3 ways to fight climate change without getting overwhelmed (w/ Ayana Elizabeth Johnson)

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1:45You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and today on the show we have Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson. Now, Ayanna is someone who has completely changed the way that I think about the climate crisis. And that's not because she convinced me that it's not a big deal. It's also not because she convinced me that it is such a big deal that we are all completely doomed and there's no way to possibly do anything about it. No, what Ayanna has done for me is to get me to think about how much better and more incredible our world would be if we make the changes that we're going to need to make.

2:15So often I've thought about climate change and climate action as just preventing a bad thing from happening. But Ayanna really made me think about how it's also creating a good thing, that we could be transforming our lives and our societies and our cities and our world in a positive way, that we would be building a safer, cleaner, more connected world while also addressing these challenges. Ayanna's book is called What If We Get It Right, and it is a truly inspiring look at what climate action is necessary and what climate action could look like. But I'm actually getting ahead of myself. Let's start at the beginning.

2:49This is a clip from Ayanna's TED Talk about what we need to do and what it's going to take. People often ask me what they can do to help address the climate crisis. But what they usually mean is what's one quick, easy, simple thing they can do? Well, that particular ship has sailed. The climate challenge is gargantuan, thanks largely to fossil fuel executives and the PR firms and politicians doing their bidding. We need to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from electricity, transportation, agriculture, industry, and buildings. We need to protect and restore ecosystems. We need to change society, policy, economy, and culture.

3:34This is about transformation. And the stakes for humanity are greater than my heart and mind can fully fathom. So I find the best way to cope with this is to avoid dwelling on the terrifying scientific projections and instead pivot quickly to solutions. Now, the climate movement and the media all too often ask each of us to do the same things, to vote, protest, donate, spread the word, lower our carbon footprint. That term, by the way, carbon footprint, was popularized by fossil fuel corporations in an attempt to put the blame on us as individuals. But yes, it is good to do those things. I do those things.

4:21However, all too rarely are we asked to contribute our special talents, our superpowers to climate solutions. And what a failing, for that would actually enable the radical changes we need. So where do we each begin? We are going to try to answer that question and so many more in this conversation. Here's Ayanna. Hello, my name is Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson. I'm the author of the book, What If We Get It Right? First of all, I loved What If We Get It Right? My first question is, you know, they say not to judge a book by its cover, but I actually feel like this cover is really unique and very intentional.

5:03This does not have a cover that is like fancy, intimidating, I am an expert cover. Instead, it has like an artistic, mostly blank cover that kind of looks like a kid could color on it or something like that. So tell me about like the design choice that went into how you wanted this book to look and how you wanted people to approach it at first glance. This is an iteration of something I drew on the back of a napkin at an oyster bar. So I was intimately involved with the crafting of the cover and trying to design something that would be part of communicating the message of the book. So I'm glad you picked up on that.

5:41And the amount of white space is certainly intentional, too. Like you said, something a kid could pick up and color in. The idea is that when we're asking big questions like, what if we get it right? Visions of climate futures. It's an invitation to imagine. This book is not like, here's how we get it right. It's a question mark. And so I wanted to make sure there was enough blank space to invite people into that. There were many different iterations of the cover until we found the right designer to help us land this. And that same sense also of primary colors being an important way to go. Also, I'm a marine biologist, so the earth is like emphasizing oceans instead of land.

6:26Yes, that's true. So you talk about how you had like as a child, this dream that was first sparked when you saw through a glass bottom boat, a coral reef of becoming a marine biologist, which I think a lot of us had that dream. Right. Like I know that when I was in third and fourth grade, if you'd asked me, I would have said I will be a marine biologist because one time. Super common dream job. And it's so incredible. And then you have become a marine biologist. You kept the dream job. But the reason I ask that is you do this dream job that you had as a kid and that a lot of people had as a kid.

