Ecocide Podcast

Ecocide Media
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Documentary

Ecocide is a narrative podcast about environmental destruction—part environmental history, part stories still unfolding. Each episode documents an ecological disaster: who caused it, who paid the price, and who fought back. The stories fall into four categories: infamous disasters you've heard of but may not know the full story; local and regional cases that never made national news; historical episodes that explain how ecosystems break and sometimes recover; and real-time conflicts you can still do something about. Environmental stories usually get covered as breaking news that's gone before the consequences arrive, or as advocacy with the conclusion already built in. What's missing are stories told in enough depth to establish the facts, name the people who made the decisions, and learn about the communities left behind. And to do it without telling listeners what to think. That's what this show is. Every episode is built on primary sources. Court documents and legal filings, agency records, peer-reviewed scientific and academic research, nonfiction books, and investigative journalism. When the facts are damning, they'll be presented without editorializing. And when the story is complicated, it'll stay complicated. The goal isn't to tell you how to feel. It's to make sure you know what happened. Because the earth doesn't forget. And neither can we.

Episodes

  1. Aug 12

    Ep. 10: Panawahpskek

    The story of how the HoltraChem chemical plant poisoned the river that sustained the Penobscot Nation for 10,000 years, and how a 22-year lawsuit produced a cleanup that still isn't finished | On February 18, 2014, the State of Maine announced an emergency closure of seven square miles of the lower Penobscot River and Penobscot Bay to all commercial fishing for lobster and crab. The reason? Mercury. The lobstermen who worked those waters had not been told the lobsters might be unsafe. They had been feeding them to their families for years. The contamination came from a chemical plant 25 miles upstream. By the time the plant closed in 2000, somewhere between 6 and 12 metric tons of mercury had escaped into the river that had sustained the Penobscot Nation for more than 10,000 years. The plant has been closed for over 25 years, but the mercury is still there. This is the story of how a 33-year industrial operation poisoned the largest river in Maine, why a 22-year lawsuit led to a cleanup effort that's still incomplete, and what it means when the people who lived on a river for millenia are the last ones consulted about how to save it.

    Ep. 10: Panawahpskek

  2. Jul 30

    Ep. 09: Wasting

    The story of Florida’s starving manatees, the pollution that destroyed their food supply, and the lawsuit challenging what it means to protect a species | Between December 2020 and April 2022, more than 1,200 Florida manatees died, most of them from starvation. It was the largest die-off in the state's history. The seagrass they had eaten for thousands of years was gone, killed by decades of pollution flowing into the Indian River Lagoon on Florida's east coast.  Thirty years earlier, the state had passed a law meant to stop that pollution, but it only enforced half of it. In 2025, a federal court ruled that Florida's own pollution permits had violated the Endangered Species Act by killing the manatees' food supply, and ordered the state to get federal authorization before it could keep permitting that pollution.  "Wasting" is the story of how the most protected animal in Florida came to starve in the water it had always called home, and how a lawsuit over dead manatees may end up rewriting what it means to protect a species at all.

    Ep. 09: Wasting

  3. Jul 21

    Ep. 08: The Zimmerly Mine

    The story of an illegal gravel operation that carved into the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, and the decades-long fight to hold the operators accountable | In 2017, a mining operator began tearing into a 122-acre hillside at the western gateway to the federally protected Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area in Washington State without permits. Clark County, Washington, issued six cease-and-desist orders, but the operator ignored all of them. Below the hillside, Gibbons Creek is salmon spawning habitat that drains into Steigerwald Lake National Wildlife Refuge and the Columbia River. Mining operations require containment systems to keep toxic runoff out of nearby waterways. Without permits, there are no required containment standards to meet, and no one to enforce them. What followed became the largest and longest-running land use violation in the history of the National Scenic Area: a years-long fight involving a regulatory body that invented a neutrality obligation that didn't exist in the law, and a community that refused to accept that the Gorge could be carved up while everyone looked the other way.

    Ep. 08: The Zimmerly Mine

  4. Jul 10

    Ep. 07: Mining on the Edge of the Boundary Waters Wilderness

    The story of a Chilean mining giant's efforts to dig a copper mine at the edge of America's most-visited wilderness area | The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is the most-visited wilderness in the U.S., boasting over a million acres of pristine lakes on the Minnesota-Canada border. On April 16, 2026, the Senate voted to strip its 20-year mining moratorium, using an obscure 1996 law meant for regulatory rules to bypass the usual 60-vote threshold. President Trump signed it into law 11 days later, clearing the way for Antofagasta to pursue a copper mine five miles from the wilderness's edge. This is a real-time episode, which means we're covering a story still unfolding. We trace how we got here and lay out exactly what's still in flux, and what you can do about it right now.

    Ep. 07: Mining on the Edge of the Boundary Waters Wilderness

  5. Jun 22

    Ep. 06: The Lagoon

    The story of what concentrated animal feeding operations—CAFOs—do to the people who live beside, downstream, and downwind of them | In Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, the water coming out of the tap turned the color of rust. In Bladen County, North Carolina, the air grew so thick with gases from hog waste lagoons that families couldn't sit on their own porches. In the Lower Yakima Valley in Washington State, the water looked clean. It wasn't. Sixty percent of the wells nearest the dairy operations that had been running there for decades exceeded the federal safety standard for nitrate. None of these communities were the victims of an accident. The permits were followed. The lagoons worked as designed. The waste went exactly where the system allowed it to go. This story is told from three states, across five decades, through the people who got sick, the scientists who proved it, the lawyers who fought it, and the family that built one of the operations at the center of it all. It's a story about a regulatory system that was never designed to protect the communities it was supposed to serve, and about the people fighting back.

