CommentsCLIMATE POLITICS-This is a busy time for Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, PhD, a marine biologist, environmental policy expert, and CEO of conservation consulting firm Ocean Collectiv.
Earlier this year, she advised Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren on environmental policy. Now she’s about to publish an anthology of essays, poetry, and visual art about the climate crisis and launch a podcast about climate change on Gimlet Media.
The book, All We Can Save, and the podcast, How to Save a Planet, share the same goal: showing people how they can get involved in the fight against climate change.
Johnson has been working toward this goal for nearly 20 years. She started her career at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where she wanted to learn how scientists could help create good environmental policies.
That’s why the Trump administration’s rollback of EPA regulations cuts so deep. “Any attacks on the EPA and the work of those really dedicated civil servants or rollbacks in hard-fought environmental protections are just such a brutal punch in the gut to the environment and to the committed staff who make all of those good things happen for the planet,” she says.
Johnson is urgently looking for ways to mitigate climate change and achieve justice and equity for the historically marginalized communities who bear the brunt of its effects. She pushed, for example, to address concerns about environmental justice and equity in Warren’s Blue New Deal policy. “I think people aren’t as motivated as they would be if they knew what the finish line looks like and what that would feel like and how much better that would be,” Johnson says. “So, I think that’s the gap I’m trying to fill.”
Johnson spoke to OneZero about oceans, climate justice, parallels in the responses to the coronavirus and climate change, how Joe Biden and Donald Trump differ on climate, and her new book and podcast.
How Does the Future of the Earth’s Oceans Intersect with Climate and Environmental Justice?
The future of the earth’s oceans is not looking good if we continue emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And the changes that we’re expecting in the ocean because of our changing climate -- warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, changes in current -- all of those have implications for justice. One simple example is as the ocean warms, fish are moving away from the tropics toward cooler water. They have a specific range of temperature tolerance. All these tropical coastal communities that depend on the ocean for food security are at risk, and certainly they have been among the lowest emitters of greenhouse gases. Certainly, that seems unjust, that they are the ones who are suffering.
What parallels do you see in the way the United States has responded to the coronavirus and climate change?
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the parallels are negative, right? Because we’re ignoring the science in terms of the projections of how severe they are — how damaging and dangerous — both the virus and what’s coming with climate change. And we can’t actually come up with workable solutions if we’re just sort of ignoring the problem. The anti-science element of the Republican Party is extremely dangerous in both contexts.
But on the flip side, I think with both there is opportunity to think on a grand scale about how we can be creative within constraints. What could the future look like? With the pandemic, we’ve seen the closing of streets to cars and opening for more pedestrians and bikes as people are looking for ways to safely get around New York City. You’re seeing all these restaurants space out tables in what would be the parking lanes of neighborhoods in New York City. People can safely eat outside. In the same way, when you think about the Green New Deal and all the different manifestations and proposals for climate policy, there’s an opportunity to be really creative right now in envisioning what the future could look like.
What do you think about the EPA relaxing its laws because of the pandemic, allowing industrial facilities to skirt clean air and water regulations?
Ugh [big sigh]. I’m not jazzed about that. I think there’s a safe way to continue to enforce environmental regulations right now. And clearly that was an excuse to do what the Trump administration wanted to do all along, which is let industry get away with more pollution. It just means there’s ever more work to do and damage to undo, which is a really needless setback in this time and just a total bummer. Shoutout to civil servants who have been trying to hold it down these last few years, doing this thankless work.
There are so many issues to consider in the upcoming election, including police violence, presidential power, the economy, and the coronavirus response. Where does climate change fit in?
I think it depends on the voter. It’s definitely risen to the top of a lot of voters’ priorities. I mean, we’ve seen that the Biden campaign is taking this seriously, taking advice from people who are creating proposals that actually rise to the level of action that’s needed to prevent climate catastrophe. So, I do think that message is getting through, and we’re even seeing a generational shift among Republicans where young Republicans are concerned about climate and care about [it], according to the polling from Yale and George Mason University. I mean, this is the first election where we’ve had people competing for who had the best climate plan in a Democratic primary and had town hall meetings on CNN fully dedicated to the climate.
