Marine Biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Talks ‘What If We Get It Right?’

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson stepped onto the stage at the Brattle Theater in October to applause from a crowd of people who care deeply about the environment. They were there to listen to the acclaimed marine biologist, policy expert, and climate activist talk about her new book, What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures, in which Ayana interviews more than 20 climate experts and intersperses art and poetry to paint an inspiring landscape of possible climate futures.

“This was a treat to write,” Ayana told the group.

The Harvard alum and Brooklyn native was back on familiar ground on one of the final legs of her national book tour. Three local climate experts joined Ayana on stage who are also featured in her book: Samanatha Montano, an emergency management expert; Brian Donahue, a farmer and agriculture specialist and former director of the Environment Studies program at Brandeis University; and Kelly Sims Gallagher, Professor of Energy and Environmental Policy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School. 

Ayana conducted the interviews for the book a year and a half ago, and on stage at the Brattle, she asked each panelist what’s happened since they last spoke. Each expert offered insight into action that could be taken in Massachusetts and beyond to tackle the climate crisis. Here are three takeaways from the climate conversation, all stemming from the overarching theme that answers lie in collaboration. 

Green industrialization can create positive economic growth 

Kelly Sims Gallagher works in international climate policy, and part of her job is to review countries’ commitments to managing greenhouse gasses through the Paris Agreement.

“Next year in Brazil [during the United Nations Climate Change Conference of Parties, also known as COP], all countries are supposed to submit NDCs, or Nationally Determined Contributions,” Gallagher said. NDCs are commitments from countries to offset their emissions according to their respective capabilities. “How are developing countries reconciling this challenge of growing and developing while managing emissions?”

She explained the term “leapfrogging,” which describes how developing countries can skip over dirty energy infrastructure (such as coal- and oil-fired power plants) to low-carbon technologies (such as solar or wind power) right away. 

“The cost of low-carbon technology has come down in cost so more countries can afford it,” Gallagher said. “We don’t need to do the dirty carbon infrastructure.”

In the 1990s, Kelly moved to China and learned Chinese after realizing the country would become a key player on climate. She worked in the Obama White House and helped negotiate the first climate deal with China. Kelly works with major economies to find ways that are a win-win for managing emissions and economic growth. Today, Kelly is the acting academic dean and professor of energy and environmental policy at the Fletcher School of Tufts University, where she directs the Climate Policy Lab and the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy. 

She mentioned another promising climate solution: “freebates.” 

“It’s a way to try to incentivize consumer behavior,” Gallagher said. She used buying a new car as an example: If people go electric, they get an instant rebate. If they buy a gas-guzzling truck, there’s a fee. “This radically shifts consumer behavior and pays for itself,” Gallagher said. 

By cutting down trees, New England could source more of its own wood and food

Brian Donahue is a farmer, forester, and historian who co-owns Boscom Hallow Farm on 170 acres in Western Massachusetts. He’s written several books about farms and forests in New England, and how the landscape has changed over centuries. He also taught environmental studies at Brandeis University for 25 years. He’s working on a new book, Slow Wood, about how New England could source more of its own wood. He explained how Massachusetts imports most of its wood from other areas. 

“People are reluctant to cut forests, but you can get ecological benefits at the same time as getting the wood we need,” Brian said. 

Brian touched on how Southern New England is now nearly 60% forested, and northern New England states are 80 to 90% forested. 

“The trees just grow. So heck yeah, we ought to be able to produce more of our wood products here than we are,” Brian says in the book, where he breaks down a term called “ecological forestry,” where forestry experts “selectively log,” cutting trees on long rotations, after 120–140 years, and when they finally harvest the timber, “you more or less mimic natural disturbance patterns, like how a storm might knock down a patch of trees,” Brian says. As the forest grows back, “there’s a lot more young trees out there than will survive. You can go in and thin the forest periodically as it’s growing to remove some of those small trees and utilize that wood …” 

Brian is also an expert on food consumption in New England, and helped write A New England Food Vision, which envisions the region growing half the food it needs on its own by 2060.

“How can we grow more food here? Ironically, that would take cutting trees,” Brian said. 

In the book, Brian also makes the interesting political case that rural America needs more progressive people to move there:

“There’s a raw political question that runs alongside the environmental one, which has to do with the massive political power held by rural parts of the country because of the way our Electoral College and Senate are arranged … We might want to pass progressive politics like the Green New Deal and have universal healthcare and a living wage, but rural America often votes against it. So, to state it in a rather naive way, why don’t more progressive people just move to those states?”

Municipalities should invest more in emergency management 

Samanatha Montano is an emergency management expert who was inspired to move from Maine to New Orleans after seeing damage from Hurricane Katrina during a high school trip. She spent years doing recovery work and rebuilding homes. Now she works on the policy side of emergency management, and is an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. At the Brattle, Samantha noted “we know how to manage disasters, but the trick is getting that information into policy.” 

“Human action is at the root of disasters happening — how we are building, where we are building,” Samantha said. She noted the socioeconomic policy that puts vulnerable people in vulnerable places during natural disasters. “We need to get congress to listen to that and implement how we spend emergency management money,” Samantha said. She noted how congress spends more money on recovery and less on mitigation. 

“Real preparation is addressing risks before the disaster happens and then making sure we have a collective response to the disaster carefully planned out,” Samantha said. “We’re spending remarkably little on actually preparing for those events when they do happen.”

“One thing most people don’t know is that most emergency management agencies across the country only have a part-time emergency manager — who often doubles as the fire chief. In some communities, the only emergency manager they have is a volunteer, which is even more alarming,” Samantha said.

The hour-long discussion spanned a spectrum of climate solutions, and at the end, Ayana invited everyone to take a climate oath to work together, moving from “I” to “we.” She also asked the audience to consider a question: “What if we act as if we love the future?” 

For more information on Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and her new book What If We Get It Right: Visions of Climate Futures, visit getitright.earth.