Hello, fellow podcast lovers,
As I write this, it is 111 degrees Fahrenheit, after having peaked at 112 in my area. My cat has refused to come out from the dark corner of my closet in a room with an aging A/C unit that is trying its best, but can only get my room down to 85. I've taken three cold showers and I'll probably take another five before you even read this paragraph.
The heatwave in the Pacific Northwest is unprecedented. Houses and buildings from before the late 2000s (or so) were built specifically to store heat for the cold and chilly months that made up most of the year, when summers didn't surface past a bearable 80. Rarely are there built-in A/C units, or even windows that are designed for them. The best our apartment had to offer was a ceiling fan with three speeds: stuttering, slothlike, and off. (Don't use ceiling fans in a heatwave y'all, it pushes hot air back down onto you).
It's no wonder that while I struggle through the highest temperatures I've ever experienced, even past the heatwave I lived through in France in 2010, that I've turned back to fiction books dealing with the climate crisis. The scene from Neal and Jarrod Shusterman's Dry where a young girl in drought-ridden California opens the faucet one day to discover no water comes out and it's not a fluke but just the way they have to live now, sticks in my craw as I watch the reservoirs dry up. The post-apocalyptic landscape of Rebecca Roanhorse's Trail of Lightning keeps making its cyclical rounds in my brain, making me think of the floods in Detroit when people abandoned their cars.
It's a little hard to not gag on the sensation that the climate crisis leaves on your tongue.
In deference to the heat and to the topics at the front of my mind, we'll just have a mini-essay today, talking about change podcasts and what we can do together, and a short list of fiction podcasts that grapple in some way with the ongoing climate crisis.
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WE DECLARE A CLIMATE CATEGORY
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On Earth Day of this year, the Australian-led initiative Podcasters Declare sent Apple an open letter demanding a climate category in the podcast category listing. It is high-time to make it easier for audiences to find the information they need about the worsening climate crisis and its impact on everything: our lives, our comedy, our politics, our families, our infrastructure--the list goes on. Apple didn't do anything about it. As of a few days ago on June 21, iHeart has become the first major podcast platform to create a climate category; not a spotlight that would go away in a few days, but a standing category.
Honestly, I'm as surprised as you.
What this sparked wasn't just anger about climate change and the collective corporate denial and reluctance to deal with it, but exhaustion over how dependent our podcast ecosystem is on Apple's decisions still. Still, now, in 2021, after Spotify has moved into podcasting with such brute force that it's hard to ignore in the listening statistics. (And Spotify's categories aren't anything to write home about either).
The reliance or dependence on industry-sanctioned categorization isn't podcasting's problem alone, though somewhat special in its structure. Just take a look at the literature industry, and the often-incorrectly-applied of young adult and adult, or the uproar that ensued when the category "new adult" was more widely introduced. Several traditional publishing houses took up to five or six years to accept it, after digital-first imprints had been raking in money via e-book sales. Categorization is always going to be a problem. It's a tool used by corporations in order to keep a stranglehold on their industries and gatekeep the creators and innovators who want to participate; it's a way to make sure they retain control over the industry in their own best interests. But categorization is also how marginalized folks find each other, or find themselves. Librarians and archivists rely on classification and taxonomies in order to best serve their populations and their work, to preserve knowledge for the future in order to build on it, and to not forget where we're coming from.
It's exhausting, especially when you work in a digital system that already provides the ability to cross-class artwork, between fiction and climate categories, for instance. It's a problem when our communities can't easily find resources to help guide us in our response to the climate crisis as individuals: where and when to put pressure on those in power, where to put our money for mutual aid and organizations fighting climate silence. We're already fighting with a lack of digital literacy, because this is not a skill taught in school nor widely available outside of prestigious academic institutions, privileged wealth statuses, or academic access.
There's layers to every issue, and the extra layer here is that alone, one person cannot change the catastrophe we are living in. But hopefully together, we can share enough stories, release enough data, and provide enough analyses that we can, in fact, change the world. This, a climate category in podcasting, is just one little piece of it. We need every piece in order to make dreams a reality.
You can sign the Podcasters Declare petition too.
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If you want to see more reviews, interviews, and other articles from me, you can support me at my Patreon, or at my ko-fi account for a one-time donation! You can also sign-up to talk about advertising in the newsletter.
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& tangentially climate change fiction too! This is not an exhaustive list, just a short list of favorites that I think you should check out. And I'm hoping to see more climate change audio fiction in the future, too!
Fun City
This actual-play Shadowrun podcast is set in a post-apocalyptic New York, one where the climate crisis hit its peak and drastically, irrevocably changed the landscape and society. One of the core concepts at the heart of its design is the idea that a future without talking about climate catastrophe is incomplete, but that there's no reason to not have hope or optimism. Rugnetta has stated, "[t]he fact that the entirety of the eastern seaboard isn't underwater signals in some way that, in the show, enough people were able to work together in order to make sure that that portion of the country wasn't completely submerged.” This, and the general attitude in Fun City's play design to have characters actually effect change on corporations, makes the world of Fun City feel a little less like imminent death, and more like something we could change.
Moonbase Theta, Out
In this futuristic sci-fi, climate change has been thoughtfully slid into the background, determining the choices of what cities are still standing and what places a resistance movement or two can actually hide within because of the flooding water levels. The reveal is slow burn, especially since the first season is all the singular voice of Roger, a communications officer on the last open moonbase during its final shutdown sequence. The steps that the production team, especially creator D.J. Sylvis, have taken in order to improve allyship and portrayal of real ongoing justice issues, are reflected not only in the script, but in the public-facing social accounts of the company.
Relativity
Recommended by D.J. Sylvis on their interview episode at Radio Drama Revival, Relativity's story constructs a world where climate catastrophes devastate the land over and over again in cycles. It takes place in space and at the Arecibo Observatory (rest in peace), where a man has been marooned out in space after his captain just walked out into space, and his contacts on Earth at the Observatory struggle to keep him alive while also keeping their own base operational. It's a gorgeous work, one that has won awards from places like the HearNow Festival, as well as been nominated for a Hugo. Character relationships and emotions are front and center here, even though we could get lost in the sci-fi and the futuristic portrayal of Earth; it's more important to talk about how we would deal with it.
Dispatch from the Desert Planet
The desert planet's 89.x1 radio station does its best to provide the real news in the façade of obedience to the government's propaganda in this far-future representation of what happens when humanity spreads across the stars. Climate justice is disabled, anti-racist justice, and it is necessary to consider what that looks like when we are imagining, planning, and designing the future. Creator Morgan Maxwell makes a good point about resources that is integral to the design and world-building of Dispatch: "How do people have what they have? How are they distributed? I can’t, no matter how utopic I could imagine things, I can’t really picture a world where we’ve solved that problem, right? Where everyone has all the resources they need, and that it’s still equitable..."
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Flash Forward’s Experimental Space Imagines Better Futures, for All of Us
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Wil Williams: Bo Burnham’s Inside begs for our parasocial awareness
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I'll be straight up with you, folks, it's been too hot for me to keep up with the news beyond "it's so fucking hot in the Pacific Northwest and that's bad here's why", so here is a photo of my cat, Persephone, who tried to get a podcast started at 2 AM yesterday.
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Did you come here from a link online, or get sent this by a friend?
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BY THE WAY,
Stay cool, stay dry, stay safe. Put your own oxygen mask on first, but then see if someone around you needs help with theirs.
If you'd like to ask me questions or comments, you can reply to this newsletter (it goes directly to my email!) or reach out to me on Twitter.
May your podcasts bring you joy,
Ely
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REVIEWS 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO
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