Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on making climate action cool

Climate leader Ayana Elizabeth Johnson reflects on this moment of the climate movement and why climate action should be fun.

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  Hey, it's Flora and you're listening to Science Friday. Today, we are bringing you a conversation we had during a live onstage event produced by the media organization GRIST. I sat down with Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, one of the most prominent voices in the climate movement. She's a marine biologist by training, but as she saw the effects of climate change intensify, she's taken on more public-facing advocacy work. And her work is expansive. She helped organize the March for Science, she founded a think tank focused on coastal cities, she started two podcasts about climate solutions, and she's published a couple of books, including most recently, What If We Get It Right?

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  So today, I'm excited to share that conversation, exploring the state of the climate movement, climate solutions, and Ayana's path. Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, welcome to Science Friday.

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  I'm so pleased to be here. I love science, I love Fridays. I love the radio.

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  And our show. So I know that solutions are your jam. Are you a glass-half-full kind of person?

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  No.

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  Really?

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  No. It's, I find it to be like very disconcerting and also sort of hilarious that everyone assumes I'm an optimist.

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  Your book's called What If We Get It Right?

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  It's a question. It's like a huge question mark. I love that we have climate solutions. We have so many that are like ready to deploy, ready to implement in every city, in every town, in every rural area across the world, in the oceans, forests, agriculture, buildings, transportation. We have so many solutions. Will we implement them quickly enough to address the crisis that we face? I have no idea. Right? There's so many political headwinds, there's so much entrenched interests and lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry and our frickin' government, Congress, the Republican Party

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  is the party of climate denial now, right? Our president says climate change is a hoax, right? So there's no reason to assume that we're gonna get it right. But there is a possibility that we could get it more right than it would be if we did not bother to try, which is like the secret title of the book, which would not have become a bestseller. What if we get it as right as is still possible? Because, you know, species are already going extinct, the planet is already warmer, sea level is already rising, ice is already melting, right? We can't, we don't have a time machine among the things that we've invented to help address this crisis.

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  So I'm not an optimist. I'm not motivated by hope, but I am absolutely not a quitter. There's like a tenacity that's, I'm like, why would we not be trying to do this, especially on an issue where increments matter so much? The difference between one and a half and two degrees and three degrees Celsius of warming is hundreds of millions of lives.

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  So you went from being a sci, you are still a scientist, of course, but you were a scientist and then became, you know, a very public figure in the last-

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  It's so weird.

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  Is it weird?

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  I mean, you don't like, so when we first met, like in Gimlet, in podcast world, there were not video podcasts. People wouldn't like recognize you on the street if you had a podcast, right? And so, you know, and also like being a marine biologist and my first jobs were in like the federal bureaucracy at EPA and NOAA in the policy office, I thought that was gonna be my whole life. Like as a public servant or as like maybe a manager of some small team in a nonprofit, like I didn't have any of those ambitions. And so the whole thing is just like extremely weird to me that anyone knows who I am.

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  So how did you find yourself here? Like, was there a turning point for you?

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  2020 was this incredible confluence of events for all of us. But that was the year that I co-created How to Save a Planet podcast with Alex Blumberg. It's also the year my first book came out, All We Can Save. I was a surrogate for Elizabeth Warren's campaign and wrote the Blue New Deal with her policy team, thinking about how to put the ocean into federal climate policy. So it was that kind of a year. It was me too, meeting the climate crisis, meeting people in isolation wanting to be

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  in book clubs together, meeting Black Lives Matter. And so it was this perfect storm, so to speak, where like a black woman, climate policy nerd was like hitting, checking all the boxes. Like not something you could plan, you know?

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  Do you feel like you have a lot of responsibility now?

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  Yes and no. There are days when I feel like I have completed a lifetime's worth of work in my 46 years. Which is a weird thing to say, maybe, and I'm not like giving up or disappearing, but I don't actually feel a lot of pressure because I'm definitely doing my part, you know? And I think, so it's not like, and because I'm involved in so many different approaches to being useful, I don't feel like there's a specific expectation of me.

