Lawless Planet

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:
Glen Borgerding
Jacob Schunk
Tony Morfitt

Sources:
Ian Parker’s reporting in The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/15/the-great-organic-food-fraud
Mike Hendricks’ reporting in The Kansas City Star https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article239079858.html
Trial documents from the Department of Justice’s case U.S. v. Randy Constant
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndia/pr/field-schemes-fraud-results-over-decade-federal-prison-leader-largest-organic-fraud
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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 burn pit exposure.

Featured in this episode:
Kelly Kennedy
Jessey and Maria Baca

Sources:
Kelly Kennedy’s reporting for The Military Times (https://www.militarytimes.com/) and The War Horse (https://thewarhorse.org/)
The New Republic’s “The Things They Burned”: https://newrepublic.com/article/138058/things-burned
The New York Times’ “The Soldiers Came Home Sick. The Government Denied It Was Responsible”: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/11/magazine/military-burn-pits.html
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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 this episode:
Betsy Gaines Quammen

Sources:
Betsy Gaines Quammen's book American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God and Public Lands in the West
PBS’s Frontline’s documentary American Patriot.
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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, Center for Climate Integrity
John Scott Railton, The Citizen Lab

Sources:
The Citzen Lab’s “Dark Basin: Uncovering a Massive Hack-for-Hire Operation”: https://citizenlab.ca/research/dark-basin-uncovering-a-massive-hack-for-hire-operation/

Inside Climate News’s “Exxon: The Road Not Taken”: https://insideclimatenews.org/project/exxon-the-road-not-taken/

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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 Venable Moore
Dr. Martin Cherniack

Sources:
Dr. Martin Cherniack’s book The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Disaster
Catherine Venable Moore’s “The Book of the Dead” in Oxford American:
https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-94-fall-2016/the-book-of-the-dead
Muriel Rukeyser's Book of the Dead
George Robinson’s Congressional Testimony
NPR’s reporting on the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/20/685821214/before-black-lung-the-hawks-nest-tunnel-disaster-killed-hundreds
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.