Making Contact

As climate change melts the polar ice caps and raises sea levels, how will we adapt? We visit two locations: On Sapelo Island Georgia, the last remaining Gullah Geechee community fights to save their ancestral lands from the flood waters. Instead of leaving their land, or building a giant sea wall, they've chosen to use oysters to create what's called a living shoreline. We take a look at how they're built and if they're working. Meanwhile, in New York, the Army Corps wants to construct seagates to protect the city from another Hurricane Sandy. But, the gates could have massive ecological repercussions and, they might not even work. Scientists think there's a better way to work with the local ecology and protect residents. 

What does food mean to identities struggling against colonialism and displacement? First, we visit the Blackfeet Nation in Montana as members of Indigikitchen harvest bison and talk about Native food systems. Then, we head to Bloomington, Indiana where a young archeology professor has brought methods of growing and sharing food from the deeper past to a modern Latino diaspora.  

Mutual aid efforts to provide pregnancy prevention and medical abortion in post-Roe southern United States. 

Our friends from the podcast The Response bring us their piece Abortion Access and Reproductive Justice in a Post-Roe Landscape, plus a quick update on how the issue of abortion access impacted the 2022 midterms. 

Groups all over Latin America turn to the age-old practice of communal cooking to feed citizens during pandemic lockdowns. A Buenos Aires arts organization solidifies their community, and a Peruvian architect brings new ways of building to the hillsides of Lima. 

This week on Making Contact - with assistance from our podcast partners, 70 million - we head to the state of Alaska, where rising violent crime and substance abuse have increased incarceration rates among Native Americans. Making use of their legal sovereignty, some Alaskan Native leaders issue “blue tickets,” documents that sentence offenders to legal expulsion. Journalist Emily Schwing looked into these banishment practices and their impacts on those affected by both tribal and state criminal justice systems. 

We revisit a major race debate within the Romance Writers of America that began in 2019 and talk about why questions of race in art and in institutions are so relevant in today's America. This is a two part series.

We revisit a major race debate within the Romance Writers of America that began in 2019 and talk about why questions of race in art and in institutions are so relevant in today's America. This is a two part series.  

One child’s experience in a neighborhood with high asthma rates and other health challenges. 

We talk to Raj Patel and Rupa Marya about their new book "Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice."