Field Trip

Field Trip is a narrative documentary series from The Washington Post, reported and hosted by journalist Lillian Cunningham, who previously created the Post's Presidential podcast. Each episode centers on a single national park — Everglades, Yosemite, Gates of the Arctic, and Glacier appear in the sample — and is built around on-site reporting rather than studio conversation. Cunningham travels with Post audio producers, including Bishop Sand and Emma Talcoff, who record ambient sound and interviews in the field. The people who appear are not recurring guests but park-specific sources: ecologists and biologists (such as an Audubon Society researcher who documented the 1989-90 Florida Bay ecosystem collapse), National Park Service officials and superintendents, fishing guides and advocacy groups, and Indigenous tribal members and leaders (Miccosukee, Seminole, Southern Sierra Miwok, and Blackfeet Nation representatives, among others). Episodes typically braid three threads: the ecological science of a specific crisis (wildfire behavior, algae blooms, water flow), the federal policy and infrastructure decisions that created or worsened it (the Army Corps' Everglades canal system, a century of fire suppression, the Ambler Road mining proposal), and the Indigenous history of the land, often including forced removal, treaty rights, and current efforts at tribal co-stewardship or co-management with the Park Service. The tone is investigative and reflective rather than promotional, with the host regularly naming the National Park Service's own historical failures. Listeners who enjoy long-form environmental and policy journalism, or want deeper history on specific national parks than a travel guide provides, are the core audience. Production is high-effort field audio journalism rather than a recurring-cast talk show, with a limited total episode count (eight) built around discrete park visits.