Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
And then Hurricane Irma comes through. You can do everything right and still climate change can pummel you, and that was actually the moment where I shifted my work from ocean to climate. If a hurricane’s going to wreck everything in a way that is very different from the way the hurricanes used to be, I was like, I can’t create enough good ocean policy to stop climate change.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
I am Dr. Rae Wynn Grant, and this is a different kind of nature show, a podcast all about the human drama of saving animals. This season, we’re going to take a journey through the ecological web. From the tiniest of life forms to apex predators, we’ll hear stories from scientists, activists, and adventurers as they find all the different ways the natural world is interconnected, and together we’ll explore our place in nature. This is Going Wild.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
It’s always surprising to me that people leave the ocean out of so many conversations about life on earth.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
Today I’m talking to my friend Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. Ayana is a marine biologist, policy expert and writer, and as a huge advocate for climate solutions, she co-created one of my favorite podcasts, How to Save a Planet, a show all about figuring out what we, humanity, need to do about climate change. As we’ve made our way through the ecological web this season, we’ve covered some pretty incredible species from invisible microbes in the boiling river to the mighty mountain lions of California. And today for the last episode of the season, we’re going to do something a little different. Instead of telling you a story about another amazing species, we’re actually going to talk about water, the life force of our planet, and it’s the epitome of the interconnected web of relationships that we’ve been delving into this season. Ayana’s worked with water on so many different levels from a micro local level as a marine biologist to a more global scale as a climate policy expert, and no one knows water and how it’s so interconnected to the survival of our planet better than Ayana.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
70% of the planet gets one episode, Rae. We need to have an offline conversation about this.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
Oh my God. Okay, Ayana. So just starting really big, I’m wondering just how water is intertwined with climate change, the health of our planet, cultures, and communities around the globe. By the way, a heads-up for all the listeners, my producers have told us that Ayana and I sound really similar in this recording. It might take you a minute to distinguish who’s talking. Anyway, here’s Ayana.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
When people hear water is life, they really seem to mean drinking water and not like the water cycle of which the ocean is clearly a part. So thinking about evaporation and rain and weather and ocean currents and how ocean currents change temperature on land.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
And when you take all of those into consideration, it becomes so clear that water plays a huge role in shaping earth’s climate.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
The ocean has absorbed over 95% of the heat that we’ve trapped with greenhouse gases. And so the ocean is this huge heat sink just soaking everything up and the planet would be way, way hotter if it weren’t for the ocean. It would be about 36 degrees Celsius hotter in the atmosphere.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
Oh my gosh, that’s almost 97 degrees Fahrenheit.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
I mean, the earth would be completely unlivable if the ocean hadn’t absorbed all this heat.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
On top of making our planet livable by regulating the Earth’s temperature, the ocean is also the reason why you and I are breathing right now. The ocean is home to the smallest and most abundant photosynthetic organism on earth, the phytoplankton, and thanks to them, the ocean actually produces over half of the oxygen we breathe and it absorbs around 30% of the excess carbon we’ve emitted through the burning of fossil fuels. As you can imagine, soaking up all this excess heat and carbon dioxide has really detrimental effects to the ocean. Increasing ocean temperatures means the loss of habitat and breeding grounds for marine fishes and mammals, and all the excess carbon dioxide the ocean is absorbing is actually making the ocean more and more acidic.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
So if you’re an animal that’s trying to make a shell or a skeleton in increasingly acidic water, that becomes quite a challenge. Maybe this is my favorite ocean climate fact, is that fish, they’re smelling the water itself. And so when the ocean gets more acidic, they have trouble smelling because the chemistry of seawater has changed. And so they don’t smell predators coming or they don’t smell their food or they don’t smell where home is. And that is just so sad to me that we’ve changed the way the entire ocean smells by changing the chemistry of the whole ocean. And I’m just imagining these little Nemo fishes trying to find their reef and they’re like, “I can’t smell it.”