    Ep. 06: The Lagoon

  6. Jun 20

    Ep. 05: The Galapagoats Islands

    The story of how feral goats nearly destroyed the Galápagos Islands | For centuries, goats in the Galapagos were a living pantry, released on islands by pirates and whalers who needed a reliable food source waiting for them when they returned. When permanent settlers arrived in the late 1800s and started releasing them by the hundreds, they became a catastrophe. By the late 20th century, 250,000 feral goats were stripping the archipelago bare—destroying the cactus forests, collapsing the soil, and pushing the famous giant tortoises toward extinction. What followed was one of the most ambitious conservation campaigns ever attempted: 9 years, $10.5 million, 150,000 goats killed, and a technique called the Judas Goat that turned the animals' own social instincts against them. This is the story of how the Galápagos Islands nearly lost everything.

    Ep. 05: The Galapagoats Islands

  7. Jun 19

    Ep. 04: The Color of Poison

    The story of the Gold King Mine spill | On the morning of August 5, 2015, an EPA contractor working at an abandoned mine in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado punched through a plug of debris and released 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater into Cement Creek—a tributary of the Animas River. Within hours, the river had turned a vivid orange. By the time the plume reached New Mexico, water intakes serving the Navajo Nation had been shut off. Farmers watched their irrigation systems go dry. Crops died in the ground. The Gold King Mine hadn't been active in decades. But abandoned hard-rock mines don't stop producing acid. This is the story of how a cleanup operation became a catastrophe, why no one was ever held criminally accountable, and what it means when the agency charged with protecting America's waterways is the one that poisons them.

    Ep. 04: The Color of Poison

  8. Jun 18

    Ep. 03: Penn Cove

    The story of the capture of wild orcas for human entertainment | For thousands of years, the Southern Resident killer whales lived in the inland waters of the Pacific Northwest, following salmon runs through the Salish Sea in tight-knit family pods that passed knowledge, dialect, and culture from one generation to the next. Then, in August 1970, a commercial whale-catching operation drove more than 80 of them into Penn Cove on Washington's Puget Sound. Seven calves were taken and sold to aquariums around the world. Five whales died. The bodies were weighted and sunk in an effort to hide them from the public. Three months later, they washed ashore anyway. What followed was a decades-long reckoning: landmark federal legislation, the end of live orca captures in Washington waters, and a cultural shift so drastic that SeaWorld—the company that built its brand on the back of captive orcas—announced in 2016 that it would phase out its theatrical killer whale shows. But the Southern Residents themselves have never recovered the numbers they had before the hunters arrived. One of the seven calves taken that day—named Tokitae—spent 53 years in a tank in Miami before coming home as ashes.

    Ep. 03: Penn Cove

  9. Jun 17

    Ep. 02: Fallout

    The story of the Hanford Nuclear Site | In 1942, the U.S. government chose a remote stretch of desert along the Columbia River in eastern Washington to build the reactors that would produce the plutonium for America's nuclear arsenal. What they left behind may be uncontainable. 177 underground tanks, some of which are leaking, hold 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste, making it the most contaminated site in the Western Hemisphere. Some of that waste moves through the soil toward the Columbia River, the lifeblood of the Pacific Northwest. “Fallout” traces the decisions that created the Hanford Nuclear Site, the decades of cover-ups, and the cleanup project that has consumed billions of dollars and produced very little success.

    Ep. 02: Fallout

  10. Jun 16

    Ep. 01: Ecocide

    The story of the use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War and the origin of the term "Ecocide" | In the autumn of 1942, a graduate student named Arthur Galston was working alone in a laboratory in Illinois, studying soybeans. What he found would eventually contribute to one of the most ecologically destructive chemicals ever deliberately released into a living landscape. Between 1962 and 1971, the United States sprayed 76 million liters of herbicide across the forests, riverbanks, and farmland of South Vietnam. Agent Orange stripped five million acres of canopy, destroyed half the country's mangrove forests, and deposited a dioxin contaminant into the soil and food chain that is still measurable in the Vietnamese population born decades after the last spray mission. "Ecocide" traces the scientists who tried to stop it, the companies that knew what they were producing and kept producing it, and the word that Arthur Galston coined in 1970 for a crime the world still doesn't have a law to punish.

    Ep. 01: Ecocide

  11. Jun 15

    Ep. 00: Trailer

    A brief introduction to Ecocide, a new narrative documentary podcast about environmental destruction, those who cause it, and those who fight back. This trailer introduces the series and the stories we'll be telling in Season 1, including environmental disasters, cover-ups, court battles, and the communities still living with the consequences.

    Ep. 00: Trailer
  • 11 Episodes

About

Ecocide is a narrative podcast about environmental destruction—part environmental history, part stories still unfolding. Each episode documents an ecological disaster: who caused it, who paid the price, and who fought back. The stories fall into four categories: infamous disasters you've heard of but may not know the full story; local and regional cases that never made national news; historical episodes that explain how ecosystems break and sometimes recover; and real-time conflicts you can still do something about. Environmental stories usually get covered as breaking news that's gone before the consequences arrive, or as advocacy with the conclusion already built in. What's missing are stories told in enough depth to establish the facts, name the people who made the decisions, and learn about the communities left behind. And to do it without telling listeners what to think. That's what this show is. Every episode is built on primary sources. Court documents and legal filings, agency records, peer-reviewed scientific and academic research, nonfiction books, and investigative journalism. When the facts are damning, they'll be presented without editorializing. And when the story is complicated, it'll stay complicated. The goal isn't to tell you how to feel. It's to make sure you know what happened. Because the earth doesn't forget. And neither can we.

Information

  • Creator
    Ecocide Media
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    11
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Ecocide Podcast
  • Show Website
    Ecocide Podcast

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