Outside/In

23/10/2025

When Claire Adas and David Wilson planned their wedding for the summer of 1996, the last thing on their mind was cicadas. If only they had known.

This week on the show, three stories about unexpected moments of abundance. Tap the link on our bio to listen!

Photos courtesy of Claire Adas.

16/10/2025

Back in 2024, we spoke with author Elizabeth Rush about life on a scientific mission to one of Antarctica’s most remote glaciers. Today, the research vessel that took her there is in jeopardy from federal funding cuts.

Listen to that conversation at the link in our bio or on the podcast app of your choice.

Photo credits
1. Scientists stop for sea ice sampling during a Palmer expedition in 1998 (photo by Michael Van Woert, NOAA)
2. The Thwaites Glacier (photo by Elizabeth Rush)
3. An iceberg in the Antarctic ocean (photo by Elizabeth Rush)
4. The Palmer (with its impressive orange hue) in 2011 (photo by Eli Duke, CC BY-SA 2.0)

10/10/2025

Ever since a tornado tore through St. Louis, Missouri last May, there are piles of bricks all over the place. It’s not just a debris problem. Bricks in St. Louis have a long and complicated history – the darling of many historic preservationists and a good source of profit to just as many demolition crews.

Producer spent a week in North City, tagging along with a brick layer who’s racing against the clock to build back homes. Can North City keep its bricks? Should they even try?

🎧 Tap the link in our bio and listen to the episode, “The Brick Lady of St. Louis,” wherever you get our podcasts.

📷 Photos by Marina Henke.

02/10/2025

Grab a pencil (and maybe a pint?) and get ready for the inaugural Outside/In trivia episode we’re calling “Natural Selection.” We’ve got a game called “Guess That Animal!” We’re testing our panel’s knowledge on the environment in movies and music. And maybe we’ll learn a thing or two along the way about environmental policy, past and present.

It’s trivia night! Plus we debate who gets the mantle of most outdoorsy, adventuresome president.

26/09/2025

When Hurricane Helene barreled into Appalachia last September, the region was taken by surprise. The destruction was awful, but the community response was, frankly, stunning. Ad-hoc, locally organized mutual aid networks sprang into action. Volunteers dug out mud, ripped down molding drywall, and arranged shelter, food, and music for their neighbors.

Outside/In spent a few days in Marshall, North Carolina reporting on the recovery. A year later, we checked in with , a business owner we followed in the storm’s aftermath, to ask how he thinks the recovery is going there.

On Saturday, locals have planned an event commemorating this one-year milestone since the hurricane, with speeches, music, and community art.

Photos courtesy of Josh Copus & Alex Barao.

Excerpts from our call with Josh:

“It’s far from over. It’s going to take years. But I think where we’re at is really good. When you come here, it doesn’t feel like a destroyed place.”

“I’m very proud of how much we’ve accomplished in this past year. But also, there are people that still don’t have places to live, businesses that are still closed and will probably always be, buildings that were destroyed that are never going to come back. Piles of debris that you’ve just learned to live with.”

“The restaurants and bars were the first things to reopen... the comic book store is reopened.
We still don’t have a post office. Our town hall is still completely destroyed, and our courthouse is nonfunctional. We don’t have a dentist anymore in town. The fire department is still operating out of tents up on the bypass.”

“You don’t quite realize how living in a disaster area weighs on you. It’s cumulative. You just normalize a lot of stuff. It’s like being poisoned slowly over time. It just gets tiring.”

“Putting it back together is much harder than cleaning it up. It’s also much more expensive. As soon as you start dealing with money, that’s when it gets a little bit more tense. It’s not to say that there was some big rift. It was just the reality is some people have resources and some people don’t. And you can’t rebuild without resources. Like there’s only so much that volunteer labor can do.”

17/09/2025

Why is there so much roadkill? To paraphrase a famous line... it’s the roads, stupid.

A public comment period on the Trump administration’s plan to rescind the Roadless Rule is open until September 19th.

📸 Credits: .a.goldfarb, Matt Hatchett, Mark Flying

28/08/2025

From the Titanic to sunken warships, shipwrecks are important historical time capsules. But they're under threat, from commercial fishing activity. In this episode, the federal program bringing scientists and fishermen together to save the wrecks.

