Trace Material

We’ve spent this season tracing how fungi, and especially mycelium, can shake up industries and remediate the harm caused by climate change. We’ve talked about foraging, growing, healing and commercializing mycelium. But there’s one frontier we saved for this episode, the last of this season. It’s one that, here at Healthy Materials Lab, we’re honestly most excited about: affordable housing.

We speak with Chris Maurer and the team at BioHab, who are building housing with mycelium.  This project represents the culmination of our exploration of fungi (and aligns with HML’s big audacious goal of making all affordable housing with healthy materials). BioHab is, all at once, addressing waste issues, food insecurity, carbon sequestration, affordable housing, circularity… all powered by fungi.

Here's a link to the recording of our Trace Material Live event with Chris.

For more information, head to our website at healthymaterialslab.org/podcast, or give us a follow on Instagram @healthymaterialslab and Twitter @parsons_HML. If you've been enjoying this season, please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Mycelium based materials have a wealth of potential applications. But how does a new material get out of the experimental phase and into mass production? That transition is often where material development can stall.

Luckily, that isn’t happening with mycelium. In this episode, we speak with Gavin McIntyre, who is the co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Ecovative. Ecovative is a revolutionary company at the forefront of the mycelium industry. He leads us through the journey Ecovative has taken to get mycelium products into homes across the world.

For more information, head to our website at healthymaterialslab.org/podcast, or give us a follow on Instagram @healthymaterialslab and Twitter @parsons_HML. If you've been enjoying this season, please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Did you know that Mycelial networks can break down dead plant or animal matter and they can connect with the roots of living plants to share nutrients between them? Whether that was news or not, mycelial networks are much more complicated than you might imagine. 

To get down in the dirt with them, we spoke with Maya Elson. Maya works with CoRenewal, a nonprofit dedicated to providing education and research in ecosystem restoration, where she leads projects around post-fire bioremediation and ecological generation. She also runs her own organization: Mycopsychology. She calls herself a ‘mycelial networker.’

For more information, head to our website at healthymaterialslab.org/podcast, or give us a follow on Instagram @healthymaterialslab and Twitter @parsons_HML. If you've been enjoying this season, please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

The power of fungi has been neglected by academic institutions and marginalized in the larger society. By the 1960s the American imagination had linked fungi to magic mushrooms, the counterculture movement, and Nixon’s war on drugs. That lingering association has meant that American mycophiles have gathered in community at the margins.

We wanted to dig into those margins with William Padilla Brown, a citizen scientist who’s been thriving at them. William is the founder of Mycosymbiotics, and he both sells and researches mushrooms. We went down to Pennsylvania to talk to him about what it took to become a renowned citizen scientist, and what makes the fungi community so special.

Here's where you can find more from William:
Instagram: @mycosymbiote and @mycosymbiotics
Website: mycosymbiotics.com

For more information, head to our website at healthymaterialslab.org/podcast, or give us a follow on Instagram @healthymaterialslab and Twitter @parsons_HML. If you've been enjoying this season, please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

In this episode we go on a journey led by revered mycologist John Michelotti into the forests of the Catskill mountains to learn the basics about what makes mushrooms so special. Can fungi change the way we approach our ecosystem? Can they give us healthier food systems, healthier bodies, healthier materials, and healthier housing? That’s what we want to explore this season, and there was no better place to start than deep in the woods with an expert.

Visit catskillfungi.com to schedule a mushroom walk or purchase a mushroom extract. Give them a follow on instagram @catskillfungi

For more information, head to our website at healthymaterialslab.org/podcast, or give us a follow on Instagram @healthymaterialslab and Twitter @parsons_HML. If you've been enjoying this season, please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Trace Material explores the intersection of our lives and the lives of the materials that surround us, one material at a time. This year, for Trace Material’s third season, the podcast team at HML is investigating fungi.

Does this mysterious kingdom hold the keys to a healthier future? Tune in this summer to find out and subscribe today!

Over the course of this season, we’ve told stories of iconic plastic objects like Tupperware and Bakelite and looked at how this material has woven itself into our culture and our bodies. We’ve traced how we found ourselves in the plastics age, but what comes next?

