Book Review: “What If We Get It Right?”

“What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures” by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is the most comprehensive, pragmatic, and uplifting piece of climate and environmental literature written in the last decade, if not ever! It is a book that stands with environmental calls to action like Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac.” The kind of book you want to buy a hundred copies of and hand out to every climate defeatist. 

“What If We Get It Right?” is written to be so reader friendly and easy to engage with. Each chapter is an interview with a different expert in a topic related to climate or the environment: climate justice, food sovereignty, disaster recovery and resilience, economic divestment, AI, the Green New Deal, the Blue New Deal, and Indigenous wisdom and leadership — just to name a few. Of course, for the MOFGA community, there is plenty on the importance of local sustainable agriculture. The people interviewed are leading their respective fields and, to my surprise, many have connections to Maine and New England. These are the folks who have dedicated their lives to building a better future for their families, their communities, and humanity. 

The interview format pulls you along so that a rather intellectual book can be broken up into easily digestible sections. To go above and beyond, which seems to be Johnson’s style, “What If We Get It Right?” comes with a plethora of digital resources, including graphs, pictures, and sources, you can reference in tandem. If only all the textbooks I had to read in school were written like this!

I chose to listen to “What If We Get It Right?’ and found this format added significantly to my ability to connect with the author and those interviewed, as the audio version featured recordings of the interviews transcribed in the book. That said, as soon as I finished listening (the same day actually), I went out and bought two print copies: one to lend and one that I can use as a reference and fill with notes of my own. 

At the risk of sounding overly enthusiastic, “What If We Get It Right”? is a book for anyone who eats food, breathes air, drinks water, lives in a community, and cares even the slightest bit about our planet’s future. It left me brimming with a desire to act and a hundred suggestions of tangible ways to do so. It is both a roadmap to a better climate future and an image of what it will look like when we get there. 

– Elliott Greene

This review was originally published in the fall 2025 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener. Browse the archives for free content on organic agriculture and sustainable living practices.