Podcast Review: Life Raft

Life Raft Podcast

A CLIMATE CHANGE PODCAST THAT DOESN’T MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE DROWNING YOURSELF

By James Fox-Smith

As a topic of conversation, climate change tends to be a bit of a bummer. Whatever you believe about the causes, it’s hard to ignore the increasingly dramatic impacts that rising sea levels, intensifying storms, and coastal erosion are visiting upon our low-lying, flood-prone part of the world. So, it’s a pleasure to climb aboard Life Raft—a New Orleans-based environmental podcast that begins with a caveat: “Climate change is scary; Life Raft is not.” Created by the public radio stations WWNO and WRKF with support from the Public Radio Exchange, Life Raft delivers a food-and-music-fueled exploration of climate change in the Gulf South, with coastal reporter Travis Lux and New Orleans comedian Lauren Malara as your guides. With help from a cast of neighborhood activists, scientists, restaurateurs, and oyster fishermen, Lux and Malara pull on face masks and white shrimp boots and wade into the surface-level realities of living with climate change, with a beer-in-hand, whatcha-gonna-do attitude that will be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with the resilient spirit of storm-battered folks at home in their beloved South Louisiana.

In half-hour episodes that drop every two weeks, Lux and Malara answer listener questions that reflect New Orleanians’ specific concerns about, and solutions to, living with climate change. Blending black humor with science, oysters, and the occasional daiquiri, episodes explore topics from the existential (“Is It Ever Gonna Be Too Hot to Live Here?”), to the gastronomical (“Have I Had My Last Good Oyster?”) to the solution-based (“How Can I Reduce Flooding In My Own Neighborhood?”). Along the way we get to know enough New Orleans barmen, writers, doctors, and performers to remind us that, while climate change is too vast a topic for any one of us to understand fully, how we respond to it, personally and locally, is still entirely up to us.

liferaftpod.org