involves chopping some of the younger trees down. This week’s episode comes...
Aug 01, 2024•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Will Simone Biles live up to her moniker as greatest gymnast of all time? Will Lebron James and Team USA continue to dominate men's basketball? And will the Paris 2024 Games be the most sustainable in modern Olympic history? While billions of viewers tune in for the drama of athletes competing on a global stage, climate scientists are tuning in to Paris's climate promises – from the locally sourced catering and carbon neutral Olympic cauldron, to head-scratching “solutions” like a sidewalk made ...
Jul 25, 2024•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast You might not think much about the sticky bottle of vanilla sitting in the back of your pantry. But that flavor – one of the most common in the world – has a fascinating history, involving a fickle orchid and a 12-year-old enslaved boy who made the discovery of a lifetime. That’s the sort of tale that attracts poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil . From peacock feathers to the sounds of garden insects, her work is known for magnifying the wonders of the natural world. Her latest book of essays, “Bite by B...
Jul 18, 2024•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