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  There's not like a clear progression of things that I'm supposed to be doing. It's just like keep being helpful and trying new ways to engage more people in climate solutions. And because there's no roadmap, I think there's actually less pressure. And I think it would be fine if I disappeared. The thing that I've been trying to do is just like leave enough breadcrumbs that anyone could like follow the trail, which we all know how that like fable works out, like the breadcrumbs get eaten and it doesn't work. But if you leave pebbles or whatever is the alternative, but yeah, this is, it's a complicated

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  one for me because I don't, I'm not like terribly interested in legacy and certainly not interested in fame. That is awful. I hate getting recognized in the street. I don't like taking selfies with strangers, being like, I'm like, I'm at the farmer's market for heirloom tomatoes, like we're just off duty.

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  Leave me alone.

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  You know? So, so yeah, this is, if there were a way to make, to do the things that I enjoy doing and have them be impactful without my face being associated with them, that would be the ideal.

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  Let's talk about what people get wrong about the climate conversation, and I want to do it in the format of, this is my hill. What is your hill? What's the hill you would die on?

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  I feel like it's more like a mountain range with multiple peaks. Definitely many things. The politics part is actually one, that like, that if you are not a super engaged climate voter, you're actually a [BLEEP] environmentalist. Because there are no perfect candidates, but we need the best one and then we need to push them once they're in office. We've seen through these two rounds of the Trump administration, what happens when you elect people who don't care, who do not care if we're breathing dirty air, who do not

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  care if we all get cancer, who want to sell off public lands to oil and gas mining, who want data centers everywhere, who don't care if they're powered by gas turbines in communities of color, right? But we've seen how much of a difference it makes when there's a thriving environmental movement pushing from the outside. We just get a lot more. I also really think that working on climate solutions should be fun.

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  Say more.

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  Climate change is terrible and depressing and deadly and all those things that we know. But working on the solutions could be delightful. Like there's no reason it has to be miserable to, I don't know, plant mangroves, install solar panels, fight for high-speed rail, build green roofs, anything you want to think of. Eat vegetables and ride your bike. Like it could all just be delightful. And I feel like we've done a really bad job of pitching that, that the, that the getting it, if we get it right, it's a better, nicer world to live in. It's not just sacrifice.

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  It's different, but a lot of that is like extremely good for our quality of life. And the work of getting there or as close to there as we can is just so gratifying. And my colleagues are awesome. I get to work with the best people. Climate people are actually cooler than you think, might be like another hill. There's many options for this.

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  Climate people are cooler than you think. I mean, I feel like that's a good tagline.

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  It's kind of a weak tagline. Like, we're not so bad.

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  Do you feel like we need more climate change in culture?

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  Yes. Oh my God, yes. This is actually the direction that my work is going in. So when I launched What If We Get It Right, two years ago in September, we did it at the Brooklyn Museum. And I co-hosted a climate variety show with Jason Sudeikis, actor from Ted Lasso. And we had magicians and musicians and comedians and climate scientists and activists and a supermodel wearing a heat pump costume. Because I was like, Cameron Russell, can you please help me make climate solutions sexy? And she was like, yes, I can.

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  And I feel like this, we need to do the work of welcoming people in and changing the status quo in culture. Like what are the celebrities that we look to doing? What are we seeing in films?

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  We need the rom-com.

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  We need the rom-com of like the hot shirtless solar installer and like the businesswoman coming home at the end of the day and she's like, what's happening on my roof?

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  Like that Diet Coke commercial.

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  Oh, yeah. All of that stuff, because like, these are actually very plausible scenarios that happen in the world.

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  Let's give it up for Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist and climate solutions expert. She's the co-founder of the Urban Ocean Lab and author of the book, What If We Get It Right? She also has a podcast by the very same name, which she hosts with Bill McKibben. Ayana, thank you so much for joining me today.

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  Oh, thank you for having me.

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  This was fun.

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  What a treat.

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  This conversation was brought to you live from New York City in collaboration with the media organization GRIST. Special thanks to Rachel Bowden and Lisa Juris Buchanan for working with us. This conversation was produced by Rasha Aridi with help from Charles Berquist. We'll catch you next time. I'm Flora Lichtman.