And while of course I wish we’d had an official Democratic debate on climate and that didn’t happen, it certainly rose to the top in a way that’s unprecedented. It’s a truly rapid acceleration in climate policy at the level of primaries and general election that I’m honestly surprised happened this fast. Like, I thought we’d get people to talk about it, but not with this level of detail and nuance. That’s been a really pleasant surprise.
What are the major ways that Joe Biden and Donald Trump differ on climate and the environment?
Oh, gosh! Yeah, there are so many.
Well, Joe Biden has a robust climate plan that would rise to the scale of the crisis, whereas Donald Trump is still denying the importance of addressing the issue head on. So, on a fundamental level, we have one candidate who is seriously committed to addressing the climate crisis and one who is continually downplaying the fact that we even have a crisis. That’s the most fundamental difference.
We’ve also seen that Joe Biden’s platform is really focused on green jobs and how we can actually get people employed in this transition, whereas under the Trump administration, we’ve lost over 100,000 jobs in renewable energy under his watch for no reason and through the coronavirus pandemic in particular. We think about where his administration has been putting recovery funds: They have been putting it toward the fossil fuel industry instead of the renewables sector. Biden is really thinking about how we can employ people in wind and solar and update and modernize our electricity grid. They could not be more polar opposite when it comes to climate.
Your work focuses a lot on people who are left out of the conversation about climate change and the environment. In the intro of All We Can Save, which features an all-star cast of women writing and thinking about our environment, you and your co-editor, Katharine Wilkinson, write about women being marginalized in these spaces. How have the environmental and climate movements historically marginalized women’s voices?
I think you marginalize voices by not giving them a platform and by not giving them the resources they need, and that’s certainly been true, with broad strokes, when it comes to women leading on climate. Women have always been among the leaders, but they haven’t been as well-resourced; they haven’t been given the same megaphones. And so we’ve been left with a small group of white men who are considered the thought leaders on climate, which is really dangerous because, despite their expertise and best intentions, they will simply never represent the full spectrum of thinking and solutions. And they will never be able to lead the full spectrum of communities that exist and need to be engaged in this work.
I mean, the whole impetus for the project came out of Katherine’s and my frustration with the fact that women we knew who were doing incredible work, no one had heard of them, no one knew about their work. We want all of these folks to become household names and have their work really supported and funded so they can accelerate it.
[Editor’s Note: Some women featured in the book are climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe, environmental justice activist Jacqui Patterson, poets Mary Oliver and Alice Walker, and illustrator Madeleine Jubilee Saito.]
The new podcast you’re co-hosting with Gimlet CEO Alex Blumberg, How to Save a Planet, will be focused on climate change solutions. Why are those important to talk about now?
I think too often, we just focus on the terrifying science or the super in-the-weeds policy stuff, or we just don’t want to deal with it because we don’t know what to do. And there’s all this focus often in public communications about what individuals can do to change their individual carbon footprint, or their individual consumption and behavior, whether it’s bring your own bag and water bottle, or ride a bike more, or fly less, or eat a plant-based diet. All those things are great, and people should do them. But one of the things that’s been proven during this pandemic is that’s not enough, right?
We need to transform our energy, transportation, buildings, manufacturing, agriculture, and land use. Those are the major categories of greenhouse gas emissions. So, the podcast is really focused on how people can be a part of the larger systems change. It’s not about shaming individuals about their personal decisions. It’s about giving people opportunities to be a part of these larger solutions. I think that’s what people are craving. You have the majority of Americans who are concerned or alarmed about climate change, and they want to be a part of the solution, but it can be really hard to figure out how to engage in a meaningful way. The podcast is aiming to hopefully show people all these different opportunities that are available to them to do something that really matters.
(Drew Costley is a reporter, editor, photojournalist, and multimedia journalist who covers the environment, health, science, and tech. He’s based in the Bay Area. This piece appeared on Medium.) Photo: Diana Levine. Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
