David Condos
Host, Up From DustDavid Condos is the host of the KCUR Studios podcast Up From Dust.
He currently works as KUER’s southern Utah reporter based in St. George, covering the dynamics shaping life in communities across the southern part of the state with a focus on environmental issues.
His reporting has earned several prestigious honors, including three National Edward R. Murrow awards, six Public Media Journalists Association awards and seven Regional Edward R. Murrow awards. His radio stories have also regularly aired on NPR’s national programs Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Here & Now.
Prior to joining KUER, Condos spent two and a half years covering rural Kansas for High Plains Public Radio and the Kansas News Service. He grew up in Nebraska, Colorado and Illinois and graduated from Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Email him at dcondos@kuer.org.
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A vast ocean of grass and wildflowers once covered one-third of North America. But that diverse prairie biome is collapsing, partly due to greenhouse gases and to our obsession with trees. Humans have unleashed an aggressive canopy that’s swallowing the Great Plains. For ranchers, saving the environment means being a tree killer — not a tree hugger.
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Humans opened a Pandora’s box by moving plants, animals and fungi around the planet where they didn’t live before. Some of those species become so successful in their new surroundings that they crowd out others. Come along on a hunt for rogue Bradford pears, meet the teens turning cityscapes into butterfly havens and learn how to turn invasive plants into delicious food.
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Trees are swallowing prairies. Bees are starving for food. Farmland is washing away in the rain. Humans broke the environment — but we can heal it, too. Up From Dust is a new podcast about the price of trying to shape the world around our needs, as seen from America’s breadbasket: Kansas. Hosts Celia Llopis-Jepsen and David Condos wander across prairies, farm fields and suburbia to find the folks who are finding less damaging, more sustainable ways to fix our generational mistakes. Coming soon from the Kansas News Service, KCUR Studios, and the NPR Network.
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Think of this year’s drought as a sort of dress rehearsal to consider the drier, hotter future that scientists predict climate change has in store. Long-lasting droughts could alter the way we live.
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Thanks to decades of conservation efforts, Hays has become the California of Kansas — a place where thinking about your water use is a way of life. For now, it’s an outlier. But as climate change brings drier, hotter weather to Kansas, more cities may have to follow a similar path.
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Drought is taking its toll on western Kansas cornfields this year. And all that dead corn could mean higher prices for products that depend on the state's grain supply, such as ethanol-infused gasoline and corn-fed beef.
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New research shows how increasingly intense solar flares could disrupt the GPS satellite connections that have made Kansas farms more efficient.
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How bad is the Kansas drought? Among the most severe in recorded history. But some other years were more extreme.
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For generations, scientists seeking to learn about prehistoric ocean life have flocked to a place that’s about as far from the ocean as you can get — dry, dusty western Kansas. What they’re finding could teach us both about life in the ancient world and about the future of life in a changing climate.
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As Kansans prepare to vote on the future of abortion, rural western Kansas offers a preview of what life with an abortion ban might eventually look like for the rest of the state.