Dig: A History Podcast

Environmental History #3 of 4. In the mid-1970s, parents in Niagara Falls, New York were struggling to figure out why their children were getting mysteriously ill. For two years, officials from the state had been investigating the environment in Niagara Falls For years, residents had been complaining about “the odors of chemicals and fumes.” By the mid-70s, officials had determined that the smells emanated from an old ditch-turned-toxic waste dump. But while everyone could agree the dump was stinky, no one really seemed to believe it was actually pressing public concern. But then children started to get sick. For this episode of our Environmental History series, we're telling the story of Love Canal — one of the most consequential environmental disasters in American history.
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Environmental History, #2 of 4. Many of the conservationists who’ve defended the Arctic heralded it as the “last great wilderness,” an ecosystem and landscape unmarred by corporate greed and violence, a place that needs to be preserved because of its “pristine” and “untouched” beauty. While well-intentioned, this narrative is, of course, problematic, because the absence of white settler colonial development is not the same thing as “pristine” or “untouched.” Entire communities of people call the arctic home. The Gwich’in and Inuit nations live on and have stewarded the northernmost reaches of this continent for some 24,000 years. At every imperialist and capitalist effort to destroy those lands with their greed, the Gwich’in and (some) Inuit have shown up to protest, testify, and speak out against those violences.

Bibliography

“Legal Action Challenges Arctic Refuge Drilling Plan,” Center for Biological Diversity, (15 Jan 2026)

H.R.1 - An act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to titles II and V of the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2018. Congress.gov. (2017)

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Status of Oil and Gas Program. Congress.gov. (Updated 4 Feb 2026)

Lenny Kohm and the Last Great Wilderness Tour (1995) Part 4

The Wilderness Act (1964)

Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (1980)

“The Inuit and Northern Experience,” Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 2 (2015)

Thomas Berger, “Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland,”  THE REPORT OF THE MACKENZIE VALLEY PIPELINE INQUIRY: VOLUME ONE

Finis Dunaway, Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice (UNC Press, 2021)

Donella Meadows, “National Energy Policy,” The Donella Meadows Project (Sep 1991)

Elizabeth Manning, “Trump Administration Opens the Entire Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Oil and Gas Leasing,” (23 Oct 2025)

Brian Palmer and Anna Greenfield, “The Long, Long Battle for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” Natural Resources Defense Council (Oct 24, 2025)

Kyle Whyte, “Indigenous Climate Change Studies : Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” English Language Notes, Volume 55, Number 1-2, Spring/Fall 2017, pp. 153-162

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Bonus! Marissa and Averill chat with Stacey and Hannah of the Amplify Podcast Network about podcasting and teaching, the realities of funding and institutional recognition, and what it means to do feminist history that "matters" in a shifting political landscape.
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Environmental Series. Episode #1 of 4.
In 1851, a journalist named Henry Mayhew set out to document the lives of London's working poor. What he found was astonishing. In the richest city in the world, thousands of people made their living by picking through other people's trash. There were the bone-grubbers, who scavenged bones from gutters to sell to soap manufacturers. There were the mudlarks, mostly children, who waded through the filthy banks of the Thames searching for coal, rope, and bits of metal. And then there were the pure-finders. What’s “pure” you ask? Well, "pure" was a Victorian euphemism for dog excrement. Pure-finders, mostly elderly women, spent their days scouring the streets of London for dog droppings, which they then sold by the pailful to tanneries in Bermondsey. The tanners used it to purify leather. Hence the name. We tend to think of recycling as a modern invention, something that started with the environmental movement of the 1970s. Blue bins, sorting instructions, that kind of thing. But as brilliant historians have uncovered, the story of how humans have dealt with their discarded materials stretches back millennia. For most of human history, the concept of "throwing something away" barely existed. To begin our series on environmental history, we're tackling the premodern history of recycling. Or as pre-WWII people would have called it: reclamation, salvage, scrapping, repair, and reuse. We'll meet rag-and-bone men and dustmen, shoddy masters and mudlarks. We'll discover how rags became paper, how old wool became new cloth, and how virtually nothing in the premodern world was ever truly waste.

Find transcripts and show notes at www.digpodcast.org
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Bonus Episode: This year, 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the moment when American patriots pledged their lives and their sacred honor to declare the American colonies independent of the British crown. By the time the Continental Congress signed that document, American blood had already been shed and the colonies were already fighting the war that would ultimately lead to the birth of the United States as an independent nation. As momentous as this revolution was, it wasn’t until over 10 years after the Declaration was signed that the revolutionary act that truly founded the nation took place: the Constitutional Convention of 1787. It’s one thing to declare your independence and earn that freedom with spilt blood and military victory; it’s quite another to make that independence meaningful and real in the form of a meaningful, functional and enduring government. And in a moment when the meaning of that government, and indeed the integrity of the the central document of the founding - the Constitution - itself, is as imperiled as it has ever been, it’s the Constitutional Convention, not the Declaration of Independence, that has real resonance for us in the ‘now.’ On this special bonus episode of Dig, join us in a little deep dive into the United States Constitutional Convention.
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