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
But it’s not just marine animals that are being impacted by all these changes in the ocean’s temperature and chemistry. Whole communities all over the world are also losing their way of life.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
One thing that maybe isn’t at the top of mind for people is that the ocean is actually a huge part of our economy. When we think about how many people rely on the ocean for their full-time jobs, it’s 31 million people. That’s basically the entire labor force of France.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
The majority of that 31 million people are working in the fisheries and tourism industry.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
But when we think more broadly about nutrition, there are half a billion people, 500 million who are relying on the ocean for some significant percentage of their nutrition and livelihoods.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
And for this half a billion people, the ocean is not only their source of income and food, it’s also their way of life
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
Really, there’s a huge and deep and gorgeous cultural aspect to all of this, right. I’m half Jamaican. What is Jamaican culture if you take out the ocean, like Caribbean culture? This goes all over the world. Think about California, New England, Alaska, Florida. The entire coastline of the US and globally are all so deeply intertwined with the ocean and with a healthy ocean.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
But despite the proximity of these places to the ocean and how much they are impacted by it, for people who grew up in urban areas in the US like Ayana, who’s from Brooklyn, the significance of the ocean wasn’t always so apparent, especially when she was growing up in the eighties. When it comes to some of the places that you have heritage, like Jamaica for example.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
And Newfoundland is the other side.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
And Newfoundland. Okay, so let’s take those places and also you’re a New Yorker, so if we take those three places, my assumption is that you, in those three places, have identified as part of a coastal community.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
Not at all. No.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
Okay. Tell me, what is that like?
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
Well, the New York part, my family, we didn’t really travel very much when I was growing up. We were working class and not just popping on jet planes. I’ve never been to Newfoundland. I’ve spent very, very little time in Jamaica. So it’s sad with two such gorgeous cultures to not really feel very much a part of either of those. But I think the hilarious thing to me is growing up in New York City, in Brooklyn, New York City is an archipelago. It’s like two dozen islands.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
It’s not often described that way, but yes.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
Yeah. It’s got almost 500 miles of shoreline and there’s whales coming into the harbor, there’s seahorses living in there, there’s turtles. Everything’s happening in New York Harbor. There’s migratory fish. It’s a huge estuary. And the oyster reefs there used to be so massive, billions of billions of billions of oysters that in New York City a century ago, boats were shipwrecking on oyster reefs and they were selling oysters instead of hot dogs at carts for a penny. So I didn’t experience any of that. I grew up in Brooklyn, but not right on the water. And even if you do, it’s not the kind of water you just jump in and hang out.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
Same with San Francisco in the eighties. I grew up in San Francisco surrounded by water. I realized I lived less than a mile from quote unquote beach, but I didn’t think of this as beach that was accessible. My family didn’t go there. It was urban.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
Yeah, I went once a year with my summer camp, and so when I decided I was going to become a marine biologist as a little kid, it was in Florida.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
When Ayana was five years old, her parents took her on a family vacation to Key West Florida, and during that trip, they went for a ride on a glass bottomed boat and on the boat, Ayana saw these beautiful colorful corals. That was the first time Ayana saw a coral reef.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
It was mind-blowing. We had fish tanks in our house, huge wall of fish tanks. So it’s not like I didn’t know that there was stuff under the water, but that there were whole enormous ecosystems happening. And I’m like, “How come no one told me about this?”
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
Can you tell me more about that spark?
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
I think the spark is just that deep awe and wonder, and like, “What is this? Tell me everything.” I just kept saying after that point, when everyone asked what you want to be when you grow up, I was like, “I want to be a marine biologist.” But I had no sense of what that would actually be as a job. So it was very abstract for me for a super long time.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
It wasn’t until she got to college that Ayana’s fascination with the ocean and this vague idea of being a marine biologist actually started to come into focus.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
When I got to college, I prioritized studying abroad. What’s up with this ocean thing? Can this really be a career? And so I spent a semester in Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean snorkeling, learning the Latin name of every coral reef species, having pop quizzes where the teacher is in the water just pointing at stuff and you have to write all the names down on your clipboard.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
As an urbanite from Brooklyn, spending time in the Caribbean and experiencing the ocean in this way was totally new for Ayana. I mean, imagine being in college and instead of a lecture hall, you’re going to the ocean, literally swimming in it to take a quiz. And during one of these ocean quizzes, her professor threw a bit of a curve ball.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
I remember one of the things he pointed at, I would come up to the surface and I’m like, “I can’t see it,” and I was determined to get a good grade because I had studied so hard. And he was like, “It’s over there. It’s over there.” And I was like, “I have no idea what you’re pointing to.” And he was like, “It’s the thing I’m not going to swim up to,” and it was a reef shark. I was like, “Oh, got it.”
