Alex Williams

Johnson, 39, is the founder of Ocean Collectiv, a conservation consultancy, and of Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank, and speaks frequently at TED Talks, climate rallies and her salons at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. Protecting the ocean is crucial for people at all economic levels, she said, not just bicoastal elites who look down their noses at plastic straws.

(This interview has been edited and condensed.)

Q: You have talked a lot about how the oceans are crucial in the fight against climate change. How so?

A: When people talk about the destruction of the Amazon, and how forests in general are the lungs of the planet, I always want to jump in and say the ocean is a huge part of that, too.

Phytoplankton — these tiny little plants in the ocean — produce a huge percentage of the oxygen we breathe, and the population of phytoplankton is declining. That should be a cause for concern for every single person.

Q: You hear a lot of talk about plastic straws. Is that issue really a big deal or is it greenwashing?

A: Straws are not the biggest problem facing the ocean, but they are an opportunity to think about what else we can do to reduce our impact on the planet.

It really cracked me up the other day. I was walking down the street in Fort Greene, the neighborhood where I grew up and where I live now, and I saw this guy looking super-stylish carrying an iced coffee in a plastic to-go coffee cup with a plastic lid, and I turned to look, and he’s got a metal straw in the cup.

Part of me wanted to just hit it out of his hand and be like, “Dude, you’re totally missing the point! If you’re going to bring a straw, just bring your own cup!”

Q: Some of those straws, I guess, can end up in the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Are there any steps we can take to tackle that?

A: I kind of recoil at this question, to be honest, because I feel like this has been done a million times: carry your own water bottle, carry your own grocery bags. But I think there is a harder answer, which is that it does actually require some sacrifice.

Like I’ll be walking down the street and I want to get a Juice Press because I’m hungry and I didn’t bring enough snacks for the day, and I don’t. There is an element of: “Don’t buy the thing that’s in plastic.”

There’s no cute answer, right? Nothing that is disposable can be sustainable.

Q: The United Nations says that 93% of commercial fish stocks are being fished at or beyond capacity. What kind of fish should we avoid eating?

A: Pending changes which could come at any moment, the U.S. still does a very good job of managing our fish population. So eat U.S. seafood and support your fishermen who are doing it right.

And eat lower on the food chain. Instead of tuna, eat sardines and anchovies — those little ones that are reproducing super-quickly. Because tuna is so far up the food chain, if we were eating the land equivalent of tuna, it would be like eating whatever kind of dragon eats a lion. It’s this incredible beast, and we will never be able to have sustainable tuna fishing at scale.

Q: Is farmed seafood preferable to wild?

A: The sustainability of fish farming is improving, but farmed fish are still often grown in high densities, and so there’s a lot of spread of disease and pollution.

But ocean farming of shellfish — oysters, mussels and clams — and seaweed is super-sustainable, and we should all be eating more of those things because they actually just live off of nutrients in the water and sunlight.

In fact, eating shellfish like oysters can be more sustainable than being totally vegan, because it’s just such an efficient and low-carbon way to make protein. Shellfish are absorbing carbon as they’re making their shells. And seaweed is absorbing tons of CO2, because they’re plants.

Q: Some people think ocean conservation is an elitist issue for people with beach houses. Why does it matter for people across the economic spectrum?

A: It’s no coincidence which communities bear the brunt of sea level rise, pollution and strengthened storms. Along the coasts, it’s poor communities and communities of color who are most at risk. It’s those who already have the fewest resources who are most in danger, not people with vacation homes and yachts. Ocean conservation is a social justice issue.

Q: Climate change deniers like to paint conservation as a pet cause for limousine liberals.

A: It’s so easy to think about the typical environmentalist as this stereotype of a fit white guy stepping out of a Prius, looking out into the mountains wearing a Patagonia jacket. But I’ve looked into the polling data, and that’s completely false.

It’s young people, and it’s people of color, and it’s women who disproportionately care about environmental and climate issues, and are most supportive of stronger government policies to address them: 68% of people of color say they are worried about the impacts of climate change, compared to 55% of white people.

