Explore every episode of the podcast Broken Ground

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 this exploitation endure in the Black Southern communities now battling the biomass industry.

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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 climate change. A fifth generation South Carolinian, Latria also shares her family’s own experience of flooding and Black land loss.  

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On a map, you can often spot pollution sources like a power plant, a highway, or a factory. But why were these things built where they are, and who lives next door? Answering those questions reveals a surprising truth: it’s often a short distance from yesterday’s plantations to today’s pollution. In this season of Broken Ground, we’ll journey through history, from a remote turpentine camp where enslaved laborers once toiled, through a bustling “Black Wall Street” where freed men and women once thrived, to the last green stretch of ‘Cancer Alley’ in Louisiana, where twin sisters Jo and Joy Banner are fighting for justice for descendants of the enslaved. Together, these stories uncover how the legacy of slavery connects to the environmental injustices we are facing today. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.  

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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 and rallied together to become a powerful force. Coalitions built small wins into a mighty wave, shifting tides and determining their destiny. Hear their stories this season on Broken Ground. 

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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 first floated to expand the county dump, that they wouldn’t have to worry about a massive future expansion or the arrival of toxic trash. So, when the footprint grew into the largest landfill in North Carolina and there was evidence that dangerous waste was making its way into the community’s water supply, residents took legal action, and made history in the process.

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"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 responded to two devastating downtown floods with some innovative ideas and lots of outside help. Now, the town is on a new path, holding a ribbon cutting for its newly-constructed "Uptown", and providing a model for one way to manage the long process of flood recovery. Rebuilding in the wake of a flood takes time, money, creativity, and community. Join us to hear how one town is putting those to good use.

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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 polluting facilities. So what happens when one neighborhood decides to stand its ground and push for stronger protections? Meet the Southerners who finally got the pellet industry to listen.

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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 a resounding 'yes.' Listen to learn how they're using every tool in their tacklebox to ensure folks understands the risks, and many rewards, of enjoying Alabama's beautiful and biodiverse waterways. 

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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 swamp's edge. Will a growing group of Okefenokee advocates be able to stop the mine and preserve the swamp for generations to come?
Photo credit: Joel Caldwell

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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.

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Photographer Cornell Watson's images recognize the camera can be a tool for connection, and action.  Whether its pollution from hog farms, efforts to gut Black neighborhoods, or racism at the state’s flagship university, Watson's lens points us to see what so many choose to ignore.

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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. 

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Listen to environmental journalist Cameron Oglesby discuss how highlighting Black joy and centering community narratives in her writing drives action. 

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Hear what spurred the founding of Southerly, an online publication focused on environmental justice, and how it evolved from more traditional reporting to an outlet focused on putting reporters’ tools in community hands. 

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As more and more news outlets close, writers, editors, and photographers across the South are reconsidering how communities stay informed. This season host Leanna First-Arai talks with the new storytellers of the South committed to keeping environmental information in communities' hands.

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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. 
Learn more at brokengroundpodcast.org. 

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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 continuing fight for thriving communities, ones with the clean air and clean water that is every person’s right.

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With a federal permit approved and state officials supporting the project, in the spring of 2021 the Byhalia Pipeline has momentum on its side. But opponents aren’t giving up as they bring national attention to the project and turn to local elected officials for help, all while still in court questioning a private oil company’s right to take property owners’ land. It’s a season of two steps forward, one step back. 

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As aquifer advocates and the residents of southwest Memphis in the path of the pipeline began looking for help pushing back against Byhalia’s plans, they quickly learned not to assume who would join their cause. From city councilpeople and county commissioners to attorneys and media outlets, the first people to step up weren’t always who they expected.

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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 one-time payment. But a few of them aren't sold on the deal. 

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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 J. Pearson. The fight, which started as a neighborhood struggle against environmental racism, becomes a city-wide crusade for clean water. As Kathy Robinson says, "If it affects one of us, it affects all of us." 

