We believe the work happening inside universities should be a public good — not locked behind paywalls or buried in language no one wants to read. So we're sitting down with scholars to ask two questions: who are you in the academy, and how does your work show up in the world?
For episode one, we talk with Dr. Megan Fork, associate professor of biology at West Chester University and an ecosystem scientist who studies urban watersheds — and treats trash as data. Megan walks us through a massive study of single-use plastic bans across nine Pennsylvania watersheds: 18 months of sampling and nearly 16,000 individual pieces of trash. The surprising result? The bans show no measurable effect on the trash in local streams — and her explanation for why says as much about how communities are built as it does about plastic.
We get into what a watershed actually is (she scales it from the Delaware River all the way down to the roof of a house), why \"urban ecology\" is real science, and how a null result can be the most interesting finding of all. Then Megan makes the turn we're chasing on this show — from the academic self to the public one. For her, the public isn't only the person on the street; it's the borough councils, sustainability boards, and state legislators who turn research into policy. They also makes a pointed case that the guilt we're handed about personal recycling was manufactured by corporations to dodge their own responsibility.
If you've ever wondered whether your reusable bag is doing anything, why your groceries come wrapped in plastic no matter what you choose, or why a scientist would spend a career counting trash in a creek — this one's for you.
Links:
https://seanisdwelling.substack.com
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