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Lawless Planet

Lawless Planet

By: Wondery
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About this listen

It’s not that hard to kill a planet. All it takes is a little drilling, some mining, a generous helping of pollution and voila! Earth over. When you take stock of what’s left, it starts to look like a crime scene: Decapitated mountains, poisoned rivers, oil-soaked pelicans, maybe a sun-bleached cow skull in a dried-up lake bed. The only thing missing is yellow caution tape. On each episode of Lawless Planet, host Zach Goldbaum reveals the scams, murders and cover-ups on the frontline of the climate crisis, and the life and death choices people are making to either protect our world – or destroy it.


Don't miss a single explosive revelation. The investigation begins now. Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting https://wondery.com/links/lawless-planet/ now.

© 2025 Wondery LLC. All rights reserved. Social Sciences World
Episodes
  • Inside the Sting Operation to Catch Florida’s Alligator Thieves

    Inside the Sting Operation to Catch Florida’s Alligator Thieves
    Jan 12 2026

    When Florida state wildlife officials begin to suspect that someone is illegally harvesting alligator eggs, they launch Operation Alligator Thief. At its heart: a veteran officer named Jeff Babauta, who delays his retirement to go deep undercover as a real Florida Man, hoping to infiltrate the insular world of gator farming.


    Featured in this episode:

    Jeff Babauta

    Rebecca Renner


    Sources:

    Rebecca Renner’s book Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades

    See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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    43 mins
  • The Trash Ship That Became a Symbol of America’s Toxic Waste Problem

    The Trash Ship That Became a Symbol of America’s Toxic Waste Problem
    Jan 5 2026

    In the 1980s, Philadelphia was in the midst of a trash crisis. A sanitation workers’ strike had left the city with an immense backlog of garbage. The solution: Ship it overseas, on a rusting cargo vessel called the Khian Sea. But when one country after another refused to take Philly’s waste, it turned the Khian Sea’s trash voyage into a trash odyssey, and shed light on a growing problem that critics came to call “garbage imperialism.”


    Featured in this episode:

    Kenny Bruno


    Sources:

    Simone M. Müller’s book The Toxic Ship

    Alexander Clapp’s book Waste Wars

    Planet Money’s reporting on the Mobro 4000: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/739893511

    See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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    33 mins
  • Drilled: How Greenpeace Got Sued for the Standing Rock Protests

    Drilled: How Greenpeace Got Sued for the Standing Rock Protests
    Dec 29 2025

    Today, Lawless Planet brings you an episode from our friends at Drilled Media. Season 12 of their flagship podcast is called SLAPP’d, and it tells another side of a story we covered earlier in our episode “Surveillance and Sabotage on the Dakota Access Pipeline.”


    Greenpeace, which was only tangentially involved in the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, has been slapped with a $666 million bill for damages...despite the fact that DAPL was built, and has been making Energy Transfer millions of dollars for years. How did we get here? Cody Hall, an Indigenous water protector who was a key figure during the Standing Rock protests and was initially also targeted in Energy Transfer's suit, walks us through how things went down back in 2016 and 2017, and where this suit began.

    See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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    44 mins
All stars
Most relevant
Just started this, 2 episodes in, looking forward to more. Excellent research and presentation, horrifying stories that should spur us all to greater thought and action.

Well-researched and confronting

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