To help us envision the future plastics, we invited Pete Myers to speak with us in our first ever live taping of Trace Material. Pete is the founder and chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences (which publishes the famous Environmental Health News) and Adjunct Professor of Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University. Pete has decades of experience in the chemistry of plastics, particularly with a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors––a term he coined in the early 90s and explored in the best selling book he co-authored called “Our Stolen Future."

We know the 3 R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle) and explored the myth of plastics recycling in this season of the podcast. In this episode Pete makes his argument for a new set of R’s: rethink, redesign, reform.

Subscribe and listen to the episode on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Have you enjoyed this season? Let us know on Apple Podcasts 

Trace Material is a project of Parsons Healthy Materials Lab at The New School. It is hosted and produced by Ava Robinson and Burgess Brown. Our project director is Alison Mears, and our research assistant is Olivia Hamilton. Trace Material was made possible by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our theme music is Rainbow Road by Cardioid. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

We're looking back at the stories we've told on this season of Trace Material. How did we find ourselves living in the plastics age and where might we go from here? 

Be sure to go back and listen to any episodes you may have missed this season! For more information, head to our website at healthymaterialslab.org/podcast, or give us a follow on Instagram @healthymaterialslab and Twitter @parsons_HML. If you've been enjoying this season, please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

More than any other generation, Gen Z’s lives have been marked by climate change and climate anxiety.  In this episode of Trace Material, we speak to young climate activists to understand how they’re imagining a future away from plastics and a materials designer working to make that future a reality.

For more information, head to our website at healthymaterialslab.org/podcast, or give us a follow on Instagram @healthymaterialslab and Twitter @parsons_HML. If you've been enjoying this season, please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

The nation’s first plastic bag ban in Suffolk County, NY set off panic in the plastics industry. How did industry create the myth of recycling and squash potential bag bans?

We speak to Assemblyman Steve Englebright, who sponsored the bag ban in 1988, about the decades long fight to ban plastic bags in Suffolk County and the tactics used by the plastic industry to thwart these bans. Plus, Kara Napolitano from SIMS Municipal Recycling Facility in Brooklyn offers us a new way to think about plastics recycling.

For more information, head to our website at healthymaterialslab.org/podcast, or give us a follow on Instagram @healthymaterialslab and Twitter @parsons_HML. If you've been enjoying this season, please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

The push to promote disposable plastics created mountains of new waste that will never biodegrade. The burden of that waste has been placed almost entirely on the shoulders of low-income communities of color. 

This week, activists share a story of community opposition to the construction of a garbage incinerator in the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark during the 1980s, and their ongoing fight for environmental justice. 

For more information, head to our website at healthymaterialslab.org/podcast, or give us a follow on Instagram @healthymaterialslab and Twitter @parsons_HML. If you've been enjoying this season, please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

The connections between vinyl chloride and diseases like cancer were first understood inside the factory setting. Workers were quite literally on the frontline. But today we're taking you outside the factory walls and into fenceline communities and suburban homes.

For part one of this story, listen to The House of Documents.

For more information regarding PVC and vinyl chloride, head to our episode page.

In the 1970s, workers in PVC factories across the country began getting sick with a rare form of liver cancer.  While the plastics industry claimed they were unaware of what was causing that cancer, internal documents told a different story. Today we’re telling a story about corporate concealment, cancer, and of course, plastic. 

In post-war America everything that people touched––paint, fabric, dishes, jewelry––could be made of plastic. But how did this first generation living in a plastic world learn to accept it as part of their daily lives?

Our story starts at the turn of the twentieth century, when the natural materials everyday objects were made from were becoming scarce. Enter the era of the inventor, it was time to forge new materials and build a new world. 

Here's a first listen of Trace Material Season 2: Stories from the Plastics Age, coming your way June 16th! We were curious: what will future societies think of us when they dig up relics of our present day? 

This will be our last episode of Season 1. We’re taking a look back at all we’ve learned over the last 12 episodes. We’ve traced the story of hemp from its colonial roots in America, through the war on drugs, and legalization. The future of the plant is wide open. And we hope as we all build it together, the past can be reckoned with instead of being pushed aside in favor of profit.

