Season 1, Episode 1

Yellowstone National Park is where we saved the American bison from extinction. But each year, we slaughter hundreds of animals from this prized herd. Why?

Season 1, Episode 2

How did we go from more than 50 million wild bison in the United States to just 23 free-roaming animals today? And how does the decimation of the herds relate to the oppression of Native Americans?

Season 1, Episode 3

Many cattle ranchers view wild bison as a threat to their livelihoods. But some think cattle and bison can coexist. In this episode, you'll meet two cattle ranchers with different perspectives on wild bison.

We'll also take you on a controversial bison hunt happening at the boundary of Yellowstone National Park.

Season 1, Episode 4

In episode four, we meet Robbie Magnan of the Fort Peck Tribes. He believes his community can prosper in the future by reconnecting with their roots as the Tatanka Oyate, the buffalo people.

Magnan has built a quarantine facility that could be an alternative to the Yellowstone bison slaughter, but right now it sits empty while more than a thousand bison are being killed from the herd every year. Why? We'll learn more about Magnan's vision for bison restoration, and investigate why some people are opposed to it.

Season 1, Episode 5

In 1908, the National Bison Range was created by carving 18,000 acres out of Montana's Flathead Reservation. Now, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says it is willing to transfer the land back to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. But a lawsuit has been filed to stop the proposed transfer. In this episode we meet tribal members who feel they are the rightful stewards of the land and the historic bison herd, and others who are trying to stop the transfer.

Season 1, Episode 6

In this episode we travel to the American Prairie Reserve - a conservation project in the heart of Montana that could eventually be home to 10,000 bison. The vision is to stitch together 3.5 million acres of public and private lands to form the largest wildlife park in the lower 48. But some nearby ranchers feel the push to build the APR is pushing them off their land, and they're mounting a resistance.

We also try to solve the Great Elk Mystery: why are elk that have been exposed to brucellosis allowed to roam free in Montana, while bison are not?

Season 1, Episode 7

In the last episode of season one, we travel to the Blackfeet Nation and the Oakland Zoo, and we return to Gardiner, Montana, to we meet some of the only people in America who are growing up with wild bison.

We also tackle some of the big questions driving this whole investigation: what is our future with this animal? How does that connect with our history? Can America ever have wild, free-roaming bison again? Should we try? Why, or why not?

Season 2, Episode 1

In Shishmaref, Alaska, no one’s asking if climate change is real. What they want to know is how bad it has to get before the world decides to act.

Season 2, Episode 2

When a major storm hit Shishmaref, Alaska in 2005, the town became a poster child for climate change in the Arctic. Dramatic pictures of houses falling into the sea showed up in news outlets around the world. But the story here starts way before that storm.

Season 2, Episode 3

All across the Arctic, frozen soil is thawing out. A lot of stuff is buried there – plants and animals that lived more than 10,000 years ago. What happens when a Paleolithic bison bone starts to decompose for the first time? And what does that have to do with climate change?

Season 2, Episode 4

An eight-ton concrete ball and a 32,000-year-old needle collection. What's all this got to do with the climate change in Arctic? Find out on this episode of Threshold.

Season 2, Episode 5

Everyone's heard of Vikings – their daring North Atlantic voyages, their mysterious runes. But there's another ancient culture in Arctic Scandinavia that's much older, and just as fascinating – the Sámi. While the Vikings have been celebrated, Sámi music, language and traditions were forced underground. Why?

Season 2, Episode 6

After thousands of years of tradition, a shifting climate is forcing changes in the way Sámi families herd reindeer. But some climate solutions are also threatening their way of life. This is the story of the Aleksandersens, a Sámi reindeer herding family in northern Norway.

Season 2, Episode 7

If there's one thing everybody's heard about the Arctic, it's that sea ice is melting, and that's bad news. But what's less well-known is that some people see opportunity in sea ice loss. This time, take a seat in the captain's chair of a Finnish icebreaker, sing along with a very musical Alaskan mayor, and find out what it means when the world gets a whole new ocean.

Season 2, Episode 8

What happens when the thing you can’t live without in the short term is the same thing that threatens your very existence in the long term? That’s our question for this episode, viewed through the eyes of two whalers from Utqiagvik, Alaska.

Season 2, Episode 9

Russia has more land in the Arctic than any other nation. It's also a regime that does not tolerate dissent. What does this mean for residents of Murmansk, the Arctic's largest city?