6:59But you also when you're thinking about policy and you're thinking about these really adult problems, you've talked about how one of the issues is that for a lot of us, we kind of mute our love of nature as we get older. We feel like that's something we have to lose a little bit. And for you, you've tried really hard to not mute the love of nature, to keep it just as intense and as powerful as when you were a kid and decided to do this in the first place. So I'm curious if you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I'm really grateful to the scientist E.O. Wilson for giving us a word for that, which is biophilia, that we have each of us, this innate love of life, of nature.

7:37I think that's important because why are we doing this if it's not for getting to live on this magnificent planet that has like ants and fireflies and shooting stars and forests and like rocky coastlines and octopuses and like just a bunch of cool stuff? Like I want to live on a living planet with a lot of cool other species and with humans too, I guess. I mean, it's just a question of like what motivates us, right? And for me, loving being a part of nature, loving ecosystems, feeling like I'm a part of an ecosystem is integral to that. And as you mentioned, this is a sensibility that can get muted as we age, that we lose as we get so caught up in our to-do lists and our inboxes and all of this stuff of modern life that we forget that we are one of 8 million plus species living on this planet.

8:37And that's on this rock hurtling through space. And so I think it helps to also ground ourselves and have a bit more humility about the context within which we're trying to solve these problems that humanity has also created for all these species. I feel like for me personally, maybe because I grew up in like a small apartment in New York City and we didn't have a yard. Obviously, there's parks and stuff. But because my main interactions with animals were rats and pigeons, now living in a place in Los Angeles where like a hummingbird just flies by or when you go to the beach and you see a dolphin jump out of the water.

9:16I am so shocked. I'm flabbergasted all the time when nature comes by in a way that I think a lot of other adults that I spend time with are like, yeah, that's actually kind of normal. And I always feel like this is not normal. This is unbelievable. And reading your book, I got the sense of like, it's good to believe that this is not normal. Like we want to keep this, that energy to. I think there's two sides of that, right? Like, it should be normal, because we should be interacting with nature regularly in such that it can always delight us, but it shouldn't surprise us that these things exist.

9:52In fact, there's a phenomenon called shifting baselines, which says that we have essentially lowered expectations for what abundance and diversity of life should be around us. And that is a problem. Because if we think like seeing one bee a year is normal and we get super excited about it, then we've actually lost touch with what a healthy ecosystem should look like, which means we're maybe setting our standards too low in terms of policy or restoration or protection as well. So having some sense of what nature would be if humans backed off is also really important. You talk in the book about how you hate to be asked about what makes you hopeful or what makes you optimistic, that that is a terrible thing to ask, especially when we're talking about climate change and climate futures.

10:42It's also presumptuous. That you are hopeful. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm not actually is the awkward answer to that, right? Like I am determined. I know that we have essentially all the solutions that we need. I know that there are ways I can be part of making those solutions happen in the world. But do I have like faith in humanity to get it together and implement all these solutions with the urgency that the climate crisis requires? Like I do not have this blind faith that it will all be okay in the end. and optimism, I'm like frequently tagged as an optimist just because I think there's stuff we could do to make the world better than it would otherwise be.

11:28But I don't actually assume that it's all going to be okay. So that part of the definition doesn't apply to me. Now, the alternative is to be like, whatever, it's all going to fall apart anyway, so I don't have to try. And I think that's absolute nonsense. like giving up on the future of life on earth honestly just seems dumb to me and and like who are all these quitters who are like oh well i guess it was nice to try to try living here on earth because i feel like there's never a point where you get to give up on the future and on each other and that's to me very very sad that's i think more and more people are just giving up And that's not part of my family history.

12:15That's not part of really any successful movement for change, right? Like I think back to the civil rights movement. And if people were just like, yeah, seems too hard to try to get rights, like let's just quit. That's not the viable way forward. So instead of thinking about having hope or not, if we just take the option of quitting off the table, then the question just becomes, what can I do to make things better than they would otherwise be? That finding like where we can each contribute is the question, not do I feel hopeful or optimistic, but like, what's my part of this work? You're a scientist, but you're really focused on practical ways that people can actually put this into place in their own lives.