In this episode, we’re heading to New Castle to see how the folks at DON are building a hemp industry from the ground up to support their vision of healthy, affordable, accessible housing. 

Alex Sparrow is repairing centuries old buildings across the UK, and in doing so, laying the groundwork for a carbon neutral future. As you may have guessed, he’s doing it with HempLime. Alex literally and figuratively wrote the book on HempLime construction and we were lucky enough to Talk Shopwith him.

Take a listen as Alex shares his wealth of experience from across the pond in the UK to help us understand what might be possible to grow the superstar HempLime material building industry right here in the US.

On this week’s episode, we’re heading back to the Sun Valley to Talk Shop with Blake Eagle. Blake is a contractor who, after years of exposure to the unhealthy materials of standard practice building, decided to construct Idaho’s first HempLime home for his family. Blake shared with us the benefits of building with HempLime and the difference living with it has made to him and his family.

This week we’re Talking Shop with Cameron McIntosh, the owner of hemp/lime construction company Americhanvre. Cameron is a leader in the emerging US HempLime landscape and in this episode, he chats with HML co-director Jonsara Ruth about how his past work with ceramics and working at a plant nursery led him to hemp. 

For our first ever Talking Shop episode, HML Director Alison Mears spoke with Hempitecture co-founder and CEO Mattie Mead.

Based in Ketchum, ID, Hempitecture built the United States’ first public use hemp building as well as many private residences. Along with his co-founder, Mattie was on the 2020 Forbes list of 30 under 30 in manufacturing and industry. Mattie and his partners at Hempitecture hosted the first US Hemp Building Summit in 2019. Listen now to hear his exciting and innovative take on building with hemp!

This episode features Chris Magwood, who is our neighbor to the North. He talks to us about the industry's successes and struggles and what he hopes for the future. But...we don't just talk about hemp, Chris is a natural building omnivore and you'll never be able to guess the other plants he uses to build houses!

In this episode we’ll drop in on a HempLime construction workshop that we at Healthy Materials Lab hosted alongside CoExist Building, a HempLime company from Pennsylvania. HML Directors Alison Mears and Jonsara Ruth will take us through the basics of building with hemp and we’ll pay a visit to CoExist’s farm in Blandon, Pennsylvania to hear about their hemp house on wheels. 

This episode we’re back in the Bluegrass State talking brass tacks with farmers who are dealing with the growing pains of a burgeoning hemp industry. We hear from the folks at Harrods Creek Farm in Goshen, Kentucky about the pitfalls and stumbling blocks they’ve encountered as they scale up an industrial hemp operation on their small farm.

In Episode 4, we turn to Winona LaDuke. Winona is a two-time Vice Presidential nominee, an internationally renowned environmentalist...and a hemp farmer.

With Winona's help, we’re backing up a little bit to look at the context of the American hemp boom. We know hemp has the potential to change our world, but what is it exactly about our world that needs to change? Part of what Winona thinks needs to change is our dependence on fossil fuels. Peter Hille, President the Mountain Association for Community and Economic Development would agree. He explains how extractive economies have ravaged Eastern Kentucky and lays out what a just transition for Appalachia will look like.

Is hemp legal to grow and sell everywhere in the United States? What exactly is CBD? And if hemp and marijuana are both cannabis, where does that leave “hemp’s illicit cousin?” In Episode 3, we tackle these questions and more as we wade through the murky water that hemp is in now.

Who’s responsible for the downfall of hemp? How could a plant that was proven to be so useful just up and vanish? We hear from cannabis historian Emily Dufton who helps us answer those questions and many more.

We’re going back in time to before hemp was considered controversial. To explain where we are today and why it’s such a hot button issue, we’re going to trace hemp’s history in the United States by looking back at the early American hemp economy. Who benefited and who suffered?

Trace Materialis a new podcast from Parsons Healthy Materials Lab exploring the intersection of our lives and the lives of the materials that surround us. Each season we dig into a material you might find in your home to discover what it can tell us about our history, our culture, and our bodies. In our first season, we’re exploring the miracle plant that is hemp. 

Music for this trailer is an adapted version of the song Greylock by Blue Dot Sessions, licensed under CC 4.0.