'We're not here for doom and gloom': meet the hosts of climate change podcast How to Save a Planet
For a podcast about the climate crisis, there is a surprising amount of laughter in How to Save a Planet. Certainly, British listeners – maybe more accustomed to the sober, mournful tone Radio 4 brings to these issues – may feel startled by the sheer quantity of hilarity that the American presenters, Alex Blumberg and Dr Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, find in the subject. The show’s chattiness, and its decision to refer to listeners as “earthlings”, may grate a little to begin with, but it is worth persisting. Beneath the gossipy drivetime tone, this is a podcast of enormous ambition and seriousness, and one which promises to be fascinating.
The show’s determined sense of can-do optimism reflects the creators’ conviction that it is crucial not to depress listeners excessively if you want them to engage with this challenging subject. “We’re not just going to bum you out, that’s really important,” Blumberg says.
Anyone who writes or broadcasts about the climate crisis is familiar with the difficulty of conveying the urgency of the situation without triggering a profound sense of hopelessness, which prompts people to switch off – literally, in the case of a podcast. Blumberg, an award-winning radio journalist who has worked on This American Life and co-founded his own podcast company, Gimlet, has collaborated with Johnson, a marine biologist, to try to inspire an active response in listeners.
Blumberg’s involvement comes from a sense that despite this being the greatest challenge of our time, most people seem to be defeated by the enormity of it. “It’s an existential issue that requires a broad sort of collective action,” he says, and yet “it doesn’t really seem that many people are talking about it, the way they should”. This, he thinks, is partly because so much of the conversation has been about the problem and not about possible solutions.
Most reporting, Johnson adds, concludes that the planet is “totally screwed … The ice is melting, the world’s on fire, and scientists continue to show us this in new ways, with new levels of rigour and specificity. And this is important, because it’s critical for us to know what is at stake. But that leaves us with ‘OK, now what?’ kind of feelings. There’s been a lot of great reporting on climate, especially in the last few years, but it’s been kind of hard to connect with. It’s either like doom and gloom, or it’s so fluffy that it’s not going to get us where we need to go. So we were trying to find that sweet spot in the middle.”
This is the territory the podcast wants to inhabit, Blumberg explains. “In the US there’s a very small minority – like 10%, according to polling – of people who deny climate change, but that group has a way, way outsized voice, and because they’re so loud, people think it’s a much bigger group. A lot of media is focused on trying to convince that 10% that it is real and we should really pay attention to it. And then you’ve got a broad group of people who are just terrified already, but they don’t want to read another scary article, because they’re convinced already and they want to know: what can I do that isn’t just, like, recycle more,” he says. “This podcast will take it as a given that it’s happening, but will be asking: what do we as humanity do about it?”
They hope to create an army of activists out of listeners, helping them find a way to participate in planet-saving missions, such as (in episode one) accelerating the move from coal to wind. Shaming people about their carbon footprint has not worked, Johnson says; instead she hopes to help people participate in wider change. “One of the failings of the climate movement to date is that we have been asking everyone to do the same thing. We say: ‘Right, everyone, march! Everyone, donate! Everyone, lower your carbon footprint!’ As opposed to saying: ‘What are you good at? And how can you bring that to this wide array of solutions that are available to us? By showcasing different climate solutions every week, we’re really hoping that people will see something here that they connect with,” she says.
“We already have most of the solutions we need,” says Johnson. It’s just about how we’re going to get them done. We want to create a show that’s focused on solutions and helping people figure out how they can be part of the systems-level change as opposed to individual behaviour change. We need to change our energy system and our transportation system and our manufacturing and our buildings and our agriculture – we don’t just need people to ride their bikes more. And so we’re backing away from the ‘10 quick easiest lifestyle changes’ to saying: we need to change everything. There are people doing this work; we’ll talk to them and let’s figure out how we can all help.”
Before each show concludes, they return to the scientists and energy experts they have interviewed, and ask them to spell out exactly what steps listeners can take. At the end of the first episode, they call on subscribers to look out for and attend council meetings, and support applications for wind farms (pointing out that most members of the public who attend these meetings are local residents with nimbyish concerns about where sites should be). The podcast’s perspective is initially quite US-centric, but the struggles between residents, politicians and energy firms are global.
Throughout the first couple of episodes, Johnson and Blumberg are constantly laughing, trying not to take themselves too seriously. Johnson says she often “gets accused of being optimistic and hopeful”, despite being someone who has dedicated her career to marine biology and “studying an ecosystem that is almost certainly not going to make it”. “The truth is that I’m just a joyful person who understands the science. We certainly take the climate crisis seriously because we know how long the odds are. That doesn’t mean I have to be miserable on a moment-to-moment basis,” she says. Occasionally, though, the reporting for the series reduced both co-presenters to tears – so frequently in an episode about the European Green Deal that editors had to cut some of the segments. “I think I cried three times in that episode and we were like: that’s too many,” she says.
The emotive conversations seem likely to continue. One forthcoming episode asks what the climate movement can learn from Black Lives Matter. (Johnson recently wrote in Time magazine that “We can’t solve the climate crisis without people of colour, but we could probably solve it without racists.”)
The presenters say this is an open-ended series, and Johnson is keen to stick with it. “It is a weekly show – until the job is done.”
How to Save a Planet from Gimlet and Spotify launches on 20 August
