Getty Images If I asked you to tell me the one issue that makes you feel the most pessimistic, what would it be? I feel pretty confident saying that the most popular response — certainly one of the most popular responses, anyway — would be climate change. But is climate despair really as tempting and reasonable as it seems? The problem isn’t imaginary. Climate change is real and terrifying, but even if it’s as bad as the worst predictions suggest, do we gain anything by resigning ourselves to that fate? What effect might our despair have on our ability to act in the present? Is our fatalism undercutting our capacity to tackle this problem? On a recent episode of The Gray Area , I invited Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on to talk about how we might collectively address climate change without falling into despair or getting mired in false hope. She’s a marine biologist, a co-founder of the non-profit think tank Urban Ocean Lab, and the author of a new book called What If We Get it Right? It’s a curated series of essays and poetry and conversations with a wide range of people who are all, in their own ways, trying to build a better future. And this is not a blindly optimistic book: The point isn’t that everything is fine. The point is that we have to act as though the future is a place we actually want to live in — not centuries into the distant future but now and in the decades to come. According to Johnson, there are already many concrete climate solutions. If we were motivated by a belief in a better tomorrow — not a worse one — we would implement more of those solutions (and find new ones). So, if you’re someone […]