Last Friday, Roux Distinguished Scholar Ayana Elizabeth Johnson discussed her book “What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures” and led a panel about environmental voting.

The book presents a solutions-based framework for addressing climate change that seeks to reach beyond the instinctive “freeze” response she has commonly found in dialogues surrounding climate.

The book is composed of a collection of twenty works of writing centered on “getting it right” with regards to climate change, including essays, poetry, interviews, data and more. Johnson described herself as more of a curator than an author of her book.

Johnson emphasized the need for a collective approach to tackling climate change.

“We basically have the climate solutions we need,” Johnson said in an interview with the Orient. “It’s just a matter of how quickly and how justly we’re going to implement them. What I really hope is that everyone sees themselves in the book somewhere, that they see some way that they can get involved and be part of the solution…. These visions of climate futures only work if everybody pitches in.”

The panel featured Nathanial Stinnett and Whit Jones, who both lead organizations for climate-based voting. Stinnett is the CEO of the Environmental Voting Project, which focuses on using social and behavioral science to change the voting habits of environmentalists. Jones is the campaign director of Lead Locally, an organization that backs local climate candidates in elections.

Johnson had met Stinnett and Jones through her support of their organizations. She was one of the first people to donate to Stinnett’s organization, and following the 2020 presidential debates, she helped raise $120,000 for Lead Locally.

“One of the exciting things about this moment of transformation that we are in—from a fossil fuel-based economy to a regenerative one—is that we need so many leaders,” Johnson said. “We need leaders in every town, in every city, in every industry, in every sector who are all helping to make this transition to clean energy and beyond.”

The panel focused on the participants’ efforts to promote voting as a habit and engage environmentalists through that practice. Because she was not able to include them in her book, Johnson will be bringing Stinnett and Jones on the book tour, using it as a simultaneous way to get out the vote.

“It was kind of a perfect storm to have this conversation,” Program Manager for Environmental Studies and Roux Building Manager Rosemary Armstrong, who organized the logistics of the panel, said. “[Johnson] thoughtfully wove those things together and thought, ‘Okay, how can I both market my book … and leverage that [conversation] in a good way?’”

The conversation reached Bowdoin students, professors and high school students from the Chewonki Semester School, who were all in attendance. Eden Zumbrun ’26, who introduced the panelists at the beginning of the conversation, said she was excited by what Stinnett and Jones are working on.

“The work that [Johnson] is doing is really great, but I was also impressed with the two other speakers on the panel,” Zumbrun said. “As an [earth and oceanographic sciences] and [government and legal studies] major, [the panel] really brought together the two things that I care a lot about. I hadn’t heard of their projects prior to the talk, but they laid out really clear ways in which they’re making a huge difference.”

Other students recognized the organizations from their work outside of Bowdoin.

“I’m really interested in the relationships between local climate policy and national social movements,” Karma Samtani ’27 said. “I had heard about Lead Locally from their work in New York supporting a lot of candidates that were running to pass the Build Public Renewables Act.… It was really interesting how their theory of change includes not just focusing on local wins, but hopefully letting that carry over to wins at the top of the ticket.”

In the talk, Johnson emphasized solving smaller issues to work towards an end to the climate crisis. She also shared this perspective in her class, “Communicating Climate Change,” which she taught at Bowdoin last year. The class focused on different arenas for climate action’s promotion, from standard formats like essays and articles to unconventional formats like comedic writing. Zumbrun took Johnson’s class last year and thought its framework had a more workable outlook on climate action.

“She doesn’t like the word ‘hope,’ but I think it’s good to look at it from a more positive lens,” Zumbrun said. “There is a chance that if we try to, we can get it right, and she lays out the groundwork of what it looks like if we were to get it right. It’s good to look at it as something we can solve, rather than, ‘Here are all the problems.’”