APES vs.

APES vs. is an environmental science podcast made by high school students, and it is candid about that. The episodes come out of an environmental science class at Research Triangle High School. More than one stops to remind the listener that the experts and researchers being voiced are students playing a part. That honesty sets the tone. The shape of each episode changes with the group behind it. Juliana and Caroline take on bird endangerment as a duo. They move from habitat loss and invasive rats and mice to the toll taken by free-ranging domestic cats, which they put in the billions of birds a year. They sign off with a plain request: save the birds. Bella, Abby and Emily cast their episode as a fight against Fritz Haber. Their account runs from the scarcity of natural fertilizers such as Chilean guano, through the Haber-Bosch method, to the chlorine gas Haber developed for Germany in World War I. It then returns to fertilizer's downsides, from runoff into aquatic ecosystems to large corporate firms squeezing out small family ones. Other groups lean on role-play. Samantha and Jasmine's look at urbanization and global warming brings in a climatologist, a history professor and a Durham city planner, after first announcing that all three are fake. Coal-fired electricity and trees as carbon sinks both come up. Ashwat Tharoor questions Jackson Lyman, introduced as a crypto environmentalist expert, about the energy cost of mining, and the answer favors proof-of-stake over simply opting into solar. Kirsten Condon opens an episode on genetically modified organisms with Malthus and the Green Revolution. That episode also detours into the gap between a cage-free egg label and the conditions behind it. McCarty Hudson's episode on birds crashing into windows begins with a childhood memory of that thud against the glass. It then moves to an interview about a campus survey in which volunteers walked around buildings looking for birds that had hit windows and sent them to the Museum of Natural Sciences as research specimens. Birds come up more than once across these episodes, and so does the trade-off between human progress and its side effects. The students name their sources, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science to an SSRN journal. The delivery is earnest and unpolished. For a first listen, the Fritz Haber episode covers the most ground, and the window-collision episode is the most hands-on.