What’s at the Top of Your Stack?

Kristin Hayes, Daniel Raimi, and Margaret A. Walls

A recurring segment on Resources Radio is “Top of the Stack,” when podcast cohosts Daniel Raimi, Kristin Hayes, and Margaret Walls ask guests what is at the top of their literal or metaphorical reading stack. Podcast guests tend to recommend a diverse range of materials, whether seminal texts, novels, podcasts, blogs, movies, or other media that make their tall stacks wobble.

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

“It was published all the way back in 1962—and it’s often thought about as the seminal book that sparked a global environmental movement … It’s really insightful and quite inspirational to look back and see how, at the end of the day, one way or other, we are always grappling with the same issues. We will hopefully get food for thought but also hope, thinking that we did manage to solve environmental or climate crises in the past. Hopefully … we’ll be able to do that again with climate change.”

Stefano De Clara
Head of Secretariat, International Carbon Action Partnership

The Hungry Tide by Amitov Ghosh

“It is about a marine biologist who goes to this rural part of India, the Sundarbans, to find a rare species of dolphin. On her adventure, she meets up with two locals, a translator and a fisherman, and they go together through this very dangerous forest with crocodiles and tigers and tides that rise on a whim and with devastating consequences. It’s a really beautiful novel about people trying to live in an unstable environment, and there’s political tensions and interpersonal drama. It’s a lovely story about sustainability and also collapse.”

Hannah Druckenmiller
University Fellow, Resources for the Future
Assistant Professor, California Institute of Technology

The Big Dig podcast

“I’ve been listening to … [this] … nine-episode podcast produced by WGBH, a public media company in Boston, about the project to bury the Central Artery, which was formerly an elevated section of Interstate 93 that cut through downtown Boston. The project took roughly 25 years to plan and complete … The podcast producers look at the project as an embodiment of broader US cynicism about our inability to build large infrastructure projects. I think it’s an important listen for this time. It looks at the role of politics, communities, contractors, and personalities in the planning and execution of this massive public works project.”

Karen Palmer
Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future

A version of this article appeared in print in the Fall 2024 issue of Resources magazine.

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