The scope of Wondery’s Lawless Planet makes most true crime podcasts seem minor league. While the show has the traditional assortment of nefarious crimes that populate the genre – fraud, blackmail, kidnapping, murder – the scale of the damage is much graver. When crimes are committed at the expense of the planet, all eight billion of us are the victims. And in a dispiriting number of cases, the perpetrators not only go unpunished, they are the ones who are supposed to protect us.
Each episode of Lawless Planet – presented, co-written and co-produced by reporter Zach Goldbaum – tackles a different environmental scandal. Here’s a brief overview. There’s the story of an oil company boss who staged his own kidnapping in a bid to solve his financial woes. Then there’s the 2023 trail derailment at East Palestine, Ohio, which sent toxic chemicals spewing straight into the lungs of hundreds of townsfolk. The assassination of Chico Mendes, who was trying to save the Amazon rainforest. And a polygamist who spearheaded a billion-dollar biofuel scam.
The podcast spans industries and continents, and each episode presents a standalone tale. Nevertheless, the themes of greed, corruption, and a galling lack of accountability are rampant throughout the series.
Of course, it’s not news that oil companies and other polluters are destroying the environment with their shocking avarice. What makes Lawless Planet riveting and fresh is the care put into crafting the vivid details of every instalment; episodes often feel cinematic in tone.
This confident storytelling is underlined in the best episode of the series so far: the Ohio train derailment. In a sad twist, the same town had been the location for a train crash sequence in the Netflix film White Noise released just the year before, and many of the towns people had been extras. Fittingly, that episode plays out with the queasily gripping quality of a disaster movie, only without the relief of a grand, cathartic finale.
In fact, few of these stories really have endings. One major reason why most of the criminals of Lawless Planet have been able to get away with their crimes, is that we will not know the full measure of the destruction they’ve caused for years, decades even. In almost every case, the damage will outlive the perpetrator. The residents of East Palestine, Ohio – who cannot move away, because no-one will buy their houses – have no choice but to wait for the seemingly inevitable cancers and other illnesses to appear from the aftermath of the train derailment.
Even the rare ending that seems positive can be easily overturned. Following widespread protests, President Obama eventually stopped construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline. Donald Trump restarted it almost as soon as he began his first term in office. After the murder of the Amazon Rainforest campaigner Chico Mendes, the international outcry was so powerful that deforestation levels slowed by fifty percent. When Brazilian president and Trump acolyte Jair Bolsonaro (who we met in a past review) was elected, that progress was reversed. That any hope found in Lawless Planet is so fleeting should make it a deeply depressing listen.
Except it isn’t. Or, at least, the podcast has other qualities. A lot of that is down to Goldbaum, whose hosting style walks a tricky tonal tightrope, both respecting the awful gravity of the tales he’s telling, while injecting the show with an amusing, fittingly exasperated snark. A good example is Goldbaum marvelling at the fact that trains like the one that crashed into East Palestine haven’t had their braking systems updated since the Civil War: “We kept a brake system designed by people who wiped their asses with corn cobs!”.
Although the combination of carelessness, greed, and malevolence that has gotten the planet into such a sorry state is horrifying and infuriating, the podcast also dedicates time to the people who are putting their lives on the line for the ever-fading chance to make things better. Rather than sending us hurtling into the foetal position, this commitment to elevating the voices of the heroes of this battle, alongside Goldbaum’s stellar storytelling, helps to make Lawless Planet a thrilling, inspiring show … just one served up with a smidgen of existential despair.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd page.