Season 2, Episode 10

Half of the Arctic is in Russia, and half of Russia is in the Arctic. Oil, minerals, pollution — it's a web of complicated environmental stories that need to be told. But in Russia, investigative journalists have become an endangered species. Spend some time around a nickel smelter and meet a veteran journalist fighting to do his job.

Season 2, Episode 11

All across the Arctic, indigenous languages are on the decline. But in many communities, people are finding new ways to reclaim both language and culture. Join some Inuit rockers in northern Canada in the recording studio, singing in their own language and making their first new studio album in more than 30 years.

Season 2, Episode 12

The Greenland ice sheet is basically a giant ice cube the size of Alaska. What happens when it melts? We spent five days camping out on the ice with a team of scientists who are trying to find out.

Season 2, Episode 13

Eighteen months of reporting. All eight Arctic countries. So many fascinating people. On the final episode of season two of Threshold, we pull back a little and try to see the big picture. Join us as we bust some myths, travel back in time in a Swedish forest, and search for road maps into the future.

Season 2, Extra 1

Take a trip through the Norwegian archipelago, meet workers in Norway’s tourism industry, and get a glimpse of some of the Arctic’s charismatic megafauna.

Season 2, Extra 2

We're following up on the story of a Sámi reindeer herding family in northern Norway – Risten and Reiulf Aleksandersen and their kids. As we learned in episode six, climate change is disrupting this family’s herding traditions. But over the last year, they’ve also been heavily impacted by a new wind farm that's going in on grazing grounds.

Season 2, Extra 3

What do "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice and "What Have You Done for Me Lately" by Janet Jackson have to do with the Arctic and climate change?

Find out in this season two special, which will take you on a journey into a permafrost tunnel near Fairbanks, Alaska. This tunnel is sort of a Paleo-museum, a network of human-made caves full of mammoth tusks, bison horns, and clumps of 20,000-year-old grass. All of which is frozen—for now.

Season 2, Extra 4

In the 1920s, Ada Blackjack, an Iñupiaq woman from Nome, Alaska, was recruited to tag along on an expedition to a remote chunk of land north of Siberia called Wrangel Island. Along with four men, seven sled dogs, and a cat, she set off in September of 1921. The trip was anticipated to last a year. But just about nothing on that trip went according to plan.

In this Threshold extra, we follow Ada’s journey, a tale that could have lots to teach us about our own time of isolation.

Season 2, Extra 5

The Greenland ice sheet is the second largest body of frozen water in the world, with the potential to raise sea levels by 23 feet if it melts.

In this Threshold extra, we’re talking with leading climate scientists and glaciologists about the cryosphere—all the things that are frozen in the Earth’s system: permafrost, sea ice, land ice, and snow. We take a close look at how two of its key elements have fared in 2020: the Greenland ice sheet and Arctic sea ice. Each of these components of the cryosphere has large and immediate impacts on our climate. And their fate will affect everything from health care to migration, national security, and what life might look like in a rapidly changing world.

Season 3, Episode 1

How did the largest wildlife refuge in the country come to be next door to the largest oil field in the country? And how did oil companies, the conservation movement, and indigenous communities each have a hand in shaping the disparate paths of these two “siblings?”

Season 3, Episode 2

For 40 years, the fight over drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has been waged mostly from afar, in Washington, D.C. But what would oil development mean to the people who live closest to the proposed drilling area?

Season 3, Episode 3

We continue our reporting from Kaktovik, Alaska—the only town within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—to find out how the conflict over drilling for oil in the refuge feels to the people who live there. The more we listened, the more we realized: the heart of the issue isn’t just over oil extraction and development, wilderness and wildlife. Whatever side people took, their focus is on their community, sovereignty, and survival.

Season 3, Episode 4

The Gwich’in have lived and hunted in the Refuge long before it was carved out as federal, protected land. Their territory spans a huge swath of northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada, and their health and culture depends on the Porcupine caribou herd—a group of animals 200,000 strong that calve on the area of the coastal plain slated for drilling.

In this two-part episode, spend time in Arctic Village, a community just over the southern border of the Refuge, and hear from the Gwich’in about what’s at stake for them as development looms in the 1002 area.

