The Story

Ken Campbell begins a trip next week to catalogue the debris from the Japanese tsunami.

Sandra Steingraber is a mother, a poet, a cancer survivor, ecologist and environmental activist living in Ithaca, New York.  She was arrested on Earth Day, and spent 15 days in jail, for protesting against hydraulic fracturing (fracking).  After many years in laboratories, and speaking at panels, she felt the time had come to use her body in a direct-action protest. She physically blocked the entrance to a drilling company called Inergy as a way of protesting the industrialization of the Finger Lakes in Central New York State.  

For the last 20 years, Lisa Curran has been living and working in the forests of Indonesia to help locals learn how to preserve what rightfully belongs to them.  Her work recently won her a prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowship of $500,000. Also in this episode, Val Johnson of Chicago.

When Neil White was sentenced to 18 months for check fraud, he expected a minimum-security prison. Instead, he found himself in a home for leprosy patients.