Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on making climate action cool

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is not an optimist. "I find it to be very disconcerting and also sort of hilarious that everyone assumes I'm an optimist," she tells Science Friday host Flora Lichtman. Her bestselling book is titled What If We Get It Right? — but she emphasizes that the question mark is doing the work. "There's no reason to assume that we're gonna get it right," she says. "But there is a possibility that we could get it more right than it would be if we did not bother to try." That distinction — between blind hope and stubborn tenacity — is the engine of her approach to climate advocacy. Johnson, a marine biologist who co-founded the Urban Ocean Lab and helped organize the March for Science, has become one of the most visible figures in the climate movement. She did not plan it that way. "The whole thing is just extremely weird to me that anyone knows who I am," she says. But her shift from federal policy work at EPA and NOAA to public-facing advocacy reflects a deliberate choice: to make climate action feel less like a grim obligation and more like something people might actually want to be part of.

The psychology of tenacity over hope