During World War II and throughout the Cold War, the Hanford Works in Eastern Washington produced plutonium for atomic weapons. The use of these weapons led to enormous loss of life in Japan, an arms race, and unprecedented levels of contamination of the landscape at home. Even today, the massive scale of the Hanford Site often overshadows the stories of the people who built it, worked there, and are cleaning it up. Join Steve Olson, author of The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age, and Michael Mays, director of the Hanford History Project, for a discussion of the stories of scientists, farmers, engineers, laborers, and bureaucrats they have uncovered.

How did Northwest land end up in a checkerboard of land use? Grants to the Northern Pacific Railroad in the 19th century set up a pattern of public and private lands that placed homesteads, towns, tree farms, and federal forest reserves intermingled with each other, all defined by railroad tracks. Join Charlie Raines, Director of the Sierra Club Cascade Checkerboard Project, as he shares newly created maps that show the pattern from Puget Sound to the Columbia River as it evolved over 150 years.