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
Oh my gosh. Oh, wow. But it wasn’t just new marine species Ayana was discovering in her time in the Caribbean. She was immersed in a whole new culture, one where the ocean plays an integral role.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
Getting to live in a fishing community in South Caicos for a few months and just develop a more nuanced understanding of people are really depending on this, because I think often people who come into ocean conservation have a real purist sense of it like we must protect everything in the entire ocean and no one should touch it. And that doesn’t have much of a nuanced lens around culture, sustainable use, food security, livelihoods.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
Kind of missing the history also of the people and the place.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
Yeah. And so it was just really valuable to have that time to really slowly start to understand stuff.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
After her study abroad experience in Turks and Caicos, Ayana went back to the Caribbean to do more field work for her graduate study.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
My research was like, how do we sustainably manage fishing on Caribbean coral reefs? And I interviewed hundreds of fishermen and hundreds of scuba divers. I feel like my Caribbean roots and my blackness became something that helped me bring, I don’t know, I guess I might say a little bit more sensitivity and nuance, and certainly led me to ask different questions than other students in my graduate program were asking. I was like, “You tell me.” I will never ever know this ecosystem as well as you have. You’ve got decades on me. And I think a lot of the reason that they’re willing to open up to me besides just being tenacious and just this curious new girl in a sundress hanging out at fishing docks with a cooler full of beer and a clipboard, I think there was a little bit of benefit of the doubt because I wasn’t just another white kid coming down to extract their stories. But I think really, it’s about showing up and making it clear that you’re going to stick around.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
And Ayana did stick around for a decade. She became the executive director of the Wait Institute, a nonprofit foundation that partners with local governments to develop and implement ocean conservation policies. During that period, she spent significant lengths of time living in Barbuda, a small island in the eastern Caribbean. She was there to launch a comprehensive ocean conservation initiative. And to do that, she spent months conducting interviews with hundreds of fishermen and organizing community meetings to keep the islanders informed about her work.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
There’s a fisherman I went diving with in Barbuda. He’s this super tough, gnarly old dude who had been fishing and diving there his whole life, and he got choked up when he was describing the way it used to be, and he was like, “It used to be so much more colorful.”
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
Visually.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
Yeah, the ocean is empty now. It’s all monotone. The corals, when you lose the corals, that’s the vibrant canvas of a coral reef. And then the fish are also colorful. So when you have overfishing and you have the decline of coral reefs, it just is literally not as vibrant. And that was really sad for him. And so lots of people told me that story. I mean, the ways that people would describe, “Oh, we just use the ocean as our supermarket. We would just decide what we wanted for dinner and we would go get exactly that thing because there was enough of everything.” And now they could go out for a whole day and not really catch anything, like go to McDonald’s for dinner. And so through these conversations with older fishermen, I got such an appreciation for how much the Caribbean marine environment has changed, a heartbreaking appreciation.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
When we come back, we’ll hear how Ayana’s growing love for the Caribbean communities actually drove her to shift her focus from local ocean conservation to a much broader issue, the global climate crisis. Today I’m talking to Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist writer and policy expert. Before shifting her focus to climate solutions, Ayana spent a decade doing ocean conservation work in the Caribbean.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
Those years obviously changed my life, right? Learning about how everything is connected, learning about the history of colonialism and how that really laid the foundation for a lot of the way that things have evolved since then, thinking about culture, thinking about ocean conservation as a matter of cultural preservation.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
Okay, say more.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
If you can’t have a fish fry, if your grandparents can’t take their grandkids fishing, if the water is too polluted to go swimming or to eat the food, yeah, it all impacts culture. So I think those years really just shaped the way I approach policy for sure.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
My assumption is that you don’t think a solution is really a solution if it eliminates a cultural tradition.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