13:00And one of those things that I know you do at your live events and is in the book is this idea of a climate action Venn diagram. Can you walk us through that? It's very simple. It's three circles overlapping. And the first circle is what are you good at? What are the skills, resources, networks, dollars that you can bring to the table? The second circle is what is the work that needs doing? So we have hundreds of climate and justice solutions we could be working on. So pick one or two. There's also that we need to change culture and politics, not just the technical solutions that people think of about solar panels and electric cars.

13:41And then there's what brings you joy. Because why would we choose to do something that makes us miserable when there's an endless number of things that need doing? And that's what will keep us going in this work is finding joy in it. Not like I sit around all day giggling while I answer emails. Not that kind of joy. But like these moments of like satisfaction, like it can be so gratifying to do this work. It can feel so good to be contributing to climate solutions. And people should be able to design their piece of this in a way that and for me, a big part of that is who I do this work with. Not just what I do, but who I do it with.

14:23So no jerks.

14:27we're going to take a short break and then we will be right back

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16:46And we're back. I come at this as a comedian from the world of comedy. And I find that like. The climate crisis is hilarious. You have and you have such a humor about it. Well, there are funny. You know what I do? I think it is in some ways. Right. I think I think it is in a bunch of different ways. One, I feel like we absolutely need to figure out how to take climate seriously without taking ourselves seriously. Like, this is my entire vibe. Like, homies, just stop being so serious about yourself because that's not helping us. So I feel like definitely more of this irreverence also, especially when we think about, like, who's causing the problem?

17:30Like, we didn't all equally cause this problem. We should absolutely be roasting fossil fuel companies, big ag executives, like PR executives, politicians who are like creating this fast track to hell for us all. And so I feel like there's some roasting to be done, some irreverence, some like plenty of room for goofiness in how we talk about and engage people in solutions. You know, and as you saw in the book, like lots of sassy footnotes for sure. And, you know, one of the things in a non-sassy footnote and just an interesting footnote in your book is you talk about the story of the peach crayon and how the color for the peach crayon used to be called flesh toned.

18:13And then as a result of civil rights pressure, the crayon color was changed to peach because that's actually not everyone's flesh tone. That's only some people's flesh tone. And it is peach color is the color that it actually is all the time. So and you use that as an example of how small changes in culture can lead to big cultural shifts and big policy shifts as well. Yeah, I mean, I brought that up because as I was trying to figure out how to write about my formative experiences with the ocean and nature, I was, the book opens with me describing seeing a coral reef for the first time and seeing these colors, right?

18:53These turquoise, teal, magenta, goldenrod, fuchsia colors in the form of fish swimming around. I was like, wait, what? Nature can do this? Like, tell me more. Also, maybe this is my job. But then also like thinking about that in the context of my own family, my black Jamaican father, my white Irish mother, and how like their relationship was essentially illegal in most states when they found each other. And how this, you know, this is also the lens through which I approach this work is just like who I am, right? I'm this biracial girl from Brooklyn, New York, who fell in love with the ocean in Florida, who was just like, and worms in my backyard, and autumn leaves, and all of it.

19:42There's a moment where you're having a conversation about the role that cultural change can play in climate futures with Franklin Leonard and Adam McKay, two people who are deeply involved and powerful in Hollywood. And they talk about the Scully effect, right? The idea that having a female scientist - X-Files. So I'm like, I'll take your word for it. Oh, but like having a strong female lead on the X-Files who was a scientist, that that actually inspired thousands or millions of women to go into science. This idea that cultural change precedes policy change is so important. It's something that people are familiar with when we think about, say, like gay marriage, how there are all these cultural touchstones, these sitcoms that just showed us that gay people, gay partnerships were normal.

20:31This was something that's happening. It's not a threat to anyone. And that those sorts of shifts in pop culture preceded certainly the Supreme Court being like, okay, you guys can get married now. And what does that kind of thing look like on climate? And we honestly like haven't had the cultural saturation that we would need from Hollywood, TV, music, art, showing us not just the climate problem, but climate solutions. And that was my motivation for creating this book, this what if we get it right, this visioning of climate futures. And then of course, realizing that I couldn't write the book myself, I had to talk to all my smart friends and all these different sectors.

