Environmental stories with ground under their feet.
Living Planet turns climate and nature stories into reported scenes, from Arctic narwhal waters to rat-heavy city basements. The show mixes field detail, science explanation, policy tension, and practical questions about how people live with the planet.
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Living Planet frames environmental issues through places where the consequences can be heard, smelled, eaten, mapped, or felt. The show does not stay in the abstract for long. It starts in small boats near Arctic ice, in apartment basements with rat droppings and heavy air, in churches weighing climate action, and in conference rooms where plastic containers are fitted with tracking devices. From there, each story widens. Narwhals become a way to talk about underwater sound, Inuit food security, traditional harvesting, and monitoring in Eclipse Sound. Rats become a story about waste, density, warmer cities, disease risk, infrastructure damage, and mental health. Geothermal energy moves from family drilling work and hot rock to technology, policy, finance, and the difficulty of making an energy transition happen quickly. The show is especially strong at connecting personal experience to systems. Luis Alberto Camargo's outdoor education work and Cristina's cooking, art, and food projects give environmental learning a human scale. Episodes on mercury and plastic show how pollution often hides behind ordinary objects, from gold to salad boxes. The reporting can be intimate, but it keeps returning to public questions: who benefits, who is exposed, what counts as recycling, what power does to climate policy, and what communities need to survive. Its register is clear and conversational. Technical points are explained without turning the show into a lecture. The production also pays attention to sound and scene, which matters for subjects like narwhal acoustics, urban infestation, and outdoor learning. Living Planet suits a listener who wants climate and nature coverage with reporting muscle and everyday entry points. It is not only about individual greener habits, though those appear. It is also about contested definitions, political pressure, industrial choices, cultural continuity, and scientific tools. The result is a show where environmental problems feel specific enough to grasp and large enough to matter.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants climate, nature, and pollution stories explained through real places and reported scenes. It also fits someone who likes practical environmental questions without losing the science and policy underneath.
What sets it apart: Living Planet stands apart by anchoring big environmental systems in tactile reporting: narwhal hunting, rat-infested basements, tracked plastic, drilling, wild food, and classroom-free education. The show makes planetary issues feel local before it makes them global.
Looking to reconnect with nature? Want to make better decisions for the health of the planet? Every Friday, Living Planet brings you the stories, facts and debates on the key environmental issues of our time.
A tracker rides inside a salad box, and you get to follow the recycling promise past the bin.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A narwhal hunt opens into a clear story about Arctic sound, wildlife pressure, and Inuit food security.
Living Planet turns a narwhal hunt in Canada's Arctic archipelago into a close, grounded story about sound, survival, and pressure on a calving haven.
A stench-filled look at urban rat life, where hotter cities and abundant food give an old pest more room to thrive.
Living Planet opens in a reeking Berlin basement and follows the trail through New York, Toronto and Los Angeles, where rats are finding better conditions in dense, food-rich, warming cities.
A direct climate episode linking wildlife wonder, political power, and the possibility of churches turning concern into action.
A childhood love of wildlife leads this episode into a sterner question: what people owe the climate, and what gets in the way of acting on that duty. Its path from animals, manatees, and water birds to organized political resistance is the piece's clearest strength.
A clear, grounded look at geothermal's promise, and why drilling, cost, and patience still matter.
Geothermal's promise starts with a familiar industrial craft: drilling, now reframed as a route to useful heat in far more places. Living Planet makes that shift feel concrete through Brock Yordy's family history, moving from water wells with his father and grandfather to his…
AirTags make the recycling bin the opening scene of a much murkier plastic journey.
A tracking device tucked into a used plastic salad box turns the recycling bin into the first stop on a murkier route. Guerrilla activists follow plastic from Houston drop-off points to storage sites, where pickup can take days or weeks depending on how full a bin gets, then…
Psychology teaching, one career story at a time.
Honest school talk with practical stakes.
Alex Udova describes hunting narwhals near Pond Inlet, where an icebreaker and an oil tanker passed his hunting ground and a narwhal surfaced close enough to harpoon after the earlier noise.
Living Planet's "Why cities keep losing the war on rats" starts in a Berlin basement where the host describes a stench that feels "asphyxiating" and finds droppings, greasy slime, and holes that point to rats.
Living Planet's "Pray or act?
Brock Yordy, a third-generation driller from Kalamazoo, Michigan, moved from water wells and Halliburton to geothermal and now leads the Geothermal Drillers Association.
Houston activists used AirTags inside used plastic containers to test the city’s all-plastics recycling program, and they found tagged material staying at the same storage site for weeks and even months.
Living Planet reporters Kathleen Schuster and Jennifer Collins examine whether four-day weeks can survive pressure to work longer amid AI and sluggish growth.
At Nibio in Tromsø, Jürgen Maulmann found that selected light wavelengths can make some potatoes emerge up to one week earlier.
A man reflects on how his childhood on large Colombian farms shaped his impactful teaching style, as evidenced by a former student's gratitude.
This episode explores the link between gold mining and mercury pollution, discussing the Minamata Convention and the surprising source of mercury in the environment.
This episode compares the environmental impact of tea and coffee consumption.
This episode explores whether driving an electric vehicle truly reduces your carbon footprint compared to keeping a traditional combustion car.
This episode explores the phenomenon of ocean darkening, its impact on the Baltic Sea ecosystem, and the struggles of a German fisherman due to declining herring stocks.