Trace Material

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.

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 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 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!

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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? 

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. 

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?

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.