How WBUR's new fiction podcast engages kids in climate solutions

This is Up Next. I'm Tisiana Dearing. According to the state of Massachusetts, sea level is projected to be up as much as a foot over 2,000 levels by 2030. Midnight Rebellion is a new WBUR podcast set in an extreme version of this future. The podcast tells the story of 12-year-old Jewel Watts Green, who accidentally steps into her mom's time machine and into an unrecognizable Boston where floods and storms have destroyed the city. We call them ducks. Right, duck boats. I know those. Finally, something I understand. Yeah, the name's based on some extinct bird, I think. Wait, what? Ducks are extinct? But listeners can help give the story a different outcome because the podcast is interactive. Senior producer Dean Russell told us how this choose-your-own-adventure style lends itself to talking about climate change. I mean, what drives the whole choose-your-own part of this podcast is the idea of agency, right? If there is one thing that we struggle with, it is that feeling of control. It's that this problem feels too big for us to have any impact on whatsoever. And so to throw people into a story where every choice they make leads to a different outcome, you get to try the bad choices, you get to find the side quests, you get to learn as you go, that was the driving force of this whole thing. It's fictional, it's fun. Jewel is in the long tradition of girl detectives, right? You just hide in dumbwaiters and solve the mystery. It's all of that. But it's also very deeply rooted in science and research and information about climate change that you give to kids in a way that they can kind of get their minds around and hold on to. I am by profession a journalist. I usually write about science. And so to imagine the Midnight Rebellion's world, I went to reports by the Greater Boston Research Advisory Group and the IPCC and great environmental journalists like Bill McKibben. I relied on resources like that to get us to a Boston where the seas have risen 10 feet. 30% of the city is underwater and 50 days of the year we have extreme heat. And we also have a lot of solutions. There's a community of people who paint their roofs white with guano, but they paint their roofs white because it keeps the neighborhood cooler because of the albedo effect. All of these things... And that kind of neighborhood warming, for example, and experimentations with white paint on roofs, we're reporting on that now in real life in Boston. Yeah, and I think that is the hope here. There are plenty of people out there for good reason who are fatigued by the news about climate change. And so how do we work around that? How do we get us all motivated and pull us all into this great struggle that we have set before us? What do you hope for the kids who listen to Midnight Rebellion and choose their own adventures? Climate change is like every great epic challenge, right? Like Frodo didn't go to Mount Doom because he wanted to and Harry wasn't psyched to hang out with Voldemort. The Trilogy of the Ring and Harry Potter. Exactly. And so I hope that they see climate change as one of those epic challenges. Scary but not impossible to overcome. And through our actions, singular and collective, big changes are possible. Writer and senior producer for WBUR podcasts, Dean Russell. The Midnight Rebellion Part 1 is available wherever you listen to podcasts starting today, April 22nd. Dean, thank you. Thank you.