I try to find podcasts that cover lesser-known stories. With several of these, like Team Human and Conspirituality, I only listen to episodes now and then when they look relevant to On the Commons. Many of these are also single-series podcasts with a limited number of episodes on a specific topic.
Scotland Outdoors: BBC Radio Scotland’s weekly show on everything outdoors, from peat farming to the Right to Roam to ancient history on the Outer Hebridean islands
Reframing Rural: Host Megan Torgerson is from a farm in Dagmar, Montana, and specializes in revitalizing stories about the people of rural Montana—excellently produced podcast, even if I don’t always agree with the assumptions or conclusions
Last Born in the Wilderness: There’s a lot of climate and societal collapse discussion here, but always with a focus on humanity’s reality of interconnectedness and our responsibilities to the life we live in, from, and among
FUTURES: Almost every single episode of FUTURES, I look at the description and think, “meh.” And then I listen and almost every single time am surprised by the deep questions and thoughts it evokes. From transhumanism to bioethics and everything in between and related
War on Cars: An excellent podcast on the car-centric world we live in, how we got here, what car-centric infrastructure destroys, and what we can do to change it
In Common: interviews with researchers on current societal and economic commons systems worldwide—“commoning” as a counterpoint to enclosure and privatization
Building Local Power: from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, covering issues from the fight for community-run internet to garbage collection to food deserts to tenants’ unions
Frontiers of Commoning: hosted by commons scholar and co-author of Free, Fair, and Alive on the past and future of the commons David Bollier, conversations with people on anything from crowd-sourced insulin devices to collective and regenerative farming to urban commons to defashion and degrowth . . .
Your Undivided Attention: expert perspectives on the damages, promises, and functionality in social media and the rest of digital tech from the founders of the Center for Human Technology
Origin Stories: stories from the worlds of paleoanthropology and evolutionary biology from the Leakey Foundation
Threshold: probably my favorite podcast. Its first season was about bison in Montana, and the second season was about the Arctic. It’s beautifully and thoughtfully produced with a decentering of the standard white western narratives.
In Machines We Trust, from MIT Technology Review: A limited-run podcast on artificial intelligence, algorithms, and the often chilling effects of digital life, especially social media, on our everyday lives (I can’t get the episode about beauty and image out of my head)
Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery: Absolutely essential research and interviews on the Doctrine of Discovery’s history and its ongoing effects worldwide
Stories for Action: Largely based in Montana, these stories are of community solidarity, local organizing efforts, small businesses, and the challenges faced by all of them. The episode on Montana’s new, horrendous law about gravel pit permitting is essential listening for anyone in the state who cares about these issues
This Land: Season 1 was about the U.S. Supreme Court case McGirt v. Oklahoma and what it meant for tribal sovereignty. Season 2 was about ICWA, the Indian Child Welfare Act. Both seasons did an amazing job bringing to life histories of land theft, removal, and oppressions that most Americans remain unaware of.
Montana Values Podcast: Hosted by a former mayor of Kalispell, Montana, with whom I disagree on almost everything, especially what constitutes Montana values, but also happens to be the only place where I find actual reporting on corruption in the state’s elected Public Service Commission officials, and the threats posed by radicalization in the local and statewide Republican Party—something we do agree on.
Third Squad: Hosted by Army National Guard veteran and photojournalist Elliott Woods, Third Squad follows the surviving members of a Marine squad with whom Woods was embedded in Sangin, Afghanistan.
Untangled Roots from Minnesota Public Radio: This podcast started in St. Paul, Minnesota’s Rondo neighborhood, one of many torn apart by the building of the U.S.’s interstate highway system (I wrote about Rondo in A Walking Life), and has expanded to wider untold stories of Minnesota’s Twin Cities
Vaccine: The Human Story: A single-series podcast about the ancient history of smallpox, inoculation, the development of vaccines, and vaccine resistance and conspiracy theories
The Extortion Economy from MIT Technology Review: I was hooked on this series when it ran, about piracy and the deep links between ransomware and infrastructure
Fireline: A series from Wyoming about the new reality and science of wildfire in the western U.S.
Timber Wars, from Oregon Public Radio: One of the unexpectedly most important podcasts I’ve listened to, because I think a lot of the western U.S.’s extremism can be traced back to the Timber Wars of the 1980s and early 1990s, which pitted environmental groups against timber company employees, leaving out the corporate monopolies truly in control
SubSurface, from Montana Public Radio: A great series about the effort to keep mussels out of the Columbia River watershed and the ecological destruction caused when those efforts fail
Mountain & Prairie, hosted by Ed Roberson: interviews with artists, ranchers, environmental leaders, writers, and athletes in some way connected to or working in the western U.S.
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast, hosted by Hal Herring: interviews about hunting and conversation; sometimes—okay, frequently—too much in the weeds about fly fishing and definitely too much devotion to private property, but I learn a lot from this show about the tenuous relationship between conservation and hunting and what they have to offer each other
Conspirituality: This is one I only listen to intermittently, but there have been incredibly valuable episodes, like with philosopher C Thi Nguyen, whose Aeon essay on epistemic bubbles and echo chambers I recommend probably more than I do any other