Johnson will be at Elliott Bay Book Company on October 3. by Hannah Murphy Winter Remember in the ’80s and ’90s, when, for some reason, every kid was planning to become a marine biologist when they grew up? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson was one of those kids—she grew up on stories from her father’s upbringing in Jamaica and, when she was five, fell in love with coral reefs through a glass-bottomed boat in Florida. But unlike most of us, she’s also one of the few that actually grew up and did it.  Marine biology brought her to conservationism, and watching hurricanes destroy coasts she’d fallen in love with brought her to the climate crisis. “It was my bad fate to fall in love with coral reefs just as they were dying,” she writes. But that love infuses her work. She’s now middle-aged (self-described) and one of the leading voices in the climate conversation that’s not just forcing people to face the crisis but to imagine real, livable, joyful solutions.  In her new book, What If We Get It Right?, Johnson brings together scientists, activists, artists, and poets to envision the answer to that question. What if we reinvest in the idea that Earth is our one and only home? What if we reimagine a future where climate solutions are what re-binds our communities? What does it mean to gamble on our humanity? “We need the gumption that emerges from an effervescent sense of possibility,” she writes. The book is about three times the length she’d originally planned. “At some point, my editor just yanked the manuscript out of my hand. I was like, ‘One more!’” Johnson says. “He described it like editing a wild beast.” But books do have to go to press at some point, so to continue the conversation, she just launched a new podcast with the same title. “There's more more to come,” she says. “Stay tuned.” Johnson will be at Elliott Bay Book Company on October 3. Before she got here, we talked to her about astrophysics, futurism, and what drives cultural change.  Courtesy of Penguin Random House In the climate conversation, we spend a lot of time emphasizing how important it is to talk about “climate solutions”: to redirect from the doom of the crisis, and give people hope. Your book takes this conversation a step further into “climate futurism.” I'd love to know what that term means to you and how it defines the book. Just like any variety of Futurism, it's this envisioning of what's on the other side. We’re in some sort of inflection point right now, and then the question is, “What comes after this?”  I think that not having a clearer sense of possible climate futures mutes our enthusiasm. Mutes our motivation. So we're just not going to get there unless we have enough of a sense of where we're going and that we can feel like it's worth the effort and get excited about it. Otherwise, it's just work. It's just a slog. In the book’s introduction, you tell a story from your childhood and describe your mother’s skin as “peach.” In the footnote, you explain that “the ‘flesh’ crayon was renamed ‘peach’ in 1962, in response to the Civil Rights Movement. That was four years before my parents met, and five years before the Supreme Court deemed their future multi-colored marriage legal. Cultural change precedes policy change.” I'm really giving it all up in the footnotes in this one. You do! I do think this teeny, tiny footnote is one of the earliest signs of your motivation for the book: to drive cultural change, so it can bring about policy change. I wonder if that's what informed your decision to introduce art and poetry into the book? This was certainly part of an arc from my first book, All We Can Save, with Katharine Wilkinson. We brought in climate comics and poetry. I loved all that about it. And I think for readers, it was really helpful and soothing to provide some breaks.  This book is a lot lighter. I would say it's a bit more irreverent and literally conversational. And I was the sole curator of this, so I really got to make it my own in this very particular way. Like, what's the point of writing a book that's a book anyone could write? What can I, in particular, offer here? And it's all the different ways that I approach this—which does include art for inspiration, music and the Anti-Apocalypse mixtape [the book’s final chapter], and all of the visionaries who help me to see the way forward.  But the way you asked this question is making me think about this very differently. Fundamentally, I am a generalist. I've always had a multidisciplinary approach to things. My undergraduate degree is in environmental science and public policy—I basically took a class in every department. My PhD was at the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation inside of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD. It was a program funded by the National Science Foundation to do interdisciplinary work with economics and marine sciences. And then I just kept that up. I grew up as a jazz singer. My dad was an architect, my mom was a teacher who became a farmer. So I have all of these elements that really fundamentally make it impossible for me to see the world only through any one lens or one discipline.  I've been hanging out a lot with this curator, Paola Tonelli, and I think I have some semblance of a curatorial approach to this work, just pulling all the different bits that I need for my own inspiration and then offering them back up to others.  