Living Downstream

Northern California Public Media presents Living Downstream: The Environmental Justice Podcast, produced in association with the NPR One mobile app. Living Downstream explores environmental justice in communities from California to Indonesia and is hosted by NCPM News Director Steve Mencher.

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Living Downstream features some of the most experienced environmental reporters in the public radio system, as well as a handful of talented newcomers.

Production funding provided by: Jean Forsyth Schulz

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Episodes

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Stories

Seeking Justice: On Repeat, In Every Language, Unceasingly

For this final Living Downstream episode of the season, we're dropping in on three recent webinars: One gathering considered Social and Environmental Justice at Upaya Zen Center in New Mexico. Another knitted together poetry and a powerful environmental film. It was put on by the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program. And a third event was cheekily called Toxics are a Drag, and was billed as a panel discussion on toxic beauty products in the queer community. That was hosted by one of the most…

Health, Wealth and Race in Today's Louisiana

This season, we’re looking at environmental racism across the country, and today that takes us to the sugarcane covered, oil-rich region at the intersection of southern Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico: Iberia Parish. In this episode of Living Downstream, we will hear from people who say they are fighting over something that their families have already fought for generations to maintain: wealth. In this case, we’re talking about land: what grows on it and what lies under it. We’ll hear from…

The Sea Next Door

From Northern California Public Media and Mensch Media, this edition of Living Downstream is guest hosted by Molly Peterson. This time, from the Coachella Valley, east of Los Angeles, we’re talking about the biggest lake in California — now starved of water — and the people who live around The Sea Next Door. The Salton Sea sits in a depression of land 30 miles from the Mexican border — and it poses a growing threat to public health. In this episode, two young women from the Eastern Coachella…

The Little Town That Would Transform the World

On this episode of Living Downstream, we take you to a little city with big plans for changing the world. While we’re there, we ask what role local governments can play in the movement for climate justice — that’s where climate activism and the fight for social justice meet. Ithaca, New York sees itself as a living laboratory for climate justice. Climate justice is based on the recognition that the people whose lives are most disrupted by climate change — the people who tend to die in the…