The story behind 'The Midnight Rebellion,' WBUR's new interactive climate fiction podcast

Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from WBUR's daily morning newsletter, WBUR Today. If you like what you read and want it in your inbox, sign up here.

It’s Earth Day — and launch day for WBUR’s new climate fiction podcast! The Midnight Rebellion tells the story of a 12-year-old Joule Watts-Green, who accidentally time travels 100 years into the future to a dystopian Boston ravaged by climate change.

But there’s a unique twist to the podcast.

Similar to those old "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, listeners can shape the outcome. At the end of each episode, they will be asked to make a choice about what Joule should do to determine the path forward. In total, there are more than 80 different possible ways the story could go.

“Things like this don't exist, truly,” said Dean Russell, a senior producer for WBUR’s podcasts team and a co-creator of The Midnight Rebellion.

For launch day, we're turning over the start of today's newsletter to Dean's interview with WBUR Morning Edition host Tiziana Dearing about the making of the podcast and what led the team to this approach to covering climate change.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

Tiziana Dearing: How does being able to choose the actions that a kid takes lend itself to talking about climate and climate change?

Dean Russell: "What drives the whole 'Choose Your Own' part of this podcast is the idea of agency. I grew up on those 'Choose Your Own' books. And the best part of it was that you get to control what happens.

"One thing that we struggle with regarding climate change — or that a lot of us struggle with — 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."

TD: Where did this start? 

DR: "Several years ago, I had just got off doing a couple years of climate reporting, so reporting on climate disasters and public health. So like, the bleakest of the bleak.

"And then my boss, Ben Brock Johnson, came to me one day and he said, 'I think I really want to make a fun [“Choose Your Own” style] climate change podcast.' And I just remember thinking like, 'Oh, I feel bad for whoever has to produce that.' "

"We didn't know that it was going to be for kids. We didn't know it was going to be fiction. All of that came from that tiny seed of a thought, which was 'How do we make climate change fun?’ "

TD:  It's fictional. It's fun. It features Joule in the long tradition of girl detectives. 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. 

DR:  "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. We've got a seagull who is an endling.

" We also have a lot of solutions. There's a community of people who paint their roofs white,  because it keeps the neighborhood cooler because of the albedo effect.  That's the hope here, right? There are plenty of people out there, for good reason, who are fatigued by the news about climate change. I say that with a heavy heart as a journalist who reports mostly on science. It's just a fact that I have to accept. And so how do we work around that?"

TD:  What do you hope for the kids who listen to The Midnight Rebellion and choose their own adventures?

DR: " Climate change is like every great epic challenge. Frodo didn't go to Mount Doom because he wanted to, and Harry wasn't psyched to hang out with Voldemort.  We have awful things in our stories that we love. 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."

P.S.— You can subscribe to The Midnight Rebellion wherever you get your podcasts. But we also created a custom listening experience on our website for the series that will reveal different paths forward at the end of each chapter.