In the podcast Not Built for This, journalist Emmett FitzGerald covers the issue of climate change through the lens of design, in keeping with the overarching theme of 99% Invisible, which produced the miniseries. The show is one of 10 nominees for podcast of the year at the fifth annual Ambie Awards, set for March 31 at the McCormick Convention Center in Chicago. Says Christy Mirabal, The Podcast Academy chair, “Reaching the fifth anniversary of The Ambies is a celebration of the storytellers who push the boundaries of this art form. …as they continue to shape the future, one groundbreaking episode at a time.“
With catastrophic weather becoming the new normal of today and tomorrow in mind, FitzGerald spent months planning a podcast series that would show the everyday impact of climate change. He hoped the stories would demonstrate how the impacts from rising temperatures could happen to anyone and show up in more ways than just changes in the weather, including skyrocketing insurance premiums, a scarcity of affordable housing and more. And then, in the course of his reporting, his hometown of Montpelier, Vermont — which had been somewhat of a haven from climate disaster and had even welcomed refugees from other disasters — was hit with a devastating flood in July 2023 (pictured above).
“As I was beginning to work on this series, it became very personal,” FitzGerald says. “What I just kept bumping up against was the sense in which the built world, both in the physical landscapes that we inhabit but also the systems and the political realities that we’ve constructed for ourselves, are fundamentally not designed for the climatic realities that are coming,” he says.
Not Built for This is the fifth podcast series of SiriusXM’s 99% Invisible, a narrative podcast about how design shapes the world.
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In the series, FitzGerald devotes one episode to rising insurance premiums for housing in Florida because of increasing flood risks, and how the risk initially was underpriced in order to encourage development there. Another episode covers the shortage of affordable housing in Chico, California, as a result of wildfires that decimated surrounding communities. The last installment discusses the impacts of extreme heat in Phoenix on the human body, particularly on the unhoused population.
While the episodes include some hopeful stories and moments of humor, FitzGerald acknowledges that the subject matter is inherently heavy.
His thesis throughout the series was to be honest about how difficult it is for anyone to adapt to this new reality, especially when it means choosing to uproot one’s own family from one’s home and community, even if that’s the safest choice.
“We fundamentally need to remake our world to be more compatible with the one that we’re actually living in,” he notes. “We’re just in a moment of intense friction and intense disruption, where that incompatibility is just beginning to show itself.”
Nature has done its part to keep the topic in the headlines. A few weeks after the podcast was released, Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina, and a few months after that, wildfires tore through Los Angeles, which thrust the issues at the core of FitzGerald’s reporting into the mainstream.
“We’re only at the beginning of this,” FitzGerald notes, “and that is a really sobering and daunting thought when you witness something that feels like it should be the worst of your lifetime.”
After reporting on the topic for years, FitzGerald says he doesn’t want to sugarcoat the impacts of climate change. But he does see reason for hope, particularly after what he witnessed in the aftermath of the flood in Montpelier. Residents held forums on how to rebuild the community to better prepare for future floods and other impacts from climate change, with suggestions as ambitious as relocating the entire downtown to higher ground. For now, the town is starting small by moving utilities from basements onto the upper floors, which FitzGerald says is a start to recognizing the current reality.
“When you spend a lot of time with people who are going through this stuff, you find hope in people’s individual resilience and collective resilience,” he says. But, he adds, “there are limits to that. You can’t expect people to keep bouncing back again and again and again.”
This story appeared in the March 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.