You did so much to make sure this book was approachable for people, including markings in the margins that call out key points and heartfelt moments in the text. How do you hope people will interact with the book? One of the things I thought about was, “How do we physically touch the words?” You’ll notice on the cover: usually you have a title, and then you have a subtitle, and then you have the author's name. To me, the question was the big thing, so that gets the middle. And what I really wanted was for people to literally grab onto the words: “Visions of Climate Futures.” So they have to in order to open the book in that lower right corner.  And you’ll notice that the opening of every section has a quote in the lower right corner, so that when you get to the bottom of the page to turn it, you're like, grabbing on to this quote. All these things are very deliberate.  The idea is to offer many different levels of detail. I would say you could get something out of this book simply by reading the section dividing pages. There are eight sections of the book, and if all you do is read the “what if” questions on those pages, I think it could spark something for people.  If you just read the poem, you'll get something out of the book. If you just listen to the playlist, I think you'll get something out of the book. Or just look at the art. And then on the website, we have all the problems and possibilities with hyperlinks to the sources. We have all of our references going online shortly. And there's a reading guide and a climate Venn diagram worksheet.  I know that people are busy. I wanted to organize it so that you can just dip in. One of the first conversations you include is one you had with astrophysicist Kate Marvel. You ask her to elaborate on the first quote you ever heard from her: “Earth is the best planet.” And she says, “I have a PhD in astrophysics, which is the study of the entire universe, so I have an informed scientific opinion when I say the rest of the universe sucks.” I think there is this inclination, when thinking about futurism, to fantasize about leaving Earth. Absolutely. The science is the foundation of all this. We know what's unfolding because of scientists. We know what the ramifications are likely to be of different actions we could take.  These are the people who have evaluated the various planets, and it's very clear that this is The One. All this going to Mars talk that we're hearing these days, it is actually important to say, “This is our option, actually, guys. So what are we going to do?” Marvel’s chapter kind of pulls us away from the science fiction narrative that we all have in our head, that we can go colonize another planet. [Deadpan] It’s not a good use of resources. You included a chapter of rendering called Proto-Farm Communities, “an Afrofuturist, ecological, and solar-punk-meets-salvage-punk world brimming with Black joy.” It’s one of many parts of your book that help illustrate that the best climate solutions are also things that support community. Was that by design? That's something that I think about, but it's not something I thought everybody would be mentioning in their interviews [for the book]. These are interviews on all sorts of different topics, right? So it certainly was when I got to the end and was writing the joyous work chapter trying to weave all the different threads together. I was like, “Oh, I somehow made a climate book that's about community and love, even if we're talking about finance,” which is very interesting. I didn't exactly see that coming. I’ve heard rumors that your book tour is a heck of a party. Tell me more! I’m an introvert, and the thought of going on a book tour was not appealing to me at all. But also, what's the point of writing a book if you're not going to go and engage people on it—especially if it's a book about climate solutions that teaches that we all need to roll up our sleeves?  So I was like, “If I have to do this, how could I make this fun for me?” With the hope that it was for me, it was fun for other people. For the big launch in Brooklyn, my hometown, I fashioned it as a climate variety show. And I take the word “variety” very seriously, so I co-hosted it with Jason Sudeikis, the actor, and there was a magician and hula hoops and a game show with Roy Wood Jr. moderating the debate of Earth versus Mars. (With Kate Marvel representing Earth, obviously.)And there was a dance-off—like a Dance Dance Revolution.  Dance Off was the final act, with me versus Jason. I've never played [the game] before, but I would say that everyone won, because the dance floors have been programmed so that with every step you take, it sends a text to a voter in a swing state to remind them to vote for the climate candidate.  All these ridiculous things stacked on top of each other to make this variety show that also featured 10 experts from the book, all sharing their favorite climate solution. We all spoke a portion of the climate oath aloud, committing to being a part of solutions. And it was just really, really fun, and super goofy. There aren't really as many rules as we pretend that there are. The tour is in large part like me going to where the experts in the book live, and doing events in their favorite bookstores or their local theaters, to have different versions of these conversations in their communities.  And because we’re doing this during an incredibly critical election, I've shaped this tour also as a voter engagement initiative. So I'm bringing the Environmental Voter Project on tour with me, which is trying to get environmentalists to cast their ballots—because 8 million registered voters who had the environment as their number one issue didn't vote in the 2020 election. We know how close elections are, so I'll register volunteers and supporters for them every step along the way. And then hopefully people will buy the book. But even if they don't, they could just come and listen, and hopefully, it'll be some sort of useful kick in the pants so that we all get to work.