Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Quotes

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

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?

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.

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.

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.”

there’s a lot of different art we could be making to help people see their way into the future.

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 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.

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.

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

this is actually a huge problem with ocean philanthropy, too, is that people want to pay nonprofit groups to do the work to establish protected areas, but not to maintain them, not to enforce them, not to monitor them.

the ocean has been, for most of human history, very much this open access, shared resource that’s just been plundered by whoever could get there first with the highest-tech equipment, whatever that meant at the time. And that hasn’t gone that well. And so this idea that we could make a plan, a marine spatial plan, an ocean zoning map for deciding what should happen where, and when, and how to reduce the conflicts between different uses, where things can harmoniously coexist; how to make sure we’re not putting shipping lanes where whales are trying to migrate; and we’re thinking about where offshore wind energy should be sited and where regenerative ocean farming should happen and where fishing should happen — all these things need a place. And it’s much more helpful for industry if they have some certainty about the regulatory framework within which they’re trying to develop their business plans.

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.

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.

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.