Broken Ground

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 ...

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 ne...

"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 ...

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 po...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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. 
Lea...

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 conti...

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 on...

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 ...

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 ...