Why Climate Anxiety Is My Word Of The Year
I also might explain why I came to the series Expectant, by Pippa Johnstone, in the middle of Summer '23
It seems likely that this year will be remembered as the *first* Summer of Climate Change. It’s not the first summer, by any stretch, to show what the effects of out-of-control carbon emissions have in store for our planet.
The sheer amount of evidence that streams through our daily channels, whilst also affecting our daily lives, is closing in fast.
Heat domes, 1000-year floods, massive wildfires, choking air quality, warming oceans. All these extreme weather events happening on multiple continents might be separate disasters, but piled together they might also finally compel more people to give collectively label it: climate change.
Personally, I have a slightly sick feeling in my gut. Back in June, I began to wear a mask again outdoors, because of bad air quality, not Covid. This summer I’ve been in touch with friends and family to make sure that her house wasn’t swept away (Vermont), that they evacuated from their city (Yellowknife), made it home safely from vacation (Maui), to make sure that Nona wasn’t melting (Italy).
That more or less covers half the planet right there.
If you’ve been reading Bingeworthy for a while, you’ll notice that I seek out climate stories
I covered Threshold Podcast, and then also Drilled. But this summer, I was craving something different. I went looking for a series that engaged with this idea of climate change so that I could put some brain effort towards it.
But I was also looking for a story that brought me inside my own thoughts, rather than something that made me feel angry and hopeless. I definitely was not looking for one of those stories that offers an optimistic spin at the end about how personal choices can make a difference.
And that landed me on a very different kind of series.
Expectant, by Pippa Johnstone, occupies a grey area
Officially, it’s fiction. Except that it’s not entirely fictional. It leans into the documentary space with real interviews and field tape.
The piece is highly sound-designed, with a range of creative elements: found sound, folly, sound effects and tape. Put together, it makes it all feel very real (sometimes a bit too real, as you hear someone throw up, you might also get the gag reflex as I did).
The subject matter is anything but fictional. It’s about a young woman who finds herself pregnant and has to make the very real decision about whether or not she can bring a child into this world, which is quite apparently falling apart.
I should also say, after I further reflected on this subject, that the question of what to do about a pregnancy, should the pregnant person not feel capable of continuing with the pregnancy for whatever reason, is an entirely privileged space to occupy.
In Canada where I live (and where the creator of the series, Pippa Johnstone also lives), choice is publicly available; abortion is legal. However, freedom of choice is not universal.
When Roe vs. Wade was overturned in June of 2022, various jurisdictions removed, or made it virtually impossible, for women to have the right to choose (which leads to a different sort of despair and anger, but I digress).
So why, during the summer when I’m really trying to read novels and spend as much time outdoors as I can, did I seek out a series that evokes not only the tricky subject of climate change, but also obliquely raises the issue of abortion?
It’s hard to explain. But I dove in. The episodes are spare and short. They are tight and clear, yet evocative and engaging. For some reason, engaging with these thoughts, via the surrogate unnamed female character, felt cathartic.
The concept of climate anxiety seems to be following me this year. Last winter I was brought into a teach a section of a class at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) about how to create a short podcast. Their term assignment was to tell a story, in the format of a short narrative podcast, on what their ecological awakening was, informed by the assignment reading Gen Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis, by Britt Wray. She’s a Stanford University researcher who focuses on climate change and mental health.
Maybe the elixir of this series for me is to listen to Other People’s Problems. The dilemma of having children is not on my mind. I already have children; they are teenagers now. But as I listened to Expectant, I realized that I would have been torn apart by this decision if I had to make it today.
All of this got me thinking about whether we listen to get lost inside a story, or to find ourselves inside the winding labyrinth of difficult subject matter.
I think I do some of both, with a measured dose of escape and entertainment as well. Except that so many of the subject matters of these narrative series available, and that I’m drawn to, are anything but easy and light.
As I prepared for our Zoom interview, I reflected on my leading question…could we resolve the cliffhanger that the series lands on…what was her final decision about what to do about the pregnancy?
But I was troubled by this question. Opening an interview with: So, did you have the child…[subtext, or get an abortion?] seemed a bit off to me. Maybe I could have looked more closely at the podcast app listing…
I’ve lived this moment before
In public school, I remember when a theatre troop came to share a story about the Underground Railroad; I asked where the actual train track route was. In my defense, the image of the railroad was extensive and believable. I have a vivid imagination am and often willing to believe audacious stories.
No wonder I’m drawn to narrative podcasts.
The following is an excerpt from a Zoom Interview with Pippa Johnstone. It has been edited for clarity and length.
Focus points of the interview:
How this project began as a theatre piece
How she got funded through an Arts granting organization, The Canada Council, for this project
How a dramaturge was used in this process
What lead, script or sound?
Technique: how Pippa made a scratch track of the whole show
How the script had sound notes embedded inside it
What is was really like to dive into this primal question.
[Samantha Hodder]: Well, first, congratulations! You made this. How long did it take you to make this project?
[Pippa Johnstone]: It had a few iterations. It actually started as a theatre documentary theatre piece, which is a discipline that doesn't get a lot of coverage.
Then because of the pandemic, and because my direction of imagining it changed, I decide: let's just make this a podcast! Which is also my bread and butter, so it felt like a natural fit.
