When Climate Meets Crime: What Climate-Themed Podcast Series Tell Us About Ourselves
For Earth Week: Ripple, from Western Sound, and Buried, from BBC4, both balance factual reporting with climate and environmental justice...but both also have elusive conclusions
It’s Earth Day next week, which is admittedly a bigger celebration in my own mind than the wider world. Sometimes I wonder why it’s not considered a bigger holiday, like MLK Day, Juneteenth, or Remembrance Day? But then I recant: a National holiday that doesn’t centre around a human, or group of humans, is not on the docket in North America any time soon.
I recalled my interview with Amy Westervelt last year, host of the long-running environment-themed podcast Drilled, when she shared her aha moment about how to tell environmental stories: leverage the true crime format and layer in a story about climate change. Drilled Season 1, from 2018, stands out to me as a masterclass in exactly how you take the best of a format to execute another type of story.
I learned early in my career that the balance of factual reporting with narrative conclusions is not an easy fit, especially in climate-focused stories.
But this century, it does appear that there is more ink and audio to cover our planet.
Audio journalism about the environment is an interesting mixed-bag
The concept lends itself well to highly niche topic-driven shows that speak to the environment in a mix of ways (here’s a list of 50 of them to get you started).
There are also a few mainstream titles, both now cancelled: How to Save A Planet, a Gimlet podcast that ran from 2020-2022, and BBC Earth, a highly-produced monthly series that focused on narrative themes that launched in 2018 and hasn’t reappeared since 2022.
There’s also a bucket of more interview-driven podcasts led by female leaders, Mothers of Invention, co-hosted by former Irish President Mary Robinson (shuttered in 2022) and the still-ongoing series co-hosted by former UN Chief Christiana Figueres, Outrage + Optimism.
But when it comes to narrative series about the environment, there are fewer to choose from.
It’s more difficult to find narrative series that squarely focus on the climate than interview, or topic-driven series. But after some digging, I have two recent examples of well-told, engaging and exciting narrative series about the environment to share with you today. And while they are both exceptional on many grounds, they both fall apart for me in the same place: the ending.
I feel like I might know why the endings fall apart; I’ll get to that a bit later. Read on…
1 - Ripple - from Western Sound and APM Studios
Part environmental caper, part climate actuality doomsday report, part good old-fashioned door-knocking journalism. For those who think they recall the largest oil spill in North America, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the Gulf Coast of Alabama in 2010, but can’t exactly remember all the horrid details, this series is here to remind you. Also, if it appears that you missed some of the facts, that was on purpose, potentially on behalf of both industry and government.
This series does a good job of marrying a journalist (Dan Leone) who is there for-reason (not because he’s a celebrity journalist who was jetted into the story to raise the profile, like Leo DiCaprio has done for enviro-docs). This detail matters because it lends credibility to the story which makes it both connecting and impactful, but doesn’t get overly hung-up on either point.
Leone is a journalist, here to tell us a story about a community that he’s not part of (the coast of Alabama). If I were to guess at his unspoken goal of this story, it would be that he hopes it will create impact and raise awareness about environmental tragedies such as this one—and how some of the choices that were made, in the name of science, were not only bogus, but potentially life-altering to both the clean-up workers, coastal residents and the ocean climate alike.
Leone tells us that he grew up in a working-class family where his dad worked long hours in construction, and whether or not this is related to his work, and what he was exposed to, he died of a rare cancer while in his 60s. Without hammering this point too frequently, his point is made; there are many layers of overlap with the folks implicated in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, because the working-class folks of Alabama, who might have been oilrig workers, clean-up workers (who were also fishermen), clusters of whom also seemed to develop rare cancers in the years that followed.
Officially, it’s hard to say this with accuracy: smoking and lifestyle choices have potentially interfered with many of their health outcomes, and thus science and medicine do not fully agree what, or whom, is to blame.
2 - Buried - from BBC 4
Buried was released in early 2023, hosted by Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor, produced for BBC4 by their production house Smoke Trail Productions. Ashby and Taylor are environmental journalists who are also married in ordinary life. This duo manage to infuse enough character and personality into the story to make it engaging without detracting from the bigger issues.
The story of Buried is based on a deathbed confessional tape from a trucker named Joe Ferguson. In a true Sherlock Holmes style, the pair pick apart clues and investigate the hidden meanings from the small amount of information that is passed on to them before Joe passed away, most of which centres around illegal dumping at a location near Londonderry in Northern Ireland, called Mobouy.
In the tape, Joe says three prophetic words: Dig it up. And the entire series is here to discover what he meant by that phrase, exactly and precisely. But, as they would discover, their metaphorical digging also showed potential evidence of a new mafia that has been formed in the UK that is wildly profiting off giant illegal dumps, such as Mobouy. Plus, they would also find troubling details about health risks, rare cancers and poor outcomes in communities adjacent to the illegal (and often hidden) dump sites.
But like all good mysteries, there’s much more to the story than it appears. Armed with only the clues from the dead man’s tape, the trail leads them to the final chapter…which is the potential discovery that this dump, and perhaps others, are hiding much more than just garbage and recyclables; that it holds asbestos, which has potentially begun to cause health problems downstream, now that groundwater and rivers are implicated.
