黑料传送门

Common Read

by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and numerous collaborators is the 黑料传送门 Common Read selection for 2025-2026m in connection with Ideas That Matter: Climate Change and the Individual!

An action-聽and reflection-oriented book offering ideal on-ramps for all disciplines, it features interviews with and case studies by numerous different experts that will spark cross-disciplinary, community-oriented liberal arts discussion. It features many different media including , and sections exist on (also ). It combines rigorous scientific analysis with memoir and a language we鈥檙e speaking outside of academic conferences (astrophysicists 鈥渉ate-following other planets鈥�…).

Each of the book鈥檚 six sections names precise for students, staff, and faculty to take action on. And a key idea in the book involves creating an informed 鈥�鈥� Venn Diagram () to bring individuals to communities in tangible projects, and we will be encouraging as many people on campus and in the community to create and share these as possible.

Excerpt from What If We Get It Right?

On that same trip to Florida, we visited the Key West aquarium, which, with its dim lighting and profusion of water-breathing biodiversity, felt like an outing to meet friendly aliens. I stared into each tank, rapt, as my mom read the plaques aloud and helped me decode this new world. And I was shocked to find there was a touch tank, and that I would be allowed to hold sea creatures. The hundreds of tube feet of a sea urchin tickled my palm. In reverie, I leaned in close to observe its waving spines. I looked up at my mother鈥檚 encouraging face, asking if there was a job where you got to know all about ocean creatures. I looked down at this marvelous invertebrate, mind blown鈥�Can this be real?鈥攚ondering how I could hold on to this feeling forever. Marine biologist, she responded. From then on, when adults posed their inevitable question鈥�What do you want to be when you grow up?鈥擨 had my answer.

My parents held my hands as our plane landed back in New York. The ocean seemed so far away. And there I was, this little Black girl in Brooklyn thinking she could be a marine biologist. Cute. Sure, kid, said the grownups, humoring me. I know now that my background made my dream seem far-fetched. And it hadn鈥檛 occurred to me鈥攅ven as the plane flew over the Atlantic Ocean, Rockaway Beach, and Jamaica Bay as we landed鈥攖hat New York City (an archipelago, with over five hundred miles of coastline) was a perfectly reasonable place to live if you wanted to study the sea. The water off Coney Island wasn鈥檛 a sparkling, welcoming turquoise.

My dreams shifted and arced and merged. By ten years old, I wanted to be the lawyer who got the next Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. out of jail. I wanted to fight for those who were fighting for justice. At fifteen, the goal was park ranger. What could possibly be better than getting paid to walk around in the forest? At twenty, back in the Caribbean studying abroad, it was ocean policy. I had discovered the wild puzzle of science, economics, government, and culture. At twenty-two, while working at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the plan was to become an environmental lawyer, because I knew how badly the Earth needed defending. By twenty-five, I found myself back at marine biology and heading to graduate school鈥攊t seemed way more fun than law school and fewer people were building the bridge to policy from the science side. By thirty, PhD in hand, I had figured out I could essentially do and be all of these things combined, and that would be ocean conservation. All told, I spent nearly a decade studying and working in the Caribbean, trying to help figure out what sustainable ocean use could look like, working with communities to put careful fishing laws in place, establish ocean zoning plans, and create marine protected areas. Then at thirty-seven, watching from afar as hurricanes supercharged by warmed waters tore through the islands I love, it became clear that my work had to expand to focus on climate solutions. And now I鈥檓 middle-aged, and here we are鈥攆rom awe and wonder, to science and policy, to heartache, to building community around solutions.

So, that鈥檚 me. My perspective is that of someone brimming with juxtapositions. I am a scientist who always intended to have a career in policy. I am the daughter of a practical schoolteacher and a wistful artist. I am cold New York winters and Caribbean heat. I am working-class and Harvard. I am Black and White. I am urban and smitten with wilderness. I am proof of the American Dream, and proof that it is all too rare. These are not dichotomies but currents, and they all flow into this book. For twenty-five years, I have been trying to understand what went so wrong, what we can do about it, and what the future can look like, if we get it right.

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