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.

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?

Each of us can contribute, though. With our votes, our voices, our food choices, our skills and our dollars. We must overhaul both corporate practices and government policies. We must transform culture. Building community around solutions is the most important thing. I am never going to give up working to protect and restore this magnificent planet. Every bit of habitat we preserve, every tenth of a degree of warming we prevent, really does matter. Thankfully, I'm not motivated by hope, but rather a desire to be useful.

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.

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.

It was Dr. Katharine Wilkinson, coeditor of All We Can Save, who introduced me to Eunice (Newton Foote). I feel like I’m on a first-name basis with her, even though she was doing her research in 1856, when she discovered that carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas and would warm the planet. A woman discovered this through experimentation in her backyard and was essentially erased from history. An Irish physicist a few years later came to a very similar discovery and was credited as “the father of climate science.”

this is a chickens-coming-home-to-roost moment. And I’m seeing a lot of my friends who — sort of aware, of course, that climate change is happening, but hasn’t really, like, hit them — we’re seeing people wake up right now.

there was this moment on a glass-bottom boat (when I was five). And to see a coral reef for the first time, and to see all of these magnificently colored fish swimming around, and to see this literal window into this other world — I was just in awe. And it’s this, like, whole city that’s happening down there, right? It’s not just these little sections where all the fish are the same. It’s this super vibrant and dynamic alternate universe — this ecosystem.

this idea that we can be motivated by love, I think it’s just — it’s just the more delightful way to approach something that is the work of our lifetimes: to do it, thinking about not just the love of other species, but the love of other humans, the love of ecosystems, the love of places. I mean, we all have places that we’re deeply attached to, and many of them are changing for the worse. And so this potential to have that be our driving force is, to me, why I focus on solutions instead of raging against the machine.

I dare you to stand in a redwood grove and not be humbled, or to dive on a coral reef and see even just the glimmer of its former magnificence and have some respect for these ecosystems and the fact that we are sharing this planet.

if you’re motivated purely by counting pennies and not by saving life on Earth, then we’re just not speaking the same language.

being the daughter of a Jamaican and thinking about people all around the world in coastal communities, who depend on the ocean for their food security, for their livelihoods, for their cultures, that if we lose the health of ocean ecosystems, we lose something much, much greater than the way it’s often framed in conservation, as an issue of biodiversity, more technically. And it’s really just — for me, it’s like, as much as I love fish and octopuses and kelp and all these things, it’s really about people, why I do this work.

Even at its most benign, racism is incredibly time consuming. Black people don’t want to be protesting for our basic rights to live and breathe. We don’t want to constantly justify our existence. Racism, injustice and police brutality are awful on their own, but are additionally pernicious because of the brain power and creative hours they steal from us. I think of one black friend of mine who wanted to be an astronomer, but gave up that dream because organizing for social justice was more pressing. Consider the discoveries not made, the books not written, the ecosystems not protected, the art not created, the gardens not tended.

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.

I think it’s also deeply unwise to have so much dependence on one person, who could be assassinated, as we’ve seen in civil rights movements; who could burn out, as we’ve seen in environmental movements; who might just want to take a break and have a family. So I think this is a moment that calls for many leaders, because what we need is transformation in every community, in every sector of the economy, in every ecosystem, with the hundreds of climate solutions we have.