Season 3, Episode 5

When the debate over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge first emerged, most people had never heard of global warming. So over the last four decades, the controversies over oil in the Refuge and climate change evolved on different tracks.

Now, those tracks are intersecting. We dive into the resulting tensions and contradictions around oil and climate in this final episode of our miniseries on the Refuge.

Season 3, Extra 1

Last week, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge made headlines all over the world: the Trump administration finalized plans to open up this piece of remote, Alaskan wilderness to oil and gas development.

But what does this latest move in the decades-long battle over the future of ANWR really mean?

Season 3, Extra 2

The controversy over oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is at a critical point: a lease sale may be just days away, but lawsuits have piled up that could put a stop to that sale and put a wrench in the federal government’s efforts to open the refuge to drilling.

Season 3, Extra 3

After four decades of fighting, the lease sale for drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was held on January 6, 2021. Amy sat down with David Aaronovitch of The Times of London to talk about what happened at the lease sale for their podcast, “Stories of our Times.”

Season 4, Episode 4

The number of things at stake in the climate crisis do not fit inside one episode. It's hard to even fit them inside your mind.

In this episode, we look at how climate chaos could affect what’s happening out our own backdoors, our ability to meet our basic needs and live together in relative harmony. What do we stand to lose if we don’t act fast enough?

Season 4, Episode 2

A lyrical ode to the earth’s atmosphere.

Season 4, Episode 3

Britain was the first place in the world to go through what we now call the Industrial Revolution. In this episode, we explore the mass acceleration of nearly every process on earth that began in Britain in the 1700s and continues to this day, a multi-century fossil-fuel binge that knocked the climate out of whack.

Season 4, Episode 14

In many ways, the climate crisis is an identity crisis. As we reckon with the damage we’ve done, we’re being forced into a massive confrontation with the powers, limitations, and essential nature of our species. In this episode, we explore what we learn about ourselves from bonobos, the necessity of getting everyone on the planet in the same boat, and the power of stories to shape our future.

Season 4, Episode 5

We keep hearing (and saying) that solving climate change is really hard. But we actually know what we need to do—and have the technology to do it—right now.

In this episode, we look at some models for how we can realistically meet the 1.5C goal and get to net zero by 2050.

Season 4, Episode 6

Nearly a fifth of carbon emissions in the U.S. come from our homes. In this episode, we zoom in to look at what individuals can do to decarbonize their homes, from small town Livingston, Montana, to New York City.

Season 4, Episode 8

Steel is an essential component of the wind turbines, electric cars, and climate-friendly buildings we’ll need in a decarbonized world. But making steel requires mountains of coal. So we both really need steel and really need to stop making it the way we’re doing now.

We travel to Gary, Indiana in this episode, where we explore the costs and benefits of our industrial processes on people, communities, and the climate.

Season 4, Episode 9

For centuries, we have been willing to sacrifice places, ecosystems, and entire species for industries like steel. In this episode, we explore the intersection of racism, industrialization, and climate change in Gary, Indiana. Also Michael Jackson.

Season 4, Episode 10

Season 4, Episode 1

After decades of scientific study and political wrangling, the world has agreed—at least on paper—that 1.5°C of heating must be the upper limit of our impact on the climate system. How could something that sounds so small matter so much?

Season 4, Episode 7

In this episode, we pay a visit to two communities in Lagos, Nigeria, just a few miles apart, responding to climate change in very different ways.

Season 4, Episode 12

The UN climate talks, or COPs, are attempting the biggest, most complicated, highest-stakes group project humanity has ever known.

We continue our journey at COP26 in Glasgow to see what the process for organizing a social and economic revolution really looks like. What kind of collaboration does this kind of climate transformation require of all of us?

Season 4, Episode 11

The UN climate talks, or COPs, are many things: confusing, bureaucratic, inspiring, boring, infuriating, and exhilarating. They are also the only thing we’ve got to deal with climate change on a scale that matches the problem—that is to say, globally.

In this episode, we take you into the trenches of COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, to explore how the process of climate negotiation works and what’s at stake for every human on the planet.

Season 4, Episode 13

The climate crisis is not just a problem of carbon emissions: it's one of inequality. In our third and final episode about COP26, we follow the conflict over loss and damage, mitigation, and finance in the negotiating room. What is the fate of a Hail Mary pass for equity at COP26?

This episode contains strong language that may not be suitable for all listeners.