If I asked you to tell me the one issue that makes you feel the most pessimistic, what would it be?
I feel pretty confident saying that the most popular response — certainly one of the most popular responses, anyway — would be climate change.
But is climate despair really as tempting and reasonable as it seems?
The problem isn’t imaginary. Climate change is real and terrifying, but even if it’s as bad as the worst predictions suggest, do we gain anything by resigning ourselves to that fate? What effect might our despair have on our ability to act in the present?
Is our fatalism undercutting our capacity to tackle this problem?
On a recent episode of The Gray Area, I invited Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on to talk about how we might collectively address climate change without falling into despair or getting mired in false hope. She’s a marine biologist, a co-founder of the non-profit think tank Urban Ocean Lab, and the author of a new book called What If We Get it Right?
It’s a curated series of essays and poetry and conversations with a wide range of people who are all, in their own ways, trying to build a better future. And this is not a blindly optimistic book: The point isn’t that everything is fine. The point is that we have to act as though the future is a place we actually want to live in — not centuries into the distant future but now and in the decades to come.
According to Johnson, there are already many concrete climate solutions. If we were motivated by a belief in a better tomorrow — not a worse one — we would implement more of those solutions (and find new ones).
So, if you’re someone looking for inspiration, or reasons to feel hopeful — or, even better, for guidance on what to do and where to start — then this book, and this conversation with Johnson, is for you.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sean IllingYou’re a marine biologist, which I think is a standard top-five dream job for kids. Was that your gateway to environmentalism? Is that why you do this work?
Ayana Elizabeth JohnsonSuper common dream job — like many 5- to 10-year-olds are very into marine biology as a life path. But I was really just a kid who loved nature, which is honestly not very unique. How many kids like bugs and fireflies and shooting stars and octopuses and autumn leaves and all the rest of it? I was just like, “This all seems very cool.” That innate curiosity — that biophilia, as E.O. Wilson calls it, the magnificent entomologist — is just part of who we are as humans.
It’s normal to love the world. It’s less common to make that your job. But of course, once you fall in love with nature — whether it’s with one ecosystem or a few specific species — and you find out that it’s threatened, you’re like, “Wait a second, what are we doing about this? Is there a grown-up who’s already on top of this? Is this not sorted? Seems like we should protect forests and coral reefs and all the rest.”
My mom was cleaning out the closet and found these old school papers, and apparently I was writing the same essays since I was like 10 about nature being great and how we should protect it. So, it wasn’t always going to be the ocean. I wanted to become a park ranger at one point, an environmental lawyer at another. But the ocean seemed like it needed more advocates at the particular moment that I was thinking about graduate school.
Sean IllingYou open your book by saying that any time you tell people that you do climate work, they invariably ask, and I’m quoting you — “how fucked are we?” Well, Ayana, how fucked are we?
Ayana Elizabeth JohnsonWe’re pretty fucked, but there’s a lot we could do to have a better possible future. And I think it’s important to always hold both of those things together.
We have already changed the climate. We are already seeing the intense heat waves and floods and droughts and wildfires and hurricanes. All of that is already supercharged by our changed climate.
But there’s still so much we can do. We basically have the solutions we need. We’re just being really slow at deploying them, at implementing them. We already know how to transition to renewable energy and stop spewing fossil fuels. We know how to protect and restore ecosystems that are absorbing all this carbon. We know how to green buildings, insulate buildings, shift to better public transit, improve our food system — the solutions are all right there. My book has a reality check chapter where I lay out all the bad news, but that’s three pages. And then the rest of the book asks, what are we going to do about it?
Sean IllingThere’s no point anymore in talking about how to solve the problem of climate change, right? I mean, that ship has sailed. It’s all about adaptation now.
Ayana Elizabeth JohnsonYeah. I mean, the climate has already changed. There’s not a time machine back to before we put a completely mind-boggling amount of excess carbon into the atmosphere. Whether and how well we address the climate crisis determines the outcomes of life on Earth for all 8 million species and whether hundreds of millions of people live or die, and how well we all can live. So even though perfection is not an option, there’s such a wide range of possible futures, and we just need to make sure we get the best possible one.
Sean IllingThis is really about degrees of suffering and the consequences of specific choices we make — or won’t make, as it might be. The difference between temperature spikes of 2 and 4 degrees is the difference between lots of people living and dying. Right?
Ayana Elizabeth JohnsonIt’s easier for me to think about it in terms of the human body running a fever: the difference between you having a fever of 100 and 102 or 103 is a huge difference. And that’s the level of sensitivity to temperature that all species and ecosystems have. If we can prevent a half a degree of warming or a degree of warming, that actually makes a big difference. It’s worth the effort.
Sean IllingPeople like to use different words to describe the project ahead of us — words like “sustainability” or “revolution.” You like to use the word “transformation.” Why is that a better way to frame this?
Ayana Elizabeth JohnsonThe two words that I pair together are “possibility” and “transformation.” There’s this wide spectrum of possible futures. I’m not an optimist. I’m not particularly hopeful given human history because we don’t have a great track record of addressing collectively major challenges that we face. There are some important exceptions to that, but the sense of possibility really drives me because the future is not yet written. Like, what if we just wrote a better one than the trajectory that we’re on?
Sean IllingHow do we reshape and reimagine how we live on this planet and with each other? I can get excited about possibility and transformation — like, what kind of future do we want to create together?