Q: Do you see the green movement forging stronger ties to the social justice movement?

A: I mean, Black Lives Matter has a part of their platform that’s about climate and the environment, because it is a justice issue. If you think about the rates of asthma in inner-city communities that are near power plants or exposed to other types of pollution, it’s a lot higher.

And when we think about immigration, and how a lot of migration is now driven by climate change, whether it’s droughts and crop failures or the impacts of storms, that becomes a social justice issue that was triggered by the impacts on communities that did the least to emit the carbon to cause the problem.

Q: That’s a lot of bad news to take in. What’s the biggest reason for hope?

A: Nature is super-resilient if we give it a chance, right? If we stop polluting the ocean, it will be less polluted. If we stop overfishing, in most cases, fish populations will recover.

The ocean has already absorbed about 30% of the excess CO2 that we’ve trapped by burning fossil fuels. And the ocean has already absorbed 93% of the heat that we’ve trapped. And so the ocean is trying its best to buffer us from our worst, right? We need to return the favor.

This article originally appeared in

Why Saving the Oceans Is as Vital as Protecting Rain Forests

Saving the oceans is key to fighting the climate crisis, according to Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a Brooklyn-born marine biologist and activist who is a rising figure in the climate movement.

A close friend, Sylvia Reed, said the cause was brain cancer.

If a life is a journey, Beschta’s was full of twists and turns, geographically and vocationally. After growing up in Wisconsin, a stint at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and a brief period living in Berkeley, California, she hitchhiked across the country to New York with dreams of becoming a fine artist.

In the 1970s, when punk rock burst loudly on the music world, Beschta, a self-taught guitarist and vocalist, could be found in crowded, raucous downtown Manhattan nightclubs belting out attitude-laced three-chord rockers in the Patti Smith vein.

By the end of the ’80s she had gone in a completely new direction, earning a law degree and working for a charity representing abuse victims and immigrants.

By the early 2000s she was a federal government lawyer in New York handling immigration cases. And by early this year she had become a federal judge, also in New York — not long after she learned of her cancer diagnosis.

To those who recall her days at CBGB, the epicenter of the punk scene in 1970s New York, Beschta’s career path may have seemed incongruous. But to friends, there was always a common thread.

“For Susan, music and art were there to lift up all people, and this deep-seated belief was what she took with her from the downtown scene to the halls of justice,” Reed, who was once married to Lou Reed, said in an email. “To her, all were equal, all were entitled to human compassion.”

In their ′70s heyday, the Erasers — made up of two men and, unusually, three women — were well known among the rock cognoscenti. In clubs like CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, the band opened for the likes of Smith, the Feelies and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Frequently, the Erasers headlined.

Beschta was also at the center of punk’s downtown social scene, presiding over parties at the Elizabeth Street loft she shared with her bandmates Jody Beach and Jane Fire. Poet Allen Ginsberg and musicians like John Cale, Johnny Rotten and Iggy Pop might show up.

But even by the here-today-gone-tomorrow ethos of punk, the Erasers’ recording output was minuscule. The band — its other members were Richie Lure and David Ebony — recorded only three songs. One, a single — “Funny,” with “I Won’t Give Up” on the B side — was produced by Richard Lloyd of the band Television but remained unreleased until it was included in a 2015 boxed set celebrating a defunct New York label, Ork Records.

But the band did not lack for admirers. After one gig in 1978, the influential British music publication NME wondered why no record companies had “picked up these flecks of gold dust from the floor of CBGBs.”

And in a 1977 issue of the underground music publication New York Rocker, the Erasers came in second in a reader poll of favorite unrecorded bands, ahead of future critical darlings like the Cramps and the Feelies.

“Susan was one of the musicians at the heart of CBGB, when what was to be called ‘punk’ was still an undefined desire and attitude developing there,” Richard Hell, who dated Beschta in her musician days, recalled in an email. “And ‘heart’ is the word, because she was unusual in that environment for her kindness and drive to work for justice.”

That drive started with the cause of gender equality.