It's not really fair to say that it took a year, but it probably took a year once I decided that I was going to make it a podcast; between really starting to work on it, and then putting it out into the world, is was just over one year.
I have a 9-5 job [at Pacific Content], but I like to do a side project to keep the artistic fever alive. But it was a lot of work to get that stuff done on the weekend….and [I had] a lot of tape to get through.
[SH]: I'm curious about the Canada Council [who is one of the funders of this project]. I know they fund institutions that do things like podcasts, but I haven't heard of them fund funding a podcast as a creative piece. Tell me about that.
Pippa Johnstone: I talked to all the granting bodies through the years…Toronto Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council…. If I wrote a play for a theater, I'm still the playwright, it still counts as my work.
But in media [like podcasts, for example], it didn't seem to have the same translation. So I feel like there's just a little bit of learning that has to happen in that space.
I already had a profile as a theatre artist with the Canada Council, so I actually applied for this craft as a theatre artist making a podcast. And because it's artistically minded, I think that maybe helped.
Over the years I have had those conversations where I've realized there's sort of a piece missing; a lot of people doing the same type of work as a theater artist, who are eligible for grants in the audio space, are ruled out because of the word podcast.
I applied for this as an audio play…or something like that…or as a documentary / audio hybrid. I don't think I used the word “podcast” in the application.
[SH]: Very interesting. Use the artistic terminology that [the Canada Council for the Arts] understands, because they don't see podcasting as an artistic endeavor. They see it as a commercial endeavor.
And on a practical pragmatic level, was the grant from the Canada Council able to fund the actual work that went into it? Was it able to pay the artists who worked their time, at least?
[PJ]: I got a specific grant that’s from production to execution. So I was able to fund things from February to June.
That means that my composer and my sound designer were able to be paid. The hosting costs for covered, I was able to make a small chunk. With a grant like this, you're really only allowed to fund the lead artist; pretty minimally, wiith no complaints. I didn't want to make money on it myself, but I did want to compensate the team.
It came at a moment when I really needed it, and it was really, really wonderful. You can't give yourself backpay for having written the script, you can't retroactively pay guests within that budget. So…one piece of the puzzle was definitely funded. And I'm so grateful for it.
[SH]: Let’s talk about the craft of this show.
Take me into the room with the sound designer and the composer. Did you storyboard it? Did you piece it out? Did you go by themes? How did you get to some of those little nuggets inside and translate that into a bigger space?
[PJ]: So I think when I brought them fully on board, I had a script. And then I did a rough cut of the voice but took me a really long time to get there.
I had a dramaturge who I worked with on the show, who's a really good friend of mine as well.
[SH]: What does a dramaturge do with you with the script? Explain that process.
[PJ]: Dramaturge gives beautiful notes, which is normally a project role that only exists in theatre.
I guess in podcasting we could call that a story editor.
She would read give notes I'd rewrite, read, give notes rewrite. At one point, we went away to a cottage, and I read it to her aloud, because you have to hear it because it's you know for audio. I think we just need to say stuff out loud for it to actually be a script. Then she gave notes on listening to it.
And we've just had lots and lots of conversations about story; this project was so much longer before, there were many gigantic cuts.
I like to make things really tight and curated. Hopefully, that came through the final product; it felt like it was pretty spare. It's really short, which I liked. Because I don't think anybody wants to sit with this for six hours. I certainly don't.
[SH]: Which came first the script or the sound? Or was it a bit of both?
[PJ]: It was it was a script, and then it response was sound. And then I would adapt the script.
I made a kind of a scratch track, we could say, of the whole show. And they [composer and sound designer] worked with that. And then I was like, okay, so this is wrong…let's change that.
I love the idea of embedding sound into the project itself. I wrote with the ear in mind.
And I wrote a lot of really aspirational things…like…is it possible for me to hear the violin here? But I want it to become a crying baby or something….and then they would just make magic happen.
[SH]: So you wrote that as notes in the script embedded? Or as a directional piece [in the script]?
[PJ]: Sometimes. And then sometimes they'd be like, Hey, here's a way better idea. So much better than my non-musical brain came up with.
For example, my sound designer Sean Cole said: “Did you know that the human ear can tell the difference between cold and hot water?”
I didn't know that. There's a certain scene that happens in the very beginning where I had to just gather the most authentic tape possible, which meant that I had to just hold microphones very precariously…if you know what I'm talking about.
[SH]: On a personal level, what was it like to dive down into this topic? It’s really gut-wrenching to pull yourself apart and ask yourself these eternal questions. How has it been coming out of it?
[PJ]: The process was grueling. It was so unpleasant at times, and like, and then so hopeful and so inspiring to get to talk to all these beautiful people who are thinking so deeply about this question for themselves and all the decisions that they've come to.
I was collecting tape over the course of enough time that people had had children who were walking by the time the podcast launched; the same ones who at the beginning [about having children].
So I don't know what that says about the podcasting process and how long it took me. Or just how long it really takes to gestate this type of question and try to put it out into the world because it felt sort of vulnerable in a lot of ways. It is quite a personal exploration.
It felt horrible sometimes. And it felt wonderful sometimes, and creatively and inspiring and awesome, to put all that anxiety somewhere, instead of just being destructive energy.
Or if you want to support this project in another way, you can buy me a coffee.