Why the federal government is on the hunt for sunken ships

21/08/2025

People are buying coyote urine. Where does it come from?

Coyote urine is a widely available product, advertised as an all-natural pest deterrent. But when an Outside/In reporter tried to track down the source, he found himself on the outskirts of the secretive industry of “urine farming.”

No one involved in urine farming agreed to an interview. Instead, our reporter was met with unreturned emails and apparently forged vet records. But we did learn what at least one urine farm looks like on the inside. Warning: it’s not pretty.

When representatives of the Humane World for Animals showed up at The Grand River Fur Exchange in Minnesota, they were horrified by conditions there: hundreds of tiny cages, holding injured and dead animals.

It’s possible this urine farm was an exception, and others look different. But we can’t say for sure. No one in the industry was willing to go on the record, and while some states have rules, there is no federal oversight on urine farms.

Full episode available on Outside/In, wherever you get your podcasts and at link in bio.

Photos: Bottle of coyote urine, posed next to a pile of strawberries (a reference to the listener question which started us on this journey). Photo by Taylor Quimby.

A coyote in a cage during the rescue operation at the Grand Fur Exchange outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Credit: The Humane World for Animals.

Screenshot of search results for coyote urine on an online shopping site.

30/07/2025

It’s a weird time to be an environmental scientist.

Tom Butler is the site manager at NY67, one of the longest running atmospheric monitoring stations in the country. For almost 50 years, he’s been coming out here at least once a week, quietly collecting precipitation and dry deposition samples. This is just one of hundreds of sites across the U.S., which together offer a window into the atmosphere — notably, they track acid rain. The data is available to anyone for free, and was critical in designing policy to help tackle acid rain.

But this spring, Tom and his colleagues got word that the federal government was cutting the funding to NY67. Since then, he’s continued collecting the samples anyway.

In our latest episode, “Field reports from the cutting edge of science,” ’s .j headed to Ithaca, New York tagged along with researchers in the field, as they try to continue their work even as their funding collapses around them.

Listen at the link in bio or on the podcast app of your choice.

All photos by Justine Paradis.
1) a map of the region and site information, tacked to the wall at NY67.
2) Tom Butler, with ozone analyzer and shelter in the background.
3) This is “bucket science,” Tom joked, an old-school method originally designed to track nuclear fall-out. But now, they collect precipitation to measure acid rain.
4) Long term monitoring is “not sexy,” per Tom. But it took decades to build these networks. “We’ve cleaned up the atmosphere. Good stuff.”
5) Graphs showing decades of NADP data. Tom estimates that this site costs about $25,000 per year to run.
6) Tom Butler at NY67. These networks were built over decades. If they go away, Tom isn’t optimistic they’d come back.
7) Tom Butler, wearing a Cornell Ornithology baseball cap and a t-shirt depicting the state fossil of New York. Despite losing funding, Tom keeps coming out to NY67 once a week. “I’ll keep doing it as long as I can,” he said.
8) “It’s easy to wreck stuff. It a lot harder to build it.”

18/07/2025

“In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky.”

That’s the first line of the poem “A Map to the Next World” by Muscogee writer and former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. It’s a piece that’s inspired Aquinnah Wampanoag writer Joseph Lee as he undertakes one of journalism's most nuanced beats: covering hundreds of unique tribal communities.

In this week's episode we talk to Joseph Lee about some of the stories he’s covered, and his own attempt to make a map to the next world.

Indigenous journalist Joseph Lee on the nuanced ways tribes are adapting to climate change and more.

09/07/2025

How a cold war plot and architectural hoax sparked a billion-dollar race to the bottom of the ocean.

AKA our deep sea mining correspondent Daniel Ackerman is back on the beat! Listen to The Trojan Seahorse wherever you get your podcasts.

Photo Credit:
🚢 U.S. Government via Wikimedia Commons &
Central Intelligence Agency via Wikimedia Commons

20/06/2025

A listener named Andy recently wrote in with a question about frog sound. One of our producers had spent a night camping that left her with the exact same question.

On this week’s episode learn what that melodic symphony is really all about. 🎶🐸

Episode is in your feeds now!

Photo of Pacific tree frog courtesy of Alejandro Vélez.