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PODCAST

Broken Ground

Southern Environmental Law Center

Broken Ground is a podcast produced by the Southern Environmental Law Center digging up environmental stories in the South.

government natural sciences

All Episodes

28:09

Jo and Joy Banner: Reclaiming Home

Broken Ground ·

2025/11/25

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 communities tied, like theirs, to the nearby Whitney Plantation. They’re also challenging the industria...

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29:52

Aya Shabu: Highway Through the Heart

Broken Ground ·

2025/11/13

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 with displacement, air pollution, extreme heat conditions, and economic loss.Today, as developmen...

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28:18

Michelle Lanier: What the Land Witnessed

Broken Ground ·

2025/10/30

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 indentured laborers forced to harvest them were. Today, though few Longleaf pines remain, echoes of th...

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29:51

Latria Graham: The Roots of Environmental Injustices

Broken Ground ·

2025/10/16

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 dictate who thrives in the South today – who breathes clean air, who owns land, who is most impacted by...

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0:30

Season 8: Plantations to Pollution

Broken Ground ·

2025/10/09

On a map, you can often spot pollution – a power plant, a highway, or a factory. But why were these things built where they are, and who lives next door? In the South, it’s often a short distance from yesterday’s plantations to today’s pollution. This season, episodes go from conversations with locals steeped in the history of North Carolina’s pine forests and turpentine industry to revelations with Jo and Joy Banner from Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, all to uncover how the legacy of how slavery ...

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14:03

Rural Justice: The Power of Coalitions

Broken Ground ·

2024/12/19

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 ...

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34:57

The Landfill Next Door

Broken Ground ·

2024/12/10

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 f...

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40:49

After the River Rises

Broken Ground ·

2024/11/01

"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 respon...

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34:14

The Wood Pellet Paradox

Broken Ground ·

2024/10/10

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 (metastasizing?) across the southern U.S., razing forests, and wreaking havoc in communities forced to host their polluting facilities. So what happens when one ...

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33:35

The Fishers' Right To Know

Broken Ground ·

2024/09/19

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 ...

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32:08

The Strip Mine and The Swamp

Broken Ground ·

2024/09/05

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...

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24:18

Jonathan Vigliotti on Connecting the Climate Dots

Broken Ground ·

2024/08/08

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.

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30:25

Cornell Watson on Justice Through Photography

Broken Ground ·

2023/09/28

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28:32

Victoria Bouloubasis and Paola Jaramillo on Bridging...

Broken Ground ·

2023/09/14

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27:07

Cameron Oglesby on Collecting Community Stories

Broken Ground ·

2023/08/31

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29:15

Lyndsey Gilpin and Tajah McQueen on Empowering...

Broken Ground ·

2023/08/17

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0:30

Season 6 Trailer: Meet Journalists Reimagining...

Broken Ground ·

2023/08/03

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2:00

Season 5 Trailer: How Memphis Beat The Odds To Stop A...

Broken Ground ·

2022/10/10

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31:05

Lesson 7: Do It Again

Broken Ground ·

2022/09/22

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29:47

Lesson 6: Hold On

Broken Ground ·

2022/09/08

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47 results

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