Common Read

What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and numerous collaborators is the SUNY Geneseo Common Read selection for 2025-2026m in connection with Ideas That Matter: Climate Change and the Individual!

An action- 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 mixtapes and art, and sections exist on podcasts (also here). It combines rigorous scientific analysis with memoir and a language we’re speaking outside of academic conferences (astrophysicists “hate-following other planets”...).

Each of the book’s six sections names precise Problems and Possibilities for students, staff, and faculty to take action on. And a key idea in the book involves creating an informed “Your Climate Action” Venn Diagram (worksheet here) 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.

Students in sections of CMRD 101 will read the whole text, and we encourage other courses and groups to adopt the book in part or in whole; we are happy to provide support for those seeking to do so. It is currently available in hardcover and audiobook and will be out in paperback Sep. 2025.

How to Get Involved

• Check out the Reading & Action Guide to get inspiration even before reading
• Check out the Table of Contents 
• Find Discussion Questions, Reflection Prompts, Service Learning Prompts, and more in the First Year Reading Guide (many of these work even without assigning part/all of the book).
• Tell us something you’re doing in relation to climate change that you’d want the Common Read team/Ideas That Matter courses to know about/help with.
• Sign your department, office, club, social group etc. to adopt the book as a reading group discussion and/or express interest in being part of a reading group (sign up here)
• Sign up for a summer faculty/staff reading group with the TLC - email tlc@geneseo.edu
• Listen to a podcast episode with Johnson about What If We Get It Right?
• Subscribe to Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s Substack
• Read this excerpt about reflection and implementation and consider including it during a course or co-curricular activity.

Questions? Ideas about using the book? Reach out to us here!

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’s 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—Can this be real?—wondering how I could hold on to this feeling forever. Marine biologist, she responded. From then on, when adults posed their inevitable question—What do you want to be when you grow up?—I 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’t occurred to me—even as the plane flew over the Atlantic Ocean, Rockaway Beach, and Jamaica Bay as we landed—that 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’t 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—it 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’m middle-aged, and here we are—from awe and wonder, to science and policy, to heartache, to building community around solutions.

So, that’s 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.

Read further excerpts here

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