Capitalism is relentless in putting a price on everything. So why does it so often fail to value the things we need most: clean air, a stable climate, healthy oceans, and the unpaid work of caregivers?

This week, political theorist Alyssa Battistoni joins us to discuss her new book, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton University Press). Early economists marveled at nature’s “gratuitous gifts.” Today, economists try to price everything from a single whale to the entire planet. Alyssa argues that the long fight over whether to put a price on nature misses something more basic: most of nature isn’t priced at all, and it’s being destroyed anyway.

Along the way, we cover a smoky chimney that inspired arguably the most important economic concept of the 20th century, a glass replica of Earth in the Arizona desert that ran short of air, and what Costa Rica figured out about protecting forests that carbon markets haven’t.

🌐 Full episode page, transcript, and resources: talkingtrashpod.com

📱 Follow us:

Instagram: @_talkingtrashpod

TikTok: @talkingtrashpod

YouTube: @talkingtrashpod

CREDITS:

Host & Show Creator: Matt King

Art Director: Frances Miller

Philadelphia has been trying to solve its trash problem for decades. The city's answers have included hundreds of surveillance cameras mounted on telephone poles; 200-year-old sewers still catching what washes off the street; and, once, a ship sent out to sea with 14,000 tons of incinerator ash to find a country that would take it.

The nonfiction film In Excess traces Philly's waste across time and space, above ground and below — through streets, sewers, a pumping station, a construction waste facility, and small rooms full of monitors and paperwork. The film is also built, to a remarkable degree, out of footage and sound other filmmakers would have thrown away.

In this episode, we hear from director Melissa Langer; archival producer Caitlin Riggsbee, who tracked down forgotten VHS tapes in a Greenpeace basement; and the sound team of Jonathan Snipes and Christopher Fleeger, who recorded in the city's grittiest corners. Together they trace where a city's waste goes, who is paid to handle it, how a sewer grate became the film's musical theme, and why the film resists the conventions of the "environmental documentary."

🌐 Full episode page, transcript, and resources: talkingtrashpod.com

🎬 Watch In Excess and hear an extended cut of this conversation: videostoreage.com

📱 Follow us:

Instagram: @_talkingtrashpod

TikTok: @talkingtrashpod

YouTube: @talkingtrashpod

CREDITS:

Host & Show Creator: Matt King

Art Director: Frances Miller

In 2018, Jessica Oublié left Paris and moved to her family’s home in Guadeloupe. Days later, she learned the island was contaminated by chlordecone — a pesticide used on banana plantations that will linger in the soil for an estimated 700 years. Today, roughly 90% of adults on the islands carry traces of the pesticide in their blood. The islands have among the highest prostate cancer rates in the world. And no one has been held accountable.

Jessica spent the next few years conducting over 130 interviews, tracing how the chemical got there — from the factory floors of Virginia, where it was first manufactured and banned, to the banana fields of the Caribbean, where France kept authorizing its use for decades. The result is Toxic Tropics: A Horror Story of Environmental Injustice, a work of comics journalism that blends documentary investigation with illustration and photography. The English translation, by Irène Vázquez, is out now from Street Noise Books.

In this episode, Jessica walks us through what it's like to live on poisoned land, why she chose the graphic novel form to tell this story, and what would happen to the price of a banana if it reflected the true ecological damage behind it.

🎧 New episodes every other week.

🌐 Full episode page, transcript, and resources: talkingtrashpod.com

📱 Follow us:

Instagram: @_talkingtrashpod

TikTok: @talkingtrashpod

YouTube: @talkingtrashpod

CREDITS:

Host & Show Creator: Matt King

Art Director: Frances Miller