Ayana Elizabeth JohnsonOkay, you can’t see me right now but I’m wiggling — I’m wiggling my fingers, gesturing with like, possibility, excitement, sparkles. I just feel like we need to be asking more big questions of ourselves and each other in this moment. We’re at this inflection point in human history. We either get our shit together or we don’t. And obviously I would like us to at least try.
Sean IllingBut you don’t like the word “sustainable,” right? You feel like that’s setting the bar too low?
Ayana Elizabeth JohnsonIt’s sort of just an everywhere word. It is useful — but it doesn’t have a lot of meaning. It’s very general. A useful analog I’ve heard is: If someone asked you how your marriage was going and you were like, “Eh, it’s sustainable,” I would probably say, “Well, okay, don’t want to trade lives with you.”
So, yes, I would say we should set a higher bar than sustainability, especially given that we’ve already degraded nature so much that I don’t want to just sustain what we have. I want to protect and restore.
Sean IllingA beautiful question you pose in your book is: What if climate adaptation is beautiful? So, let’s talk about that. What if climate adaptation is beautiful? What then? Is it rainbows and sunshine? What are the kind of things we have to look forward to?
Ayana Elizabeth JohnsonWell, I think we will always have rainbows and sunshine. That’s the good news. But imagine if we were just deliberate about building things that were aesthetically pleasing and durable and could be deconstructed and repurposed instead of demolishing things. Some cities and towns are now passing essentially deconstruction ordinances that say you have to take apart buildings instead of demolishing them, instead of just pulverizing everything and sending it to the landfill. You have to take it apart so the pieces can be reused like Legos, which seems obvious, almost like, “Why wouldn’t we always have been doing that?”
There are so many choices that we’re currently making that shape our societal trajectory. Every day, we are building a piece of the future, something that will be here in 10 years or a century or more. So let’s just be really thoughtful about all that and make it nice.
Sean IllingAre you encouraged by the direction of the climate movement as it stands at the moment? What are your major concerns?
Ayana Elizabeth JohnsonMy primary concern is that we’re just not moving fast enough, given that we have basically all the solutions that we need to begin to make a difference. It’s just incredibly frustrating how politics are holding us back.
I mean, in this country, there’s division between the two major parties about whether climate change exists and whether it’s something we should address, which is just so retrograde, I don’t even know where to start. And it’s especially frustrating because most Republican politicians are literally just pretending they don’t think it exists; they are fully aware that climate science is real, but it’s untenable politically for them to admit that. That’s a huge part of why we’re in this mess, as well as the fact that the fossil fuel lobby is ridiculously powerful in this country. And, you know, so many politicians are bought and paid for in one way or another, even though the fossil fuel industry doesn’t account for very many jobs.
Then you have the banking sector, which is funding all these fossil fuel corporations to continue expanding their extraction and infrastructure. Since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, 60 banks have provided 6.9 trillion in financing to fossil fuel companies. But the top four US banks alone, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, have provided almost $1.5 trillion to finance fossil fuel companies.
So, yeah, if you have your money in any of those banks, I would encourage you to do something like move your retirement savings to a place that does not make the problem worse.
Sean IllingWhat would be the difference between a Harris administration and another Trump administration? What are the stakes on the climate front?
Ayana Elizabeth JohnsonThe stakes are sky high. There are actually graphs projecting the difference in greenhouse gas emissions between the two.
It’s really remarkable because on one hand, you have Vice President Harris, who was the deciding vote in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest ever investment in climate solutions in world history. This Biden-Harris administration has created the American Climate Corps that has put tens of thousands of young people to work implementing climate solutions from reducing wildfire risk to installing solar panels to replanting wetlands. We have a loan program office in the Department of Energy that has hundreds of billions of dollars that they’re giving out to businesses that are figuring out this renewable energy transition. All of that could be completely wiped out, essentially on day one of a Trump administration.
And so on the other hand, you have in Trump a candidate who has offered to fossil fuel executives that if they donate $1 billion to his presidential campaign, he will basically do their bidding once he gets into the White House. That is how stark a difference this is.
Sean IllingThere’s part of the book where you write — I’m quoting again— “Fuck hope. What’s the strategy?” Do you feel like we, meaning all of us collectively, have a clear, concrete strategy for creating a better future in the face of climate change? Or are we going to keep doing what we’ve been doing?
Ayana Elizabeth JohnsonThis is where I think media, Hollywood, music, art, culture makers broadly matter so much. I cannot literally show you what the future could look like. I can talk about it. I can write about it. I can interview people about it. I can, as I did for this book, commission art about it.
But if it’s possible to go through our day-to-day and not encounter anything about climate, that’s a huge problem. Right now, climate coverage accounts for less than 1 percent of the minutes on major TV news stations; that’s actually gone down from recent years, so we’re going in the wrong direction.
If this is not part of our day-to-day exposure, then it’s just always on the back burner. There’s always something more important. And we’re thinking about climate as something separate from our other concerns, whereas it’s actually just the context within which everything else right now is playing out.
So there’s a chapter in the book called “I Dream of Climate RomComs,” where I interview producer Franklin Leonard, founder of The Blacklist out in Hollywood, and Adam McKay, filmmaker, writer, director, about the role of Hollywood in this. Because basically, to date, Hollywood has just shown us the apocalypse, the fire and brimstone, The Day After Tomorrow kind of stuff. And there are very few examples of not like utopian rose-colored glasses stuff, but like literally, what if we just used the solutions we had and projected that forward? What would that look like?
To hear the rest of Illing’s conversation with Johnson, listen to our latest episode on The Gray Area, available wherever you get your podcasts.
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