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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 publicly began to draw new resisters to the fight. 

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This is Boxtown, a neighborhood in southwest Memphis founded by formerly enslaved people who put down deep roots and residents who cherish their ties to this land. It’s also a neighborhood that’s seen decades of government neglect, while more and more polluting industries moved into the area. So, when the community first heard about plans for a crude oil pipeline that would cut through their neighborhood, they wanted to know more. They didn’t like what they learned.

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Brenda Mallory, former Director of Regulatory Policy at SELC, sat down with us in December 2020 before joining the Biden administration as Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and reflected on how the federal government can engage a broad coalition to embed environmental justice principles across the country. 

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Chandra Taylor is the leader of SELC's Environmental Justice Initiative. Her ongoing work in North Carolina includes cleanups at contaminated industrial sites and an end to unchecked water pollution in Black communities. 
"It's not going to be just conservationists who turn the tide on global climate change. It's going to take a lot of people. It's going to take the everyday environmentalist."

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Catherine Coleman Flowers was recently named to the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. A 2020 MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, her environmental health research brought to light the failing wastewater infrastructure in rural parts of the South. She
spoke with Broken Ground about how systemic racism and classism have played a large part in this crisis and how it led her to found the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. 

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Heather McTeer Toney stumbled into environmental justice work as the Mayor of Greenville, Mississippi. After moving on as EPA administrator and now as a Senior Adviser at Mom’s Clean Air Force, Toney talks about how to wrap climate justice around social justice and how her faith is inextricably woven into her work fighting climate change.

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The latest season of Broken Ground, featuring women in the South on the frontlines of fighting for environmental justice, launches this Earth Day, Thursday, April 22. 

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Find out what we learned about sea level rise in the South. Who will be hit the hardest? What can we do? How can we navigate a path forward?

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In Norfolk, Virginia scientists battling sea level rise enlist residents to help collect data that could help the city better understand its rising tides and flooding problems.

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In Charleston, South Carolina and its suburbs questions of environmental justice and wetland protections arise as development encroaches.

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In Norfolk, Virginia homeowners like Karen Speights are struggling with the hard decision of staying put in rising waters or finding a way to start over. Meanwhile, the city is hoping it can buy people time.

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With waters rising in Charleston, South Carolina we explore what, if any, breaking point there is for people living and working in this city. And we talk to city officials about making the big decisions of what, and what not, to build when trying to keep a flooding city livable.

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Norfolk, Virginia's waters are rising fast, and its land is sinking. The city's plans to meet this climate change challenge could be a blueprint for other coastal communities. Among other plans, Norfolk has set it sights on revamping its aging public housing complexes. We'll talk to folks living in one of these communities about what adaptation will mean for them. 

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Earl Swift is author of Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island. He talks about the slow disappearance of this unique Virginia island to climate change.

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Author and New York Times contributing opinion writer Margaret Renkl talks about her book Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. Renkl's essays reflect on the intersection of family life, grief and her natural surroundings.

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Dr. Robert Bullard, widely considered the father of environmental justice, talks about the inequality of pollution and climate change.

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Author and wildlife biologist Drew Lanham talks about his book, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature. Lanham discusses his love of birds, his South Carolina homeplace, and reconciling the South’s legacy of hate with its beauty.

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Solar energy is growing by leaps and bounds in the Southeast and becoming a way for schools to save money.  In this episode, we visit two Virginia schools to better understand the key role policies play in whether schools can go solar. 

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An elderly couple steps up to defend their farm and neighbors when pipeline developers won’t back down from a risky, environmentally damaging project that – after years of delay – is now obsolete.

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When two North Carolina women received letters from state officials that their water wasn’t safe to drink due to coal ash pollution, they fought it all the way to the state house.

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The 2008 Kingston, Tennessee coal ash spill was disastrous at the time, but what came a decade later would reveal the full devastation of the tragedy.

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

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