21:13So the book is at its heart, these 20 interviews. And this one that you point to about the role of Hollywood was really interesting to me because Franklin and Adam are explaining how hard it is to get anything made in Hollywood. And that really, it's about like making the financial case, that people will watch it. And so how do you create climate content that people want to watch, but also not to fall into this trap that it hasn't been made before. So clearly, it couldn't be successful. And that's why it hasn't been made this sort of like circular logic. But the thing about that conversation that stuck with me the most is that they said, well, Hollywood can't get it right until the news gets it right.

22:01Because until the executives in Hollywood are seeing the kind of news that properly frames our climate challenge and starts to talk about the solutions, they're not going to bring that understanding and urgency into their decision making when they're thinking about which projects to green light. And so it was based on that conversation with them that I went back and added another interview to the book with a climate journalist, Kendra Pierre-Lewis, who's, you know, worked at the New York Times and Spotify and Bloomberg and all these different places, popular science, about like, what, how would newsrooms have to change?

22:39Like, if newsrooms have to get right for Hollywood to get it right, like, what does that look like? And And so this book was really a process of me sort of following my nose and talking to all of these incredible people that I get to collaborate with. Part of that joy, part of my Venn diagram and offering packaging up their wisdom for everyone else. So in a way, this book is like a 20 episode podcast season because the audio book, you can hear everything in their own voices. Even for a lot of people who are kind of bought in, like I would consider myself to be someone who like I believe the science.

23:16I care about climate change. I care about the future. But before reading your book and before engaging with your work, I actually don't think I had realized how little I had like an image of what it looks like, what it could look like in a good way. I had an image of like I want to avoid bad. I don't want to die. I don't want to, you know, have my house be on fire or underwater. But I didn't have this vision of like you can work towards something that is amazing and better than what we have now, where it's, you know, full of these things that are full of joy and beauty and connection. And there's a reason to work for it, not just against the worst, but also like you can raise the ceiling and not just the floor.

24:01It's so hard to like muster the energy and like fortitude to work on climate solutions if you can't imagine something good coming out the other end. Right. And I think that's part of what's been holding us back is a lot of the images, most of the images we see in popular culture about climate are terrifying and awful. And there's good reason for that, right? Like those things are real. But the question is then like, okay, so what world do we want to create? And I don't think there's really been enough of a public conversation about that. It's like, so if we agree that the status quo is not working and continuing on the path that we're on is increasingly dangerous, what does the alternative look like?

24:48What world do we want? And I think this was my attempt to offer, you know, offer something to that conversation, a collective, some collective wisdom.

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27:27And we are back with Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, author of What If We Get It Right? You talk about many times in the book, you frame this as problems versus possibilities. So here are the problems, but there's also these incredible possibilities. I think that's a really helpful way for listeners to think about this stuff and to think about it not just in the scared way, but the generative way. And for people who are watching, instead of listening to this, there's this like two page spread that opens every section of 10 problems and 10 possibilities. So like on nature and agriculture or on design in the built environment or on policy.

28:05I was the creative director for the book too, the art director. So thinking about like how to visually lay that out in terms of never list the problems without the possibilities. So it's this literal centerfold, this spread of showing those side by side. On page 68, you've literally printed out an email exchange from your mom in the book. And it's just you saying, why can't you ever send me a 10-minute video as she sends you a link to an hour-long video? It's so good. It's just happened again yesterday. She was like, you should watch this three-hour. I'm like, is there an article about this? Maybe we could summarize that somewhere.

28:44I got things to do, mom. I love that. Your mom moved out of the city and started a homestead farm. So your mom made a pretty dramatic life change in line with thinking about what it means to be sustainable, means to be living in one of these positive climate futures. It makes me wonder how much do you think that the rest of us, the people who are listening and watching, how much should we be thinking about those kinds of dramatic shifts in our lives versus how much are we thinking about shifts to our daily kind of status quo life? like changing the things at the edges versus changing it from the ground up?

29:22I think this is a time for transformation, right? Little tweaks to the way that we exist are not going to get us the kind of transformation of our society, economy, culture, policy, politics that we need in order to address the climate crisis. So once we set the bar at transformation, I think that opens up all different types of thinking. And there's an interview in the book with someone named Brian Donahue, which is his imagining of what it would look like to have people in cities start to repopulate small towns and rural areas. Because in the U.S., we have a lot of small towns that are emptied out, right, because of any number of factors of industrialization or globalization or, you know, consolidation of big box stores and that kind of thing.

30:19And to improve our food system in terms of sustainability and food security, making sure that we have a next generation of farmers is really important. The average age of farmers in America is like in their 60s. You know, we don't have a next generation of people who are eager to go into it or they don't have the money to buy farms because land is too expensive. And there's all these barriers to getting it right in terms of agriculture. But one of them is just like we need more people living in rural areas again. And that would also start to rebalance some of our political divide. And having people interacting with each other as neighbors who don't share politics would actually be really helpful, too.

31:05So he's written a whole manifesto about this, which is brilliant and lovely. And I talked to him about that in our interview. And he's done a lot of work imagining what that would look like for New England. So I think it's, yeah, for people who are like, I don't know about this Brooklyn life. I think it's totally reasonable to think about where else we could live in order to contribute to some of the societal changes that we want to see. Whenever I'm reading a book, I try and pay close attention to word choices and to words that stand out in me that maybe are used more frequently or less frequently than in other books.

31:45And reading What If We Get This Right, the words that jumped out at me were adaptive and maladaptive. I think what you're picking up on is that we need to change, right? Because the world is changing. And to just continue doing things the way we've been doing things as the world dramatically changes around us, right? as extreme weather events become more frequent and more intense, as wildfires and floods and hurricanes and droughts and all of these sea level rise, etc., are all happening, as our federal climate policy structure crumbles, to just be like, I'll just keep doing things the same way I've always done them just is absolutely maladaptive, right?

32:35Like the world has changed, so we need to change. It is a message of the book that something's got to give, right? The more we just try to hold on and pretend that everything's more or less fine, that's maladaptive because it diminishes, because it's out of touch with reality and diminishes our ability to even think about visions of climate future that require transformation instead of like edits. I also try to think about it as like just useful or not useful. Okay. Tell me about that. The question that I ask myself repeatedly is how can I be most useful? And in the context of this climate action Venn diagram, it's like that answer is different for everybody.

33:24And that's okay. Right. And that's why I needed to talk to all these different experts to create this book. and that's why I do what I do from the perspective of a marine biologist, a policy nerd, a kid from Brooklyn who's really enamored with design, who's practiced how to communicate. Like this set of things that I have to offer is that's my set of things and so how can I offer those in service of climate solutions? There's a poem in the book called To Be of Use. It's one of my all-time favorite is something that I come back to a lot because I think that's the big question. Like, how can we be of use in this moment in human history?

34:07Going back to this question of hope and my relationship with it, I kind of sometimes feel like hope is a very flimsy motivator because it's something, it's a feeling, right? And we can't always feel hopeful and we can sometimes, And if hope become, if feeling hopeful is a precursor to action, then we're screwed to me because I don't feel hopeful a lot of the time. But I can consistently try to be useful. And to me, that feels so good. Right. To put it more simply, instead of focusing on how to be hopeful, I think we can just focus on how to be useful. You have a part in the early part of your book where you talk about reality check.

34:53And you just say, one of the biggest questions that people ask you is, how fucked are we? Oh, you want me to answer this? Well, the answer is pretty fucked, but we don't have to be. Right? But there's a whole bunch of stuff we could do to make it better. And I think sometimes that sounds boring and incrementalist to people. But, you know, like, oh, well, if we can't solve climate change, then what are we even doing? And I think it's so important to remember that there's actually a really big difference between one foot and five feet of sea level rise. There's a very big difference between three degrees Fahrenheit and seven degrees Fahrenheit of planetary warming, right?

35:33There's a big difference between like having snow in the future and not having snow in the future. When the change is at this planetary magnitude, these increments become more important than ever. So I don't say things like solve climate change because the climate has already changed. It's continuing to change. Like we have changed the chemistry of the atmosphere and the ocean because of all the fossil fuels we've burned. Like that is just a fact. How much more it changes and how quickly that happens. And if we adapt to those changes or not, that is still an open question. Like the future is not fully written yet.

36:17And so every day I wake up and I'm like, all right, how are we going to have the best possible future that's available to us? Because hundreds of millions of lives hang in the balance. I mean, within the U.S. alone, we're talking about 13 million people having to relocate because of sea level rise alone in the next few decades. Hundreds of millions of people globally, right? Like that's a big deal how much we can rein in sea level rise, for example. As an ocean policy nerd, this is the lens through which I see some of these things as often oceany, salty examples. I thought one of the most eye-opening parts of the book for me was you walk through this idea for a policy change, this blue new deal.

36:59And you go through like the nitty gritty timeline of what does it actually take to get politicians to pay attention to something, to put a policy through. And it's not a short timeline and it's not a straight line in any way. Yeah. And this is a very different conversation to be having now than it was when I wrote the book a year ago, right? Because we have a completely different federal policy context within which it seems like really challenging to think of how to be constructive. and so actually a lot of my work on the policy side right now is thinking about what cities and states can do because cities and states are you know close to their constituents thinking about how this adaptation question right and a lot of people are going to have to relocate there's all sorts of stuff that people can do at a local level if we're thinking about building codes for the future or zoning laws or efficiency standards or public transit or food systems, right?

38:01What kind of things are we supporting with our local tax dollars? And how can town councils, mayors, state representatives help to support more resilience in the communities that they represent? there's so much room for productivity there. But yeah, I mean, this idea of a Blue New Deal was just how do we make sure the ocean is included in federal climate policy? That's a conversation that people were having in Congress and in nonprofits and in communities and in the scientific disciplines. And so I teamed up with a bunch of colleagues who I really find delightful to start to put this on paper, right?

38:45Like, me and the head of Surfrider Foundation and an ocean seaweed and oyster farmer and a policy wonk who worked in Congress for dozens of years, we're just like, what would it look like? Like, if the vision doesn't exist, what do we think it should be? And how do we keep moving these ideas forward, regardless of who's in office and what are all the different roles to play in making that happen. So these kinds of things are like lifetime projects. What I realized doing the book is that we need to be thinking more in terms of generations. And there's this phrase from Martin Luther King that comes into my mind a lot, which is, he said, I may not get there with you.

39:32He wasn't like, we're solving civil rights tomorrow. It's going to be so great. We're going to have a big party. It was, this is the work of generations. This is a huge challenge to transform society in this way. And the climate crisis requires a similar, if not greater level of transformation. And so thinking about it in that context, that longer arc, I think is also really helpful for me. A part that I also found really moving is the story that you tell of your father, as a black architect in New York City and feeling like he hadn't maybe accomplished what you would have hoped for him to accomplish, that he didn't have these skyscrapers in his name or in all of that stuff.

40:13And then talking to a younger generation of a younger black architect and realizing that your father had actually paved the way in ways that you hadn't fully realized. Yeah, that was such a powerful moment hearing that he knew about my father's firm, that he'd heard of him and he had in fact opened lots of doors and that I had been thinking about the whole thing wrong, right? That it's not about the glory, it's about the ripples. All of us can only hope to have our work make meaningful ripples in the world. The way we live make meaningful ripples in our communities. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you making time to be on the show.

40:52This was so fantastic. My pleasure. Thanks for reading the book. Oh, thanks for writing it. That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much for listening to the show. Thank you to our guest, Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson. Her book is called What If We Get It Right? I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team that gets it right shockingly often. On the TED side, we've got Daniela Balarezzo, Ban Ban Chang, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Antonio Leigh, and Joseph Debrine.

41:29This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who both believe in and support scientific consensus. On the PRX side, they are forces of nature. I am talking about Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks again to you for listening. Please share this episode with a friend, with a family member, with someone who you think gets it right. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much for listening and take care.

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