Lawless Planet

With the arrival of the second Trump administration, many employees at the Environmental Protection Agency have felt like they’re under attack – from their own boss. Under its new chief Lee Zeldin, the EPA has slashed budgets, programs, and staff, all in the name of what Zeldin calls rooting out “waste, fraud, and abuse” and “driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion.” On this...

Don Blankenship grew up poor in the heart of West Virginia coal country, but rose to become a union-busting CEO with a track record prioritizing profits over safety. For decades, he operated with seeming impunity, even as his company, Massey Energy, spilled toxic coal slurry into local waterways, and its miners died in preventable accidents. Then, in 2010, a disaster too big to ignore finally brought Blankenship down. But what does...

In July 1979, just months after a nuclear accident at Three Mile Island gripped the nation, the largest radioactive spill in U.S. history quietly unfolded on a Navajo reservation in Church Rock, New Mexico — and almost no one noticed. A dam at a uranium mine tailings pond burst, causing 94 million gallons of toxic waste to flood a nearby river, poisoning the water, livestock, and people. Through the eyes of an activist who wo...

On New Year’s Eve 2024, an Uber driver named Jonathan Rinderknecht allegedly started a fire in the Pacific Palisades. The fire was quickly contained, but it lingered on underground as a “zombie fire.” Days later, fueled by Santa Ana Winds, it exploded into the Palisades Fire, the most destructive conflagration in Los Angeles history. A second fire, ignited just hours later, destroyed much of neighboring Altadena. ...

Chemical manufacturers like DuPont and 3M have invented nearly 15,000 synthetic compounds called PFAS, better known as “forever chemicals” because of how slowly they break down. They’re in the soil, our food, even our bodies. When the towns of Parkersburg, West Virginia and Hoosick Falls, New York found PFAS in their water supply, they fought to hold the chemical companies accountable – and exposed just how ...

In 2017, Hurricane Maria, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, battered the island of Puerto Rico. In the aftermath, big banks, crypto bros and other ‘disaster capitalists’ swooped in to take advantage of the crisis. No one realized the full scope of death and destruction until a scrappy team of journalists started to investigate. They exposed a corrupt system that continues to threaten Puerto Rico’s pow...

In 2011, the people of Ecuador shocked the world by winning a multibillion judgment against Chevron for failing to clean up its oil operations in the Amazon. But back in the U.S., Chevron responded by suing their most prominent legal adversary, Steven Donziger. And as the oil giant challenged the Ecuadorian verdict, Donziger found himself trapped in his own Kafkaesque legal nightmare, one that threatened to overshadow the plight of...

After Texaco (now Chevron) discovered oil in Ecuador, they left behind an ecological and public health disaster so severe that experts have dubbed it the "Amazon Chernobyl.” The local population then sued the company sparking an epic courtroom drama spanning multiple decades and costing billions of dollars. Leading that fight are two outspoken attorneys: an American outsider not afraid to make enemies, and an Ecuadorian lawye...

When Elon Musk’s xAI opened a data center called Colossus in South Memphis for its chatbot, Grok, local politicians and business leaders hailed it as the first step towards turning Greater Memphis into “America’s Digital Delta.” But residents soon noticed they were getting sick – and blamed the data center’s methane gas turbines, installed without permits to support the center’s massive ele...

When it comes to organic food, can we really trust what’s on our plate? Do we understand how it was grown or raised? The organic food industry is largely built on the honor system. More than a decade ago, a mild-mannered Missouri farmer exploited that system, raking in millions of dollars and leading a double life in Las Vegas. As it turns out, that wasn’t the only secret he was hiding.

Featured in this episode: 

Gle...

When Jessey Baca returned from Balad Air Base in Iraq, he began experiencing strange health symptoms: fevers, chills, headaches, difficulty breathing. The VA tried to write off his condition as PTSD, but Jessey and his wife Maria would eventually learn that the likely cause was exposure to burn pits, where the military was incinerating trash with jet fuel. And they weren’t alone. Thousands of veterans were sick and dying from...

The tug-of-war over undeveloped land in the U.S. is nothing new, but in 2014 Cliven and Ammon Bundy escalated their dispute over cattle grazing permits in Nevada to another level. Their clash against the federal Bureau of Land Management would galvanize a movement – and set the stage for one of the largest armed uprisings against the government in American history, with lasting consequences for the environment.

Featured in thi...

In 2015, news broke that Exxon’s own scientists had known for decades that burning fossil fuels was causing global warming. To raise awareness, climate activists launched a campaign called “Exxon Knew.” But almost immediately, they noticed something strange: their private emails seemed to be getting leaked to the press. They were getting hacked – but by who?  

Featured in this episode:

Kert Davies, C...

One of the worst industrial disasters in our nation’s history occurred in West Virginia in the 1930s. Not in a coal mine – but in a tunnel chiseled out of a mountain for a hydroelectric power plant. Hundreds of workers, most of them poor and Black, quietly died from breathing in silica dust. For decades, the true scale of the devastation was buried by the companies behind the project.

Featured in this episode:

Catherine V...

The device you’re using to listen to this podcast almost certainly contains cobalt. It’s a vital component of rechargeable batteries, which are essential to electric vehicles, laptops, and smartphones. But most of the world’s known cobalt reserves are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where mines are plagued by child labor, human trafficking, and deadly working conditions.

Featured in this episode:

Siddharth ...

In the late 1980s, Judi Bari was a fearless activist building an alliance between loggers and environmentalists to save the last of California's old growth redwoods. The same traits that attracted followers to her movement, also made her a lot of enemies. In 1990, a bomb exploded in Judi’s car while she was driving. Somehow she survived – but then the FBI showed up and told her she was under arrest.

Featured in this epis...

When Florida state wildlife officials begin to suspect that someone is illegally harvesting alligator eggs, they launch Operation Alligator Thief. At its heart: a veteran officer named Jeff Babauta, who delays his retirement to go deep undercover as a real Florida Man, hoping to infiltrate the insular world of gator farming.

Featured in this episode:

Jeff Babauta

Rebecca Renner

Sources:

Rebecca Renner’s book Gator Country: Decepti...

In the 1980s, Philadelphia was in the midst of a trash crisis. A sanitation workers’ strike had left the city with an immense backlog of garbage. The solution: Ship it overseas, on a rusting cargo vessel called the Khian Sea. But when one country after another refused to take Philly’s waste, it turned the Khian Sea’s trash voyage into a trash odyssey, and shed light on a growing problem that critics came to call &...

Today, Lawless Planet brings you an episode from our friends at Drilled Media. Season 12 of their flagship podcast is called SLAPP’d, and it tells another side of a story we covered earlier in our episode “Surveillance and Sabotage on the Dakota Access Pipeline.”

Greenpeace, which was only tangentially involved in the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, has been slapped with a $666 million bi...