Lytton Burns

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary

4.3 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2021

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The worst effects of climate change are often framed as a problem for the future. But for some, the worst has already happened. As world leaders prepare to gather in Glasgow to talk about how to bring down emissions, Assignment tells the story of three places which have been at the sharp end of extreme weather events. In June, the Canadian village of Lytton smashed national heat records three days running, reaching an astonishing 49.6 degrees Celsius. Then, it burned to the ground. This documentary, the first in the series, is a vivid portrayal of a place in the crosshairs of climate change, where people don’t just have to imagine the future. They’re now figuring out how to build it.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC World Service. I'm Neil Resell. The climate crisis isn't coming. It's here. Extreme weather
0:07.9	events are becoming the new normal across much of the globe, devastating lives and landscapes.
0:13.6	Over the next three weeks here on assignment, we'll be telling the story of three places that
0:18.0	have been at the sharp end of extreme weather. First, the Canadian village of Linn, population
0:24.9	250. We didn't want to be famous. Certainly didn't want to be famous for this.
0:33.8	Littinsits just below the Trans Canada Highway perched on the sign of a mountain that
0:38.2	slopes steeply down to a pair of huge rivers in British Columbia. Most people blast past the turnoff
0:44.4	into town. But Ross and Judith Earcart aren't most people. Almost 50 years ago, fresh out of college,
0:54.0	with the promise of a teaching job, they took the greyhound into Littins for the first time.
0:58.9	The bus pulls into the fan-winkel, motel, and goes, shhh. At 10.30 at night, and the door opens,
1:10.8	and you can feel the heat. Of course, everybody's outside is trying to get inside,
1:16.8	and we're inside trying to get off of the bus. And I tell you, Neil, without a word of a lie,
1:23.7	you'll never see this ever again. Getting on the bus, we're two people with bows and arrows in a
1:32.0	scabbard. Getting on the bus. We've never seen this ever before. And then we looked up
1:39.6	and these great big balls of tumbleweed were rolled in. I don't think our main street in
1:46.4	just the end. And Littins was very much towards outdoor cowboy life type stuff. It's a rough and
1:54.0	ready place. It's almost frontier. Right, right. Boots not shoes. Yeah. People have been living in and
2:02.0	around Littins for thousands of years. The indigenous and clopalmock people first called it
2:06.9	Comchean, a word that means where the rivers meet. White people gave it the name Littins after a
2:12.6	British colonial secretary in 1858. Around the time tens of thousands of Europeans, Americans,
2:19.0	and Chinese were here looking for gold and building the railways, but still run past.
2:25.3	Today, when you try and enter Littins, there's a big yellow sign at the entrance. It says,
	...

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