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

Trace Material is 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. 

Welcome to Trace Material, a new podcast from Parsons Healthy Materials Lab. HML Co-directors Alison Mears and Jonsara Ruth make the case for digging into the materials we surround ourselves with every day and introduce you to your hosts for season one.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.