“One of the things I‘ve been particularly curious of throughout my whole career as a performing artist was the fact of being a woman,” Beschta said in an interview with the alternative newspaper The East Village Eye in the 1980s, when she went by the name Susan Springfield. “One of my main concerns as a woman was to set a good example as an individual for other women, particularly young girls in the middle of nowhere. The place where I came from.”

One shibboleth she sought to shatter was the idea of female rockers as sex objects.

“We all played instruments, we weren’t just the pretty girl up front,” she told Flavorwire, a website devoted to popular culture, in 2016. “And this was right on the heels of the feminist movement. If you saw one of our first posters, I had really long, curly hair — beautiful — and shortly thereafter I made a statement and had it all chopped off.”

But if Beschta was rebellious, she was no punk-rock nihilist.

“Susan was that unusual artist who performed with spunk and drive on the stage of CBGBs, drawing all eyes to her, but remained devoid of ego, absent any need to push anyone else offstage,” Reed wrote in an email. She added, “She thought that creativity was its own reward.”

Susan Marie Beschta was born on April 21, 1952, in Appleton, Wisconsin, to Gerald and Jean (Gericke) Beschta. After hitchhiking to New York, she enrolled as an undergraduate at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn with plans of becoming a painter and a fine-art photographer. During that time she met another aspiring artist, Jane Fire, and the two decided to investigate a more raucous form of art.

“I wanted to do something in a more populist way,” Beschta told Flavorwire. With fine art, she said, “I would only be able to sell it to rich people.”

After batting around the idea of starting a band with Fire and Ebony, a recent college graduate who had studied art history, they formed the Erasers, taking the name from a surrealistic detective novel by French avant-garde writer Alain Robbe-Grillet.

After the band made its final appearance, at the Peppermint Lounge in Midtown in 1981, Beschta pursued a solo career, collaborating with composers like Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca.

Eventually, however, she came to believe that she had accomplished all that she could with music and decided to chart a new path, entering the City University of New York School of Law and earning her degree in 1989.

Ebony, her former bandmate, said the move was not as improbable as it might have seemed. She had always been passionate about women’s rights, gay rights and racial equality, he said by email, and “thought that she could be more effective in bringing about change through the legal system — rather than from the compromised platform of the entertainment industry.”

Beschta spent nine years doing legal work for Catholic Charities in New York, in some instances taking on asylum cases involving victims of sexual slavery and female genital mutilation. She later worked for Bretz &amp; Coven, an immigration law firm in New York.

“Susan was a crusader who was passionate about every case and every person,” said Kerry Bretz, a founding partner of the firm.

In 2002 Ms. Beschta joined the Department of Homeland Security as an assistant chief counsel in New York, focusing on immigration cases. She remained there for 16 years and was ultimately promoted to deputy chief counsel.

She also did volunteer work with groups like ACT UP, the AIDS advocacy organization, and Codepink, a female-led grass-roots anti-war organization.

She died at the Dawn Greene Hospice in Manhattan.

Beschta, who never married, is survived by two sons, Thando Marshall and Vuyisile Jamal Beschta; a daughter, Layla Marie Beschta; three brothers, Randy, Greg and Rick Beschta; and a sister, Debbie Alswager.

Beschta had been appointed to the New York City Immigration Court, an arm of the Justice Department, when she received her cancer diagnosis in March 2018. After a brain tumor was removed that month, she recovered enough to complete her training as an immigration judge in Washington. She was sworn in in November.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/obituaries/susan-beschta-dead.html" id="02d70d00-60ef-3762-a888-9a36623df520">The New York Times</a>.

Susan Beschta, who performed in the 1970s art-punk band the Erasers as frontwoman Susan Springfield before taking an unlikely career turn, becoming a human rights lawyer and then an immigration judge, died May 2 in hospice care in Manhattan. She was 67.

Susan Beschta, Punk Rocker Turned Judge, Is Dead at 67

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Alex Williams

Articles written by the author

Why Saving the Oceans Is as Vital as Protecting Rain Forests

Susan Beschta, Punk Rocker Turned Judge, Is Dead at 67