Life Raft

Apr 12 2024 12 ep. 25 mins 56
Life Raft Podcast artwork

Climate change is scary. Life Raft is not.

From WWNO, WRKF and PRX, comedian Lauren Malara and reporter Travis Lux explore your questions about living with climate change. How bad will the flooding get? Is it ever going to be too hot to live here? Have I had my last good oyster? We’ll tackle it all.

  Society & Culture
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Introducing: Sea Change

Apr 12 2024 40 mins  
Right now in the US, there is a GAS BOOM. A liquified natural gas boom — or LNG. The US produces the most LNG in the world. And the epicenter of this massive expansion? It’s here on the Gulf Coast. For the last year, we’ve traversed Louisiana trying to uncover what this growing LNG industry means for the state. But, after talking with everyone – from shrimpers to energy in

What If We Just...Made Our Houses Float?

Mar 09 2021 35 mins  
With flood risk increasing and flood insurance rates likely following suit, it seems like there's got to be a better way to tackle the challenge. For example: could we make our homes float when the water comes? This week we talk to an architect who has devoted her professional life to that question, and we visit a Louisiana community where some people have decided that it makes m

Could Flood Insurance Sink Us Before The Water Does?

Feb 23 2021 32 mins  
Everyone knows flood insurance isn’t the most exciting topic. What this episode presupposes is: maybe it should be? It’s not difficult to imagine a future in which climate change-fueled storms and floods depopulate our coastal communities. Generations of Louisianians have been moving northward for decades, after all. But could the rising cost of flood insurance actually drive

What Would It Take For Louisiana To Go Carbon Neutral By 2050?

Feb 09 2021 28 mins  
Gov. John Bel Edwards wants Louisiana to dramatically cut its emissions by 2050. What would it take to get there? This week on Life Raft, reporter Tegan Wendland breaks it down for us. We talk about where Louisiana’s emissions come from, what changes need to be made to reduce them and the hurdles standing in the way, and do a little imagining about what New Orleans might look li

How Much Can We Blame The 2020 Hurricane Season On Climate Change?

Jan 26 2021 20 mins  
The 2020 Hurricane Season was intense. It set all kinds of records: most named storms in a season,and most to rapidly intensify, among others. Five storms hit the Louisiana coast. How much of this can we chalk up to climate change, and how much has to do with normal weather patterns? What’s the link between hurricanes and climate change? This week on Life Raft we revisit interv

Bonus Episode: Confronting The Loss That Climate Change Promises

Jan 12 2021 20 mins  
Happy New Year, Life Raft listeners! We’re busy readying the second half of the Life Raft season, but we still wanted you to feast your ears on some climate content, so here’s a story for you. It’s all about our attachment to place in the face of climate change — our connection to the land, our ways of life, and how we emotionally process what it means for those places to

HumaNature: Afrovivalist

Dec 29 2020 17 mins  
Doomsday prepping seems more and more logical to us on the Life Raft team. Climate change-induced weather disasters are only getting worse, and it never hurts to be prepared, right? Today on the show we’re going to get a glimpse into the world of prepping through the eyes of Sharon Ross, who wanted to be prepared for anything, but later found herself the odd one out. This story

How Can I Reduce Flooding In My Neighborhood?

Dec 15 2020 25 mins  
When it rains, it pours. And when it pours, it floods. More and more, that appears to be the situation down South. In New Orleans, several big rain storms in recent years have turned streets into rivers and flooded homes and cars. This week on Life Raft: flooding. What can we do about it? We speak drop by a bar that regularly floods, get the latest science on climate-induced rai

So You’ve Got Climate Anxiety. Here’s What You Can Do With It.

Dec 01 2020 26 mins  
No matter where you fall on the eco-anxiety spectrum, on a scale from low-key stressed to lying up at night in a dread spiral, you could probably use some advice on doing something about it. Climate change can be scary, after all. We talk with science writer Britt Wray, who has been researching the overlap of mental health and climate change. She defines some terms, offers some ti

Have I Had My Last Good Oyster?

Nov 17 2020 31 mins  
Is climate change coming for oysters? This week on Life Raft we take a dive into the world of food. We drop by a famous New Orleans oyster bar, and visit with an oyster scientist to get a better feel for the ways a changing climate threatens oysters, and what’s being done to help ‘em out. Got a question you want us to explore? Send it to us! There’s a super simple form on ou