Dr. Robert Bullard continues to earn his moniker as the “father of environmental justice” by calling for justice for the community of Shiloh, Alabama. The area has suffered repeated flooding ever since a highway was widened and elevated in 2018, causing destruction to homes that Black landowners have proudly kept since the Reconstruction era. Dr. Bullard sat down with Host Steve Curwood to describe the trouble in Shiloh and how it’s affecting residents. They also take a wider look at environmental racism in America today and increasing vulnerabilities from climate change in the years to come.

The 2021 children’s book One Step Further: My Story of Math, the Moon, and a Lifelong Mission tells the story of Katherine Johnson, an African American woman who while living under Jim Crow in the south worked at NASA as a mathematician and helped put a man on the moon. Host Steve Curwood spoke with one of Katherine’s three daughters, Katherine Moore, who co-authored One Step Further to help share her mother's story.

Over seven years poet Camille Dungy gradually transformed her sterile lawn in white Fort Collins, Colorado into a pollinator haven teeming with native plants and the wildlife they attract. Her book Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden recounts that journey alongside a world in turmoil amid the coronavirus pandemic, police violence and wildfires. Camille Dungy joined Host Steve Curwood to talk about how all her hard work amending hard clay soil has yielded gifts of joy as well as metaphors.