Climate Futures Based on Positivity and Optimism
May 20, 2026
By Derek DiMatteo
Many books discussing the planet’s future lean towards doom and gloom, emphasizing rising temperatures and the potentially catastrophic consequences of allowing temperatures to keep rising. Not so with What If We Get It Right? (2024), an anthology edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, that approaches the task of charting visions of the future that emphasize the optimistic outcomes that could occur if we make positive changes in policy and behavior. Books that help us to envision a better future are crucial because they help motivate us to take positive action—if we can imagine it, we can take steps to create it.
Contributions to the anthology come from Johnson’s interviews with experts in a range of fields, from activists to climate scientists to politicians to filmmakers. Guiding all of these conversational interviews and think pieces are three questions that Johnson suggests can be used to identify a person’s own climate action:
What are you good at? (skills, resources, and networks)
What brings you joy? (sources of satisfaction and delight)
What work needs doing? (climate justice and solutions)
Each question sits in its own circle as part of a tripartite Venn diagram. You write your answers to each question in the appropriate circle. The place where the three overlap tells you what your climate action is, or what Johnson terms your climate superpower. This exercise requires some serious thought but is refreshingly direct, and it might just help some people overcome the inertia of feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems facing humanity and not knowing where to start making a difference.
She organizes the book’s contributions into eight clusters starting with “Possibility” and ending with “Transformation.” Each cluster has a loose focus. For example, part four is titled “Follow the Money,” and it focuses on financial aspects of changes that society can make to create a better future. Part Four’s interviewees include Bill McKibben and Jigar Shah, and the section ends with a piece on corporate responsibility co-written by Johnson and K. Corley Kenna. As another example, part six, “Changing the Rules,” focuses on government policy and legal cases, such as when Johnson engages with Rhiana Gunn-Wright to discuss the Green New Deal and with Abigail Dillen to discuss court cases in the United States. Next, I’ll discuss three of the sections that I found compelling.
Part 1, Possibility, begins with a brief discussion of how bad things are as of 2024, titled “Reality Check.” She lays out many of the ways that human behaviors are changing Earth’s climate for the worse: global temperatures setting record highs annually, higher pH of the entire ocean, less rain forests, more plastic in everything from fish to clouds to human veins. She lists some of the consequences of these changes, connecting dots between behaviors that increase methane, leading to increased temperatures, leading to increased violence, inequality, and more. Dots that she accuses the news media of barely even attempting to connect (p. 13). She notes that “we have already changed the climate [and] frayed the web of life” (p. 13). There is no way to prevent these changes because they are already happening. Now we can only “minimize the damage, mitigate the impacts, and adapt to this unknown world” (pp. 13–14). Johnson’s brief rundown of the crisis provides context for and the impetus to enact the many solutions that either exist or are being developed. She calls for “fundamentally changing how we interact with nature and each other” (p. 15). The rest of the book provides some ideas for how.
Part 2, Replenish and Re-Green, asks what-if questions that center around looking to nature for models of how to behave better. The epitome of this approach to finding solutions comes in the form of an interview with Judith D. Schwartz, a science journalist who has written Water in Plain Sight among other books. Their conversation focuses on “Earth repair” through “ecological restoration,” “re-greening,” and “climate solutions inspired by nature (p. 38). There are many fascinating facts and revelations, such as the way that animals help manage their ecosystems, that humans should support nature’s already existing processes, and the concept of evapotranspiration—a cooling process for the earth that they compare to human perspiration or sweating (p. 41). Two of the other interviews in this section are focused on farming. The one with Leah Penniman gives a good look into small-scale farming practices and regenerative agriculture that could help inspire a “back to the land” movement of more people farming locally and increasing food sovereignty.
In part 5, Culture Is the Context, Johnson directs our attention to news media and the culture industry. She asks questions such as what would happen if storytelling on TV and in film “acknowledged climate as the context” and if “the news is 50% about climate instead of 1%” and focused on solutions (p. 215). Interviewing filmmaker Adam McKay, Johnson asks: “Is there a way to tell stories about solutions that’s exciting and palatable?” rather than continually telling disaster stories such as The Day After Tomorrow (p. 227). She is asking why we don’t see more stories about optimistic futures. To me, this is the right question to be asking. Before we can make something, someone has to imagine it. The mobile flip phone’s science fiction precursor was the Star Trek tricorder. We need creative writers and Hollywood directors to spend some time with this book to imagine futures where we get it right. Without those imaginative examples to dream about and aspire toward, we risk locking humanity into a death spiral of inevitable climate doom.
And ultimately, the sentiment on which I ended the previous paragraph is the core value that I see in this book. What If We Get It Right? Doesn’t shy away from the hard facts of our current situation—a situation of our own making that we could have and should have avoided—but it also doesn’t take readers into a doom spiral. Instead, Johnson leads readers through interview after interview with incredibly smart, optimistic people from a variety of fields, who are trying to make a difference by working toward a future founded on optimism, in an area of specialty that leverages the climate change action superpower discovered at the heart of their own personal tripartite Venn diagram. This book is inspirational and hopeful, things that we humanity desperately needs if we are going to muster the political will to improve our situation by changing our behaviors.
References and Resources
Johnson, Ayana Elizabeth. What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures. One World / Penguin Random House. 2024. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/645855/what-if-we-get-it-right-by-ayana-elizabeth-johnson/.
McKay, Adam and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. “Why our secret weapon against the climate crisis could be humour.” The Guardian. January 13, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/13/director-dont-look-up-climate-crisis-ending.
Schwartz, Judith D. Water in Plain Sight: Hope for a Thirsty World. St. Martin's Press. 2016. https://www.judithdschwartz.com/water-in-plain-sight.
WBUR City Space, Boston. “An Evening with Soul Fire Farm Founder Leah Penniman.” [YouTube]. WBUR. April 26, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juJjdAz46TI.