I think the flip side of that though is all traditions don’t scale. A lot of these traditions evolved when there were 10 times fewer people on the island, when there was no mega international tourism, when there was no export of seafood on a significant scale. We’re talking about old cultures. And so that tension is always there, that respect for tradition. But traditions need to evolve because the world has changed so, so much. We can’t just do things the way we’ve always done them. And that’s a really hard conversation. I mean, it’s something that I think about a lot.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
In the fishing community of Barbuda, these hard conversations meant realizing that if the local community wants the coral reefs and other marine animals in their coastal environment to survive, they would need to make huge changes to their fishing practices, including to stop fishing one of their main catches, the parrot parrotfish. Parrotfish are colorful herbivores that eat algae off of coral reefs like a cleanup crew that prevents algae from overtaking the reefs. But in the Caribbean, including in Barbuda, parrotfish have often been over harvested with nuts and spear guns for generations. Considering that parrotfish was a big part of the fishing community’s livelihood in terms of food and income, passing any kind of conservation initiative that would involve banning the catch of parrotfish would require a lot of buy-in from the local community. But this is exactly the kind of conservation work that Ayana is striving for.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
Working with the community, with the fishermen, with the island government to develop completely groundbreaking, comprehensive set of new ocean policies.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
Ayana and her team spent months having these hard conversations with community members in Barbuda, talking to fishermen, local politicians, and really finding solutions for utilizing the ocean to sustain local communities without depleting it. And amazingly, in 2013, the initiative was launched and it was one of the most comprehensive ocean conservation policies implemented in the Caribbean.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
Marine protected areas and protecting herbivores that are really important so that algae doesn’t overgrowth the corals, protecting mangroves and sea grasses, starting a monitoring and enforcement program, training local folks, getting them scuba certified so they can really understand what’s going on underwater, all the right stuff.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
But what Ayana realized is that even having the most comprehensive ocean policies wasn’t enough.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
And then Hurricane Irma comes through. You can do everything right and still climate change can pummel you. And that was actually the moment where I shifted my work from ocean to climate.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
Whoa.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
If a hurricane’s going to wreck everything in a way that is very different from the way that hurricanes used to be, I was like, I can’t create enough good ocean policy to stop climate change.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
In the early morning hours of September 6th, 2017, hurricane Irma hit Barbuda and it devastated the island. Housing and infrastructure were destroyed. The entire community had to be evacuated to the neighboring island of Antigua, and most of them weren’t able to return to their homes for many weeks. Barbuda’s Governor General, Rodney Williams, told the UN that for the first time in over 300 years, there is not a single human being living on Barbuda. In the months following the hurricane, the evacuated Islanders slowly returned to their homes, salvaging what they could, and starting the slow process of rebuilding. But the road to recovery has been long and arduous for the Barbudan’s. Even to this day, the Islanders are still fighting to regain their way of life, but the truth is, their coastal community will never be the same again. I can only imagine how devastating this news must have been. Do you struggle emotionally with looking at a single town, a single village in a single community, knowing where they’ve been, where they are now, the threats against them?
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
It’s so funny because when it comes to work, I turn on this robot mode and I just do everything that needs to be done. And that, I have had to shift in the last few years because this is a human dilemma. And so to just pretend that there aren’t going to be emotions as a part of that, means that we’re not really facing the reality of the problem. And so the way that I handle the enormity of that is to acknowledge the pain, the anxiety, the worry, the fear, the uncertainty about what the future could hold and about how much has already been lost, and then really focus on, okay, so what are we going to do about it? Because to me, the worst possible thing I could do is just sit on my couch and be sad about the world. That would make me so much sadder, if I weren’t participating in driving solutions forward. And as you know, a lot of my work in the past few years has really been focused on welcoming more and more people into being a part of climate solutions.
And so that’s the goal of my new book. It’s called What If We Get It right, because I feel like we don’t talk enough about that. What are we working for? We have basically all the climate solutions we need. So what would it look like if we actually did them? Because this is going to be a lot of effort. Show me it’s worth it.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
What do you envision? What is your positive, hopeful vision for where we can be or where environments can be?
