Scholars’ Circle – Safe drinking water delivery in US ; Floods and aftermath in Ellicott City, Maryland – July 20, 2025

Although Access to safe drinking water is a human right, millions of people in the United States do no have access to safe water. Lead in the pipes is the most well-known cause but there are many others. What can be done to fix the nation’s water delivery systems? What have we learned from the Flint case? [ dur: 34mins. ]

• Newsha Ajami is Chief Development Officer for Research at the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. She is the co-author of Building water resilience in the face of cascading wildfire risks and ​Infrastructure and the Digital Economy: Reinventing Our Role in the Design, Financing, and Governance of Essential Services for Society.


• Benjamin J. Pauli is Associate Professor of Social Science at the Department of Liberal Arts at Kettering University in Flint, Michigan. He is the author of Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis.

Segment 2: Why did Ellicott City flood not once, but twice in 22 months (July 2016, May 2018)? How can “once in a thousand years’ rainfalls happen so close to one another? How do cities respond to extreme weather? We speak with Ken Conca author of After the Floods: The Search for Resilience in Ellicott City.[ dur: 22mins. ]

• Dr. Ken Conca is Professor of environment, development, & health at American University. He is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Water Politics and Policy and his recent book After the Floods: The Search for Resilience in Ellicott City.

Music clip by Sam Cooke – Change is going to come

Poetry by Rachel Dillon – Dead whale can feed an entire ecosystem

This show was originally published Oct. 2023

This program is produced by Doug Becker, Maria Armoudian, Ankine Aghassian, and Sudd Dongre.