Trace Material
Episodes
32 episodes
Season 3 Trailer
Trace Material explores the intersection of our lives and the lives of the materials that surround us, one material at a time. This year, for Trace Material’s third season, the podcast team at HML is investigating fungi.Does this mysteri...
Into the Woods
In this episode we go on a journey led by revered mycologist John Michelotti into the forests of the Catskill mountains to learn the basics about what makes mushrooms so special. Can fungi change the way we approach our ecosystem? Can they give...
The Citizen Scientist
The power of fungi has been neglected by academic institutions and marginalized in the larger society. By the 1960s the American imagination had linked fungi to magic mushrooms, the counterculture movement, and Nixon’s war on drugs. That linger...
Nature's Detox
Did you know that Mycelial networks can break down dead plant or animal matter and they can connect with the roots of living plants to share nutrients between them? Whether that was news or not, mycelial networks are much more complicated than ...
Mycelium for the Masses
Mycelium based materials have a wealth of potential applications. But how does a new material get out of the experimental phase and into mass production? That transition is often where material development can stall. Luckily, that i...
Harvesting Housing
We’ve spent this season tracing how fungi, and especially mycelium, can shake up industries and remediate the harm caused by climate change. We’ve talked about foraging, growing, healing and commercializing mycelium. But there’s one frontier we...
Season 2 Trailer
Here's a first listen of Trace Material Season 2: Stories from the Plastics Age, coming your way June 16th! We were curious: what will future societies think of us when they dig up relics of our present day?
The Fourth Kingdom
Our story starts at the turn of the twentieth century, when the natural materials everyday objects were made from were becoming scarce. Enter the era of the inventor, it was time to forge new materials and build a new world.
Mi Sueño Tupperware
In post-war America everything that people touched––paint, fabric, dishes, jewelry––could be made of plastic. But how did this first generation living in a plastic world learn to accept it as part of their daily lives?
Out of the Factory
The connections between vinyl chloride and diseases like cancer were first understood inside the factory setting. Workers were quite literally on the frontline. But today we're taking you outside the factory walls and into fenceline communities...
The House of Documents
In the 1970s, workers in PVC factories across the country began getting sick with a rare form of liver cancer. While the plastics industry claimed they were unaware of what was causing that cancer, internal documents told a different stor...
Dance Against the Incinerator
The push to promote disposable plastics created mountains of new waste that will never biodegrade. The burden of that waste has been placed almost entirely on the shoulders of low-income communities of color. This week, activists sh...
The Guilt Eraser
The nation’s first plastic bag ban in Suffolk County, NY set off panic in the plastics industry. How did industry create the myth of recycling and squash potential bag bans?We speak to Assemblyman Steve Englebright, who sponsored the ba...
Our Plastic Future
More than any other generation, Gen Z’s lives have been marked by climate change and climate anxiety. In this episode of Trace Material, we speak to young climate activists to understand how they’re imagining a future away from plasti...
The Social History of Plastics
We're looking back at the stories we've told on this season of Trace Material. How did we find ourselves living in the plastics age and where might we go from here? Be sure to go back and listen to any episodes you may have missed...
Trace Material Live: The Plastics Inferno
Over the course of this season, we’ve told stories of iconic plastic objects like Tupperware and Bakelite and looked at how this material has woven itself into our culture and our bodies. We’ve traced how we found ourselves in the plastics age,...
Season 1 Trailer
Trace Material is a new podcast from Parsons Healthy Materials Lab exploring the intersection of our lives and the lives of the materials that surround us. Each season we dig into a material you might find in your home to discover what...
Introducing Trace Material
Welcome to Trace Material, a new podcast from Parsons Healthy Materials Lab. HML Co-directors Alison Mears and Jonsara Ruth make the case for digging into the materials we surround ourselves with every day and introduce you to your hosts for se...
Trace Material Series Trailer
Music for this trailer is an adapted version of the song Greylock by Blue Dot Sessions, licensed under CC 4.0.
Hemp in the Bluegrass
We’re going back in time to before hemp was considered controversial. To explain where we are today and why it’s such a hot button issue, we’re going to trace hemp’s history in the United States by looking back at the early American hemp econom...
Pot's Benevolent Cousin
Who’s responsible for the downfall of hemp? How could a plant that was proven to be so useful just up and vanish? We hear from cannabis historian Emily Dufton who helps us answer those questions and many more.
Booms, Bills and Busts
Is hemp legal to grow and sell everywhere in the United States? What exactly is CBD? And if hemp and marijuana are both cannabis, where does that leave “hemp’s illicit cousin?” In Episode 3, we tackle these questions and more as we wade through...
The Green Path
In Episode 4, we turn to Winona LaDuke. Winona is a two-time Vice Presidential nominee, an internationally renowned environmentalist...and a hemp farmer.With Winona's help, we’re backing up a little bit to look at the context of the Ame...
