Coastal science, patiently and beautifully reported.
Hakai Magazine Audio Edition is a library of reported feature stories about oceans, coasts, ice, wildlife, and human pressure on fragile places. Its episodes move slowly from shoreline detail toward wider questions of history, conservation, food, migration, and loss.
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Hakai Magazine Audio Edition is a collection of narrated magazine features about life at the edges of land and water. It is not a talk show. It works like field reporting read aloud, with each story opening in a particular place and then gradually revealing the science, history, and human choices gathered there. The pace is measured. A Greenland peregrine, a Galapagos tortoise, an Olympia oyster, a Chilean cold-water coral, or a missing purple sea urchin is never just a specimen; each becomes a way of seeing a larger environmental pattern. The show is especially strong at connecting intimate observation to long consequences. In one episode, careful surveys around Lough Hine turn a once-common urchin into evidence of ecological change. In another, shellfish harvesting becomes a meditation on food, abundance, introduced species, and respect for the waters that feed people. Glacier work on Mount Baker carries the texture of mud, alder, crampons, and cold rain before it arrives at the diagnosis of retreating coastal ice. The writing often trusts silence and detail. It gives room to field scientists, farmers, archaeologists, conservationists, and ordinary harvesters without turning them into simple symbols. History matters here, too: Danish bird records in Greenland, the Monteverde campsite in Chile, Japanese oysters on the Pacific Coast, and early surveys marked by painted shoreline crosses all carry present-day meaning. The show’s environmental outlook is sober but not inert. Damage is real, recovery is slow, and human systems are implicated, yet the stories keep returning to people who count, protect, restore, observe, and adapt. Its final episodes also acknowledge Hakai Magazine’s closure and the staff’s move toward Biographic, giving the archive a valedictory undertone. For listeners, the appeal lies in attention. These are stories for people who want science to arrive through weather, labor, landscape, and consequence.
Made for: For listeners who prefer thoughtful narrated essays about ecology, oceans, wildlife, field science, and environmental change. It suits people who enjoy long-form reporting that starts with a place and earns its larger stakes.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its magazine-like construction: sensory field scenes, careful scientific context, and historical depth braided into a single narrated arc. It feels less like a briefing and more like standing beside the researchers, harvesters, and witnesses who keep returning to the shore.
Every Tuesday, Hakai Magazine brings you the best stories from the world’s coastlines. Each episode is a recording of our weekly feature story. Find all of our stories at hakaimagazine.com.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Coastal field reporting makes ecological change legible through scientists, communities, and the patient accumulation of evidence.
Hakai Magazine Audio Edition turns reported feature articles into patient, scene-rich listening, using coastlines as a route into ecology, climate, conservation, and human relationships with the natural world.
One missing purple sea urchin, and your beach day suddenly needs a clipboard.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A Greenland falcon story that grows from field notes into wider environmental significance.
Set in Tasarmiet Fjord in southern Greenland, the episode uses peregrine falcons to move from close field observation into a broader account of Greenlandic bird records, Arctic banding, and environmental action.
A fjord-bound look at how deep-sea corals reproduce, and why that knowledge matters.
Hakai Magazine Audio Edition opens on a wooden fishing boat crossing Comau Fjord in Chilean Patagonia, then settles into a careful look at cold-water corals that usually live thousands of meters below the ocean's surface.
A careful coastal account of absence, memory, and the slow work of looking.
At Loch Hine on Ireland's southwest coast, the piece tracks Colin Little and Penny Sterling as they measure a shoreline where Paracentrotus lividus, the purple sea urchin, has fallen from common to nearly absent.
A shellfish harvest opens into memory, community, and the fragile systems behind coastal abundance.
Shellfish are the way into a bigger question here: what changes when food is gathered by hand, in company, from a living shore. Emma Maris moves from teenage weekends on Daybop Bay, with oysters, bonfires, hot rocks, and cold-water plunges, to a Sunday at Tuano State Park, where…
A butterfly release becomes a careful study of hope, labor, and survival.
The Butterfly Redemption follows a recovery arc from a prison greenhouse to a prairie release, tracing scientists, volunteers, and incarcerated women as they raise Taylor's checkerspot caterpillars and send nearly 900 of them loose at Scatter Creek Wildlife Area.
A glacier climb that turns field detail into climate stakes.
Hakai Magazine Audio Edition follows Madeline Ostrander, read by Heather Walter, up Mount Baker with glaciologist Morey Pelto, and the climb lands with rare physical clarity as well as scientific weight.
Documentary storytelling on ecology and Indigenous land stewardship, hosted by Mendel and Adam.
BBC World Service reporters explain climate mechanisms and policy from the Amazon to Delhi to the Alps.
Books, systems, and the questions that unlock them.
Soil life, climate repair, practical regeneration.
Climate justice from the ground up.
Journalist Madeline Ostrander joins glaciologist Morey Pelto on Washington's Eastern Glacier, where his 35-year study documents climate-driven decline.
This episode examines the staggering amount of fish wasted globally each year, from catch to plate.
The episode follows the Taylor's checkerspot butterfly conservation program at Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women, where incarcerated women raise nearly 4,000 caterpillars.
Science writer Caroline Van Hemert narrates a long-form feature for Hakai Magazine about Greenland's peregrine falcons, told through her family's sailing voyage from the Mediterranean to the Arctic and interviews with biologists who have studied these birds for decades.
Science writer Heather Walter narrates a Hakai Magazine feature about the first-ever lab spawning of Desmophyllum dianthus, a cold-water coral that normally lives in near-total darkness at depths of up to 2,000 metres but grows in accessible shallows in Chile's Comau Fjord.
Hakai Magazine Audio Edition reads Olive Heffernan's "For the Love of a Little Sea," a feature about Loch Hine on Ireland's southwest coast where Colin Little and Penny Sterling keep finding fewer purple sea urchins.
Hakai Magazine Audio Edition reads Emma Maris's feature "Finding Food and Solace in the Intertidal," a coastal essay about shellfish, family memory, and climate pressure.
Hakai Magazine Audio Edition examines the return of fin whales to British Columbia's Kitimat Fjord system and the LNG tanker traffic planned through their habitat.
Norwegian anglers caught 6,289 non-native pink salmon in 2017 and 13,925 in 2019, and in 2023 the Norwegian Environment Agency put US$5 million into trapping them in Finnmark County.
Archaeologist Tom Dillehay's discovery of a 14,500-year-old campsite in Chile challenges established theories of human migration to the Americas.
A journalist joins a glaciologist and his team as they monitor the health of coastal glaciers in Washington State.
This episode explores the history and comeback of the Pacific Coast's only native oyster, the Olympia oyster, and the efforts needed to support its recovery.
This episode explores the surprising vocal abilities of plain fin midshipmen fish, whose loud humming puzzled residents until scientists identified the source.
This episode explores how ocean animals use sound to navigate, featuring a mini-podcast series from Hakai Magazine.
This episode explores the discovery that mysterious underwater sounds detected by the Navy during World War II were actually made by croaker fish.
Exploring eco-engineering innovations in Seattle's waterfront that enhance marine habitat for salmon and other species.