PSYCHOSCAPES: What If We Get It Right?

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

I’ve written before about how I’ve been trying to focus on positive alternatives to counteract today’s dominant “the sky is falling” commentary. Today I want to highlight one such encouraging voice: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.

She is a marine biologist, policy expert, and author. In a podcast on Krista Tippet’s “On Being”, she points out how we have become demoralized by doomsday tales about our future, almost to the point of surrender. To combat such defeatism, Johnson makes a creative and pragmatic inquiry: What if “we let ourselves be led by what we already know how to do, and by what we have it in us to save?”

In fact, that idea is going to be the title of her next book:“What if we get this right?”^⁠1

Johnson believes our pervasive apprehension has prevented us “from rising to our highest human capacities, in every sphere of our life together.” She says each of us “feels the disarray of the natural world at a cellular level in our bodies.” It’s impossible to divorce ourselves from what is happening. “It’s not even so much that we are in it — we are of it.”

The solution is to stop running from the world we’ve created and turn to face it. Rather than getting emotional, Johnson prefers to put her head down and take concrete action. She reminds us about what we too often forget: we already know how to resolve our climate challenges. It’s just a matter of “figuring out how we can welcome more people into this work, get people excited, [and] help them find where they fit.”

We are already making more progress than we realize.

Just last week, David Brooks desribed in the Monitor the significant gains New England has made: we already have 4,000 MW of solar panels sitting on the region’s rooftops and back yards…more than three times the output of the Seabrook Station nuclear plant. That’s despite major foot-dragging by our retrograde governor and old fogey legislature who, at every turn, have refused to expand renewable energy options.

Wired Magazine has chimed in on the same theme: “The US Can Halve Its Emissions by 2030 – If It Wants To” by Matt Simon.^⁠2 He quotes a new study in the journal Science stating we can eliminate half of the US’s greenhouse gas emissions in the next eight years by fast-tracking solar and wind energy while rolling out more electric vehicles. Success will be less costly because the cost of renewables is plummeting: The price of solar technology has dropped 99% in the past 40 years.

Another advantage will be massive health benefits. The fossil fuel lifecycle, from extraction to processing to burning, is highly harmful to the human body. The study has shown that transitioning to clean energy will avoid over 200,000 premature deaths and over $800 billion to a trillion dollars in health [costs].^⁠3

Last, according to energy economist and coauthor Nikit Abhyankar, the cost will not be steep. “In fact, some studies found it might result in significant consumer savings.” For example, while putting solar panels on your roof may be costly, it will save you lots in the long run.

When it comes to combating climate change, Johnson says that we, as individuals, too often give up, overwhelmed by the immensity of the problem combined with guilt at not doing enough. The answer is to think more collectively. Her favorite quote outlines how an exciting regenerative future is possible, “not when thousands of people do climate justice activism perfectly, but when millions of people do the best they can.”^⁠4

The major stumble block is not inadequate technology or individual failure but foot-dragging by our government. Consequently, at the national level, Republicans have blocked Biden’s Build Back Better program, which would have ramped up the manufacture of renewables, among other climate benefits.

At the state level, our NH legislature and governor have consistently been the neanderthals of New England, rejecting clean energy bills and regional efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Sadly, we are the conspicuous outlier among New England states, otherwise quite proactive on climate change goals.

We need to be more like sports fans. When it dawned on Celtic fans that they had a chance to win the world championship this year, they became energized, rallying behind their team and passionately rooting them on. But in the case of climate change, where we have a clear path to victory, few people seem to give a damn.

Instead, we pay $5/gallon for gasoline instead of driving electric cars; we fight catastrophic forest fires when we shouldn’t have to; and it’s the same story with our unprecedented droughts, floods, and rising oceans. We all know the definition of doing the same old things over again, expecting a different result.

It’s called insanity.

xxx

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