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
So my hesitation right now is I just really hate the word hope. I don’t know if you and I have talked about this before, but the definition of hope has an expectation that things are going to work out. It’s like you assume it’s going to be okay in the end for some reason, but we’ve seen the scientific projections. That’s unreasonable to assume that it’s going to work out okay. The word that I embrace is possibility. There are so many different possible futures, and I think that’s really exciting because as much as there are all these scientific projections, they depend on what we do now. And each of us can help to inflect all of these projections.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
And the way we can help shape the future isn’t necessarily by making grand gestures because small but effective actions can make a huge difference.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
I mean, one of the most mind-blowing stats to me is when Hurricane Sandy hit New York, already 85% of the wetlands were gone, but the 15% that were remaining prevented hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. And who knows how many lives and injuries they saved or prevented. And so there’s all these things that you’re just like, “Oh, wait, this is still worth it,” even if it’s not a hundred percent. I mean, the difference between zero and a hundred is really big, and I think we get caught up so often in we either save the planet or it’s destroyed, as if there’s nothing between apocalypse and paradise.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
I’m sure you have so many visions for the future. What is one that fits between those? Can you paint a picture?
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
Well, something that I’m really excited about is this concept of regenerative ocean farming. We’ve started to hear more and more about regenerative farming on land, using traditional indigenous practices to restore soil health, building topsoil while producing food in poly cultures instead of mono-cultures. We can do the same thing in the ocean. When we think about ocean farming or aquaculture, it’s usually a few big carnivorous fish that we’re thinking about. We’re thinking about salmon and tunas as opposed to oysters and mussels and clams and scallops and all different types of seaweed. And so this idea of regenerative ocean farming, it’s been around under various names and practiced for centuries, seaweed farming, shellfish farming. But in this era of climate change, it’s become really a valuable opportunity because of photosynthesis.
We think so much about protecting trees and restoring trees, but photosynthesis in the ocean is like half the air we breathe comes from phytoplankton in the ocean that’s producing oxygen. Certainly these coastal ecosystems like a wetland or mangrove, are absorbing three or five times more carbon per acre than a forest on land. And seaweeds absorbing carbon can help with ocean acidification locally. You can grow them in this polyculture with these other shellfish. And because the ocean is three dimensions, you actually have all this depth to work with. You can produce an enormous amount of food in a small patch of ocean.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
This vision of the future was inspired by Brent Smith, a regenerative ocean farmer and a co-founder of GreenWave, a nonprofit that trains and supports a new generation of ocean farmers dedicated to bringing life back into the ocean.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
And so thinking about these multi solutions where you’re sequestering all this carbon, you’re providing nutritious, sustainable food, you’re supporting coastal economies and communities, you’re providing all these jobs, and we’re talking about many, many millions of jobs in a sustainable ocean farming economy, you are rejuvenating life along the coasts. And that to me is just such a powerful future vision to hold onto. I mean, why would you not want that future?
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
It is such a wonderful possibility to work towards and regenerative ocean farming is just one out of a host of possible solutions that the ocean can provide.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
And then there’s renewable energy offshore. We can decarbonize shipping, we can protect and restore coastal ecosystems. The ocean could be 20% of the carbon emissions reductions that we need by 2050. It’s like one fifth of the solution is in the ocean. So every time we think about climate policy, we should be thinking about the ocean. And so I just want to encourage everyone who’s listening to not forget about the ocean, whether you’re thinking about the magnificence of ecosystems and wildlife or solutions for our climate crisis,
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
It’s really motivating to hear about the role that the ocean can play in solving the climate crisis. But at the same time, throughout this season, we’ve been talking a lot about the interconnectedness of nature and how we humans fit into that picture. In our previous episode, we spoke to a Tonga archeologist, Desiree Martinez, who introduced us to this idea of seeing the personhood in all living things. In her culture, everything, the animals, the plants, the land, the water, they’re all considered as relatives, and that’s a pretty radical idea. What if we treated water like it was alive? I asked Ayana how this idea fits into her climate advocacy work.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
I mean, I do feel guilty when I fall into this human-centric approach, but of course, we’re part of a web of life. We are just the most disgustingly out of balance part of that web or just lumping all over the web like Godzilla vibes. But I also appreciate that people have, especially right now, I feel like so many people are stretched so thin. And not to prioritize the US, but this is the place that I know the best. And so in a country like this that has such a flimsy safety net, where we’re talking about taking food stamps away from people in the richest country in the world, not being able to make sure everyone has food, not having access to reasonable healthcare. When we think about how hard it is just to get through the day, let alone racism, sexism, all the violence that we’re seeing play out all across the country, I get why people aren’t always prioritizing the environment and conservation. And so a lot of the way that I speak about the environment is to try to get it up on that same tier as all of these other day-to-day survival things. And so it’s not just like, don’t forget about the ocean. It’s like, don’t forget that the earth is our life support system. So what are we going to do to sustain life here on earth with each other?
