Castaway Mountain

Explicit content warning

09/05/21 • 37 min

Saumya Roy is a journalist and activist from Mumbai India who spent eight years writing: Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Waste Pickers of Mumbai. The book is so beautifully written, weaving together stories of how we can create something out of nothing with an examination of what it means to be human. The story centers on a family that lives on the slopes of Deonar waste mountain, the largest pile of trash in India. What emerges from talking to Ms Roy are stories of a shared humanity and struggle for dignity that we must harness if we are to avoid the worst of a climate uncertain future.

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Previous Episode

Grantchester

I grew up in this English village just outside the university town of Cambridge. Grantchester is surrounded by flat farmland. Along the narrow river Camb which connects Cambridge to Grantchester are the Meadows which for 800 years have been home to herds of cows and crowds of revelers. Just like the rest of the world Grantchester has changed. The village has had to withstand the loss of the school, the village shop and the Green Man pub. And yet, the glue that holds the community together still exists. The Parish Magazine, remaining pubs, orchard, barrel races, art classes, church and the networks of neighbors that banded together to help during the pandemic, show the evolution of community.

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Next Episode

Denny and Torm

We embark on an environmental justice tour of Richmond, CA with two Laotian community organizers. Before Torm Nompraseurt managed to escape Laos, 13 members of his family had been killed, the U.S. had dropped 50 million tons of bombs on his country, defoliated the forests with agent orange, and he had been displaced 6 times. Torm moved to Richmond, CA to pursue the American Dream only to discover more than 350 toxic hotspots. Torm’s journey mirrors the creation of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), where Denny Khamphanthong is the next generation of APEN organizer in Richmond. We visit with the Laotian community, see way too many toxic sites, talk about the struggles to afford to live in the community in which you were raised, understand the power of organizing everyday people and finish by seeing a soon to be opened youth climate resilience center called RYSE Commons!

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