GETTING CURIOUS | Are Dams Cute… Or Not So Cute? with Professor Heather Randell

Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness

Sony Music

Science, Self-improvement, Comedy, Education, Society & Culture

4.9 • 21.5K Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2021

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dams, what’s their story? Are they scenic sites? Harmful structures? This week, Professor Heather Randell and Jonathan go on a journey through dam history, ecology, and sociology. Listen in to learn about why dams are built; who they serve; and how they can cause displacement, change river ecology, and contribute to climate change. Heather Randell is an Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology and Demography at Penn State. She studies how dam construction affects local communities as well as the health and social impacts of climate change. You can follow her on Twitter @HeatherFRandell, and at www.heatherrandell.com Want to learn more about dams? Here are three short films worth checking out: Guardians of the River Belo Monte: After the Flood (2016) A River Runs Through Us And here’s a recent article from the New Yorker on the Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell. Transcripts for each episode are available at JonathanVanNess.com. Check out Getting Curious merch at PodSwag.com. Listen to more music from Quiñ by heading over to TheQuinCat.com. Jonathan is on Instagram and Twitter @JVN and @Jonathan.Vanness on Facebook. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Getting Curious, I'm Jonathan Vanes, and every week I sit down for a gorgeous conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.
0:10.0	On today's episode, I'm joined by Heather Randell, where I ask her,
0:14.2	Are dams cute or not so cute?
0:19.9	Welcome to getting curious.
0:21.0	This is Jonathan Van Ness.
0:22.1	I'm so excited for this episode, honey,
0:24.0	because I got questions.
0:25.9	Welcome to the show Heather Randell, who is a sociologist
0:29.2	and demographer at Penn State University,
0:32.0	and she specializes in dam-induced displacement.
0:36.8	Welcome, Heather.
0:38.4	Thank you.
0:39.0	I am so excited to be here and to talk dams today. Me too and you know here's the thing I am like I I love myself obviously but like I also realize that like I'm a little basic sometimes and I was raised in the 90s and when you were raised in the 90s in America
0:56.4	What I'm realizing in my 30s is is that most things that we thought were like really cool and fun when we were growing up are deeply
1:03.2	problematic so Olympics you name it my dreams keep getting crushed so here I was on
1:09.2	this road trip on my 21st birthday I was driving Las Vegas, drove by the Hoover DM.
1:15.2	The night before had been intense and I was just trying to make it to Vegas in one piece,
1:18.7	you know, which we loved.
1:19.7	But I saw the Hoover Dam and I was like, what is that?
1:22.8	So ever since I've been curious about DMs,
1:24.8	which leads me to my first question, what is a dam?
1:28.6	What is a dam?
	...

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