Actor, model, producer, activist and former fitness guru Jane Fonda reflects on her relationship with climate change activism in a new book: What Can I Do? My Path from Climate Despair to Action.
Fonda is a two-time Oscar winner and an Emmy award-winning American actress with a lifelong commitment to political activism. She now sits on the boards of the V-Day movement against violence to women, the Women's Media Center (which she cofounded in 2004), the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power and Potential, and youth development programme Homeboy Industries, and has become well known for her climate activism.
Jane Fonda Photo: (Ted Eytan CC BY-SA 4.0)
Fonda's latest book is the story of her commitment, and a handbook of what is required to save the planet, for the average person through to governments. She says after feeling frustrated with the limited options at her own finger-tips, she began looking wider.
Photo: supplied
"That's why what I'm interested in, along with a lot of other organisations, is building the numbers [of people taking action].
"There's a project at Yale called Climate Communications, and they say there are 23 million Americans who know there's a climate crisis but don't know what to do, and have never never done anything because nobody asked them; so... you don't need to worry about the people who don't believe there's a problem. Organise those 23 million people and you've won.
"And 13 million people are prepared to engage in civil disobedience, but nobody's asked them - so our target is the great unasked, get them organised and you've won."
Last year Fonda moved to Washington DC to lead the weekly climate change demonstrations called Fire Drill Fridays, in honour of Greta Thunberg's Friday's for Future and the exhortation to act as if "our house is on fire".
"I had done everything I could as an individual, in terms of how I eat and getting rid of single use plastics - I drive an electric car, but I know that's just how you're supposed to start, that's the on ramp. It's not supposed to be the ending, I needed to do more.
"I just didn't know what to do, and was very depressed about it until I read Naomi Klein's book On Fire, A Burning Case for the Green New Deal, and she wrote about the science - I hadn't done what Greta told me to do; focus on what the science is telling us, which is that we only have less than 10 years to cut fossil fuel emissions in half. It made me really understand how time was running out and the bad guy is the fossil fuel industry and that's what we have to focus on.
"Like many people I was focused more on the demand side, the solar panels and the wind turbines and all of that - without focusing enough on the cause of the climate crisis, the fossil fuel industry. Then I read what Greta said, in Naomi's book, she said we have to get out of our comfort zones - that's what lit me up and caused me to move to DC, and the minute that I did, and I threw myself into this my depression lifted."
Fonda says famous people like her have an obligation to do more, and her public platform gives her the opportunity to introduce those fighting on the frontline, and those directly affected and made ill by pollution and climate change.
"The climate crisis isn't some far away thing that is not impacting us now, this is a here and now. Of course it's a little hard to escape the here and now when half my state's burning."
More than 100 fires are burning across the West coast of the US, turning skies orange with smoke Photo: AFP / Harold Postic
Activists were worried the Covid-19 pandemic could distract from the urgency of climate change, but Fonda says the numbers following Fire Drill Friday have built strongly this year.
"The movement is growing, they care, they understand, they're signing up to volunteer by the thousands, and right now the volunteers are focusing on getting people registered and making sure they vote.
"That's the most critical thing that we're doing right now, because we've got to get rid of this guy... what I say to these young people who say 'I love Bernie but I don't know if I can vote for Joe Biden', but what I say is: 'wouldn't you rather push [Biden] than a fascist', and they kind of get that."
She says the US president Donald Trump is "in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry".
"They give a lot of money. We can never again vote for a candidate who takes money from the fossil fuel industry. We have to change everything if he's re-elected, so we're assuming we are going to mobilise enough people - everyone who's thinking straight in America is working to try to get Biden elected, and that's what we're going to focus on for two months.
"We're at a real crossroads civilisationally, and it's not just in the US, but we are a leading country so what we do is really important. We're not just facing a climate crisis we're facing an empathy crisis, our social fabric is unravelling. So we have to solve that at the same time we solve the racial crisis and the health crisis and the climate crisis, and the solutions can be overlapping and the same."
Jane Fonda speaks onstage at the Respect Rally during the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Photo: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images/AFP
The sweeping legislative and economic package proposed for the US described as The Green New Deal is holistic and pragmatic, she says.
"It can happen, it happened in this country in the 1930s when Franklin D Roosevelt was president, and people forced him to take big, brave, bold - and yes, very expensive - actions, but it lifted the US out of despair and desperation, people were starving and committing suicide. It did address the problems and solve them, and brought us things that we still benefit from today, like social security for example.
"We have to do that again now, only it has to be in the clean and sustainable energy sector that moves the economy forward, and it can, there are many many more jobs in the clean energy sector than in fossil fuel. We just have to sure that the workers in the fossil fuel industry are trained for new jobs that are union jobs that pay a decent wage so they can support their families ... so they're not left behind."
A growing undercurrent of individualist sentiment and mistrust in community and authorities has led to deep-rooted problems.
"Ever since the 40s - Reagan in this country, and Thatcher in England, there's been a deliberate and well-orchestrated effort to make people think that government is bad and individualism is good.
"And we have to fight against it with every ounce of our being - we're vulnerable as individuals we only have power when we come together in an organised and strategic way. And when that happens, history shows that we can make a difference.
"It's the only thing that has ever made a difference in terms of turning history in a new direction.