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
And really the only way for us to sustain ourselves in the long run is by changing our relationship to nature, to other living things.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
One of the things I think about a lot is how can we live within nature instead of on top of it? We just pave over nature and isolate ourselves from it, and we think that we’re not dependent on it because we have literally built all these walls and climate controlled everything. There is no way to separate yourself from nature, even if you can do the mental gymnastics to make it so. Every time there’s a heat wave, every time there’s a hurricane, every time you go to the farmer’s market, every time you see a butterfly in your garden, I mean, I just had this incredible red cardinal fly past my window three seconds ago, and I’m like, “Ooh, nature. Of course, we’re a part of this thing.”
I hope that more and more people get to rejuvenate their sense of biophilia because we’re all born with this. Back to the beginning of our conversation, I fell in love with the ocean because of course I fell in love with the ocean. How do you not fall in love? How do you not like lions and bears and parrotfish and octopuses and all of it? Yes, it is so easy to love, and I think more than hope, that’s what I want people to tap into, is that sense of love and that sense of possibility and that perennial question of like, but what if we get it right? And what if we act as if we love the future? And how would that change the way that we do our work in the world and we show up in nature? And I’m just so galvanized by that question for my own life. What would it look like if I really lived as if I loved the future and all of the possibilities it could hold?
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
That’s beautiful.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
Anyway, worth the shot.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
And it’s radical and it’s useful.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
That is always my goal.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
Wonderful Ayana, Dr. Johnson, thank you so much.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
Oh, Rae, come on.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
Ayana’s new book is called What If We Get It Right, and it’ll be out on January 9th, 2024. I’m one of the people who’s like, “No, don’t call me Doctor,” and then I call everyone else by their full title. I must.
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson:
The one time I insisted on someone calling me Doctor, I was in a boardroom of all white men and I had something to say, and one of them said, “Yes, Ms. Johnson?” And I was like, “You’re welcome to call me Ayana, but if we’re being formal, it’s Dr. Johnson.” And it was the only time I’ve ever flexed my doctor and it felt so good because legit, you can call me Ayana, but if we’re using titles, it’s not miss. Anyway.
Dr. Rae Wynn Grant:
We would like to take a moment to acknowledge some of the locations where the stories in this episode took place. We acknowledge the Caribbean Islands, Turks and Caicos and Barbuda as the homelands of the Taino, Lucayan and Carib peoples, most of whom sadly no longer exist. As caretakers of their land, the peoples of the Caribbean truly lived in a paradise. The skilled farming and fishing techniques of these indigenous nationalities ensured a way of life that was complimented by advanced agriculture. The agricultural produce included corn, beans, squash, peanuts, tomatoes, and a large variety of tree fruits in everyday use were the now familiar sweet potato and Yucca said to have been developed over 10,000 years. This ever ready food supply made for large and thriving communities with huge populations. Although there was little sickness and no disease, the island peoples did develop a considerable natural pharmacopeia.
The first inhabitants of the Turks and Caicos Islands were the Lucayan people who came from Espanola, now present day Haiti in the Dominican Republic. It is believed that the first European to cite the islands was a Spanish conquistador, Juan Ponce de Leon in 1512. Soon after that, the Spaniards began brutally abducting the Lucayans to replace the native population of Espanola, which had been mostly worked to death in the mines. By 1513, the islands were completely devoid of any indigenous population. Espanola originally had a huge population of upwards of 6 million. When the Spaniards first landed. Barbuda was populated by both Tainos and Caribs when the island was first cited by Columbus on his second voyage in 1493. None survived the Spanish occupation. The world of the Islanders came crashing down with the arrival of the Spanish and an unspeakable genocide that has few parallels in the history of humanity. Of the millions of native people living in the Caribbean when Columbus landed, the only survivors are the Caribs, also known as the Kalinago on the island of Dominica, but only numbering a few thousand.
They are nonetheless a strong thriving community with a reservation and a sovereign government.