Aside from the jolly banter of the hosts, perhaps my favourite part of this series is that unlike so many of its counterparts, the episodes are brief—just 15 minutes each—but yet they feel packed with information, told in an entertaining way. It proves that it can be done; tell a complex story, led by charismatic hosts, but still manage brevity.
As good as these series are, they both fail to deliver an ending
The last episode of Ripple outlines how that after the information was released about exactly what the chemical make up was of the substance that claimed to “clean up” the oil spill. Prior to the Deepwater Horizon spill was regulated by an antiquated environmental guideline that hadn’t been updated since 1994.
The crux of the issue is this: after the oil spill happened, a chemical substance called Corexit was used to clean up the oil. The problem was, the combination of oil plus Corexit was not tested. And now, many different poor health outcomes have been observed (read, cancer) over the last decade.
And this is where the David and Goliath archetype plays out in this story, when just one man named John Moss managed to sue BP Oil…and win. He appears to be the only person who was successful in getting a settlement from BP, and it was specifically because of his exposure to both oil, and Corexit.
The series is allowed to end on an upbeat: EPA has subsequently adapted their guidelines, to make sure that the combination of chemical agents and base ingredients need to be tested. This may, or may not, lead to better outcomes for accidental spills—but that statement is complicated and comes with a caveat, which is partly why it’s not the conclusion of the series.
Here’s how Leone concludes the series in Ripple: 8. The Nail, Feb 22, 2024
“My dad worked a lot of hours when I was young, and I always wondered what he was doing out there in that big, wide world. Turns out he was working his ass off on construction sites, exposing himself to all kinds of things that may or may not have given him cancer in his 60s.
So I'm going to leave you with the same message I wish I knew to say to my father when I was a child, and he came home smelling of germs, and placed the only pair of shoes he could afford in the basement to protect me.
Take care of yourself.”
Now let’s look at how Buried closes.
Again we have a series with huge allegations and wide-ranging implications that straddle health, politics and crime.
The deathbed tape of Joe offers the advice: ”dig it up,” which leads the investigative pair Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor on a treasure hunt of the worst kind. In the last episode we discover that it appears to be an illegal asbestos dump—which was already showed signs of toxic pollution among the nearby population. But their investigation also uncovers evidence that this entire industry is fueled by organized crime, illegal waste dumping, and potentially cancerous chemical leaching.
Here we have huge allegations, disastrous health outcomes and a coverup strategy, which add up to what could be a host of wide-ranging consequences.
And then here’s the conclusion in Episode 10 when they finally find another dump, not the Mobouy dump:
“And into this moment, maybe, where Joe wanted us to be all along.
…
I jump out of the car, and I'm scrabbling up a bank, looking at the place he has led me to, wondering, like we've done for years, is this what Joe knew?
But maybe his point was that we could be scrabbling, searching for secret waste, toxins, another buried crime almost anywhere, because it's everywhere, and we just choose not to see it. The note about the sign was right, and this is it. Beautiful area, a school, a church, people living here.
And yet again, a worry, a concern. What's Buried?”
Ripple closes with a personal note - “take care,” and then Buried closes with a rhetorical statement - “illegal dumps are anywhere, and everywhere.”
And as much as I actually enjoyed both of these series, I feel that the endings were lackluster.
But I know why these producers did this…and more broadly, why it bothers me. Because it could point to the wider reason why there aren’t more climate-themed series out there. And that is this: to arrive at a satisfying conclusion, one that befits the facts contained in the story and the overall story archetypes that govern them, might not be achievable. Ever.
Tackling the issue of climate inevitably requires coverage of a lot of science, both to explain the issue at hand and then also to uncover the other inevitable angle, which is that they measure human health outcomes, based on disease reporting and mortality rates.
These are both highly complex issues, and between accurately reporting science, according to scientists, and then also the lawyers who vet these scripts who might worry that the Errors and Ommissions insurance policy will not fully warranty against well-founded, evidence-based opinions.
And then there’s epidemiology, which we’ve all learned quite a bit about during these last few years. If Covid taught us anything, in terms of epidemiology, it’s that you need a lot of data to call something a thing. Like tens of millions of people getting infected quickly. That’s a pandemic, which allows you to call it out as something obvious. Short of that, science is clear that it’s more likely an isolated event, which could be based on coincidence.
Betwixt these different departments, it’s hard to form a conclusion that’s befitting of a story that has otherwise followed the Sherlock Holmes archetype, or to conclude that the door-knocking journalist has uncovered evidence of a new organized crime circuit, or even the seemingly obvious rare cancers in children who live nearby that has been correlated, based on personal stories and some sort of data.
There’s almost never enough data in a climate-themed story to form a strong conclusion. Perhaps if there was enough data, it wouldn’t make for a good story.
Narrative series that discuss climate (and often the associated health risks) are almost duty-bound to find a conclusion that supports the merits of the show, but not sequester the facts into a strong hard-hitting conclusion.
On the one hand, it’s okay to report the facts…but it’s another to assemble these facts into a conclusion.
As a result, they lean heavily into the personal, or the universal, to fulfill the obligation of concluding a story. And it’s tough to admit this, but that doesn’t always translate into a satisfying ending.
Here are two of the best enviro-themed series to discover, out of the vaults: