Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Quotes

Sylvia Earle, what a pioneer...her generation — they were explorers...They’re like, what is even down there? How do we understand this? And then: Oh [bleep], this is in trouble. And they all became conservationists, right? We saw that same professional transformation with Jacques Cousteau.

We are simply not seeing very much climate coverage at all in the mainstream media. What we see is last year about 0.4% of the major news shows’ minutes were about climate, 0.4%. So we’re not talking about what we’re supposed to do. And only 30% of the coverage that does exist on climate in major news outlets talks about solutions. So we’re just not having the deep conversations about what we do next.

the fact that we have so many Americans who can't follow their dreams because they know that their first responsibility is to protect their communities is just gut wrenching to me.

I don’t have a lot of hope per se. This is a question I get asked a lot, and I’m always like, Why do you think I’m hopeful? I know way too much about the science, that’d be a little bit irrational. But I do think that what I have is a deep understanding of the fact that we still have a range of possible futures. Every scientific report, every graph, there’s a range: We could have two degrees [Celsius] of warming, or we could have four degrees of warming. We could have a little bit of coral reefs left, or we could have none. We could have 20 hurricanes a year, or we could have 10. And that really makes a difference. So basically what gets me out of bed every day is fighting for the best possible future, knowing that climate has changed and will continue to change even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases now, just because we’ve set all of these things in motion.

this op-ed, for me, really grew out of a moment where I was just like, I can't. I just can't charge ahead. I have to stop and pay attention to what is happening in this country. And I hope that that is something that hit a lot of people - that business as usual is just not an option anymore. This is obviously an inflection point in American history.

I think it’s so funny that people say it’s too expensive to solve climate change, because it’s just like, what’s your alternative?

The word that I’ve started using more and more is “transformation,” because we’ve talked about a transition away from fossil fuels; we’ve talked about what we’re going to stop doing; we’ve talked about how we need to do other stuff. But I think the word “transformation” has embedded within it the sense of possibility: what are we going to become?

I think when the thing that you love is threatened, the natural reaction is to try to save it. And I fell in love with Caribbean coral reefs right as they were starting to crumble.

when I and other ocean policy folks looked at the Green New Deal, we realized the ocean and all the solutions it’s trying to offer us for how to address the climate crisis were essentially left out.

I wrote about this intersection between ocean conservation and social justice, because I feel like we don’t talk about that enough.

The ocean produces about half of the oxygen we breathe. It has also already absorbed about a third of the carbon dioxide that we have emitted by burning fossil fuels, which has turned the ocean more acidic than it has been in human history. So we have an increasingly acidic ocean, an increasingly warmer ocean. That’s very bad for the creatures that are trying to live in there. Some are trying to flee towards the poles, when they can move, like fish. Others, like corals, are often now frying in place. So we have just a very different ocean than we had even a hundred years ago.

I think that climate communication has focused too much on the problem...I focus on the getting our act together part, because I think that’s the pivot that we need right now. We have more than enough information. I’m grateful for the science, and it’s helping us make more nuanced and clear decisions, but the broad strokes that everyone needs to pitch in, have been there for a long time.

People of color disproportionately bear climate impacts, from storms to heat waves to pollution. Fossil-fueled power plants and refineries are disproportionately located in black neighborhoods, leading to poor air quality and putting people at higher risk for coronavirus. Such issues are finally being covered in the news media more fully.

As a marine biologist and policy nerd, building community around climate solutions is my life’s work. But I’m also a black person in the United States of America. I work on one existential crisis, but these days I can’t concentrate because of another.

that’s something that Naomi Klein talks about a lot, is how we are sort of in this moment where imagination is one of the most valuable things we can bring to the table. And a failure of imagination means a failure of the spectrum of futures that are available to us. And I just, I like to think of — so I remind myself and others that there is still such a wide spectrum of possible futures, and we do get some choice in which ones we have.