Podcasts for Field Trips

• Design and Architecture – Bridges and Walls: Wildlife Crossing
  • “Wild animals need to roam, but our freeways are in the way. Now a proposed bridge over the 101 would allow mountain lions and other wildlife to cross safely over the freeway and improve their access to food and mates. But can humans and predatory animals coexist in the city?”

• The Urbanist – Animal Spirits
  • “This week is all about animals and cities: from backyard chickens to birdwatching and even entrepreneurs making life easier for your furry friend. Plus: how can we design our public spaces in a more animal-friendly way?”

• Freakonomics – Why Bad Environmentalism Is Such an Easy Sell
  • “Sure, we already know it’s not easy being green. But how about selling green? Yep, pretty easy. That’s according to the Harvard economist Ed Glaeser. Glaeser argues that since most of us are eager to do the right thing for the environment, we are vulnerable to marketers and politicians who offer solutions that aren’t as green as they seem.”

• Planet Money – Unbuilding a City
  • “Shrinking cities have a problem: Millions of abandoned, falling-apart houses. Often, knocking them down is the best solution. But it can be remarkably hard to do that. On today’s show, we visit a single block in Baltimore and figure out why it’s so hard to knock down buildings — even when everybody wants them gone.”

• Placemakers – The Quest to Make the Perfect Place
  • “Imagine a place where you can stroll down the sidewalk, wave to your neighbors on their porch, then pick up your dry cleaning or have lunch at the café. That’s the kind of walkable, compact, mixed-use community envisioned by the founders of New Urbanism—including Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. But some people say there’s a reason one of Plater-Zyberk’s developments played a starring role in a memorable Hollywood film about overly constructed reality.”

• 99% Invisible – Ten Thousand Years
  • “The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is the nation’s only permanent underground repository for nuclear waste. WIPP, which is located deep in the New Mexico desert, was designed to store radioactive material and keep us all safe from it. Storing something safely forever is a huge design problem; in fact, the jury’s still out on whether WIPP has solved the basics of the storage problem at all. In 1990, the federal government invited a group of  geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New Mexico desert to visit WIPP and address how to communicate this information and mark the site as radioactive to people 10,000 years in the future.”

• The Nature Podcast – Geoengineering Antarctica and Increasing NMR’s Resolution
  • “Geoengineering glaciers to prevent sea level rise, and using diamonds to improve nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)’s resolution.”

• The Nature Podcast – Human’s Influence on the Mississippi and ‘dirty’ mice (Start at 10:29 for the Mississippi story)
  • “Dissecting human influence on the Mississippi’s floods, and getting ‘dirty’ mice into the lab.”