WMC News & Features

Jane Fonda is fighting for the climate: “I hope to spend my 82nd birthday in jail” for the cause

Wmc Features Jane Fonda Firedrillfridays David Fenton 101719
Jane Fonda is arrested during the first Fire Drill Friday. (photo by David Fenton)

Actor, producer, and Women’s Media Center co-founder Jane Fonda announced last week that she would be moving to Washington, D.C. for the next four months to conduct a series of civil disobedience actions to draw attention to and mobilize action on the climate change crisis. For this campaign, called Fire Drill Fridays, she is working in concert with a broad array of activists and experts. Following is an edited excerpt from Fonda’s interview on "Women's Media Center Live With Robin Morgan," which aired October 13 and is available by podcast at wmclive.com and all your favorite podcast platforms.

Robin Morgan: She's an actor and a producer. She has a gazillion Oscars, Emmys, and prizes of all kinds. She's been an anti-war and feminist activist for years. She gives a whole new face to aging. She is a mother and a grandmother. She has survived three husbands, numerous lovers, and she is still standing. She gave an entire way of being in your body to American women and women around the world by producing the very first exercise videos for women, for their health. She has been around the world for causes. She's a co-founder of the Women's Media Center, together with Gloria Steinem and myself. She's written books. She's been on Broadway. She's here today to talk about her newest venture, why she's moved to D.C., what she's doing now, and why she's a fierce octogenarian: my dear pal Jane Fonda.

RM: Jane, dear Jane, welcome back. I'm just going to turn you loose on Fire Drill Fridays, and on the fact that you're moving to D.C. for a couple of months. Go for it.

Jane Fonda: Well, I was getting very depressed, actually, understanding that the crisis is here — we're right smack-dab in it — and that I wasn't doing enough. And over Labor Day weekend I read Naomi Klein's new book, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal. And it really rocked me and inspired me. One of the important things that it did was explain the Green New Deal to me in ways that I could really grok. When I first heard the press conference, I said, ‘Oh, god, why are they bringing everything into it? This is about climate.’ After I finished Naomi's book, I thought, ‘What a schmuck [I was]!’” because the Green New Deal is the framework to guide us going forward. It’s not a policy, but there are very, very smart people all over the country working away right now, attaching policies to it, so by the time we get a new president, right out of the gate she'll be able to know what to do. The reason that it’s so inclusive is this: Yes, we're in a climate crisis, but we're also in an empathy crisis. The fabric of our society is unraveling. What [we need is] structural systemic changes in our economy and our society, and it can happen within the framework of capitalism, with a lot of regulation added to it, but it is so big and so profound that everybody is going to have to work together to push it through. You know, the only reason that Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed the New Deal was because people were in the streets.

RM: That's right.

JF: He had to pass Social Security and everything else that he did because he was staving off an outright revolution. That's what we have to do — we have to make it impossible for whoever the new president is to not push forward the Green New Deal. Now, for that to work it means that everyone has to be behind it. Obviously, the fossil fuel industry and the politicians they bought off are going to fight it tooth and nail. But everybody else has to be behind it, and they're not going to be behind it unless there's something in it for them. So since we have to take so much apart, we’re going to put it back together again in a way that is equal, unlike the original New Deal: frontline communities and poor people and people of color have to be the very first to receive the investments, to lift them up and make them less vulnerable to climate change and less vulnerable to poverty. And they have to also be part of figuring out the solutions, they have to be part of the transition. Ask your fossil fuel workers and the communities that depend on the fossil fuel industry. They have to have a say-so in what the transition looks like and how it works. And those fossil fuel workers, they're not going to be just trained for new sustainable energy jobs; those jobs have to be union, they have to pay a living wage that can support a family, buy a house, and send kids to school. Everybody has to know that there's something in it for them.

RM: It affects real democracy.

JF: Yeah. Finally, let's have a democracy, a real democracy. When I understood it in Naomi's book, and then when I started to watch Greta Thunberg, the Swedish student, who, because she's on the [autism] spectrum, sees things not through any filter of denial, or rationalization; she sees it, you know, it just pierces her straight on. So, when she realized what was barreling towards us, it traumatized her so much she stopped eating. And when I read that, I knew she had seen the truth, and that I had to find a way to put my body on the line the way she was, and all the other students all over the world that have been joining her in these Friday climate strikes.

So I decided to move to Washington, D.C., and with the help of a vast array of climate activists, including the Sunrise Movement, FridaysForFuture, and others, every Friday we're going to have a rally in front of the Capitol building, focusing on a different aspect of climate change, and then we're going to get arrested. And I hope to spend my 82nd birthday in jail. But because you can't really go deep at a rally, the Thursday before, at 7:00 p.m., we're having digital live stream teach-ins, where we take questions from audiences across the country, and maybe across the world, and the scientists and the experts and the celebrity activists that will be with me on Friday will be part of that teach-in.

RM: How do people find the teach-ins?

JF: Our website: firedrillfridays.com. I’m standing beside the youth and trying to lift up their messages, so we’re working very closely together. Every Friday we focus on something else, like on October 18 we're focusing on why the Green New Deal provides a framework for moving to a fossil-free future. On October 25 we [focus on] oceans with Ten Danson, and other scientists are coming in to focus on that. November 1 it will be women and climate change, and we have some fantastic women coming from New Orleans, and Eve Ensler is coming, and some poets, and Catherine Keener, and it's going to be great. And then, November 8, it's war and the military and climate. And so it goes, until the middle of January.

RM: People can access the Fire Drill Fridays through the website, and then if they're anywhere in the neighborhood of D.C., they can attend in person on the actual Fridays in front of Congress. God knows it needs it.

JF: We’re trying to keep alive the momentum that was created by the students. I think we've reached a point now where it's a tipping point.

RM: There is so much going on in any direction that you look. Even as we speak, the Turks are bombing the Kurds, we're moving ahead on impeachment and the White House is trying to ignore it — but without women and water and the planet, there is no moving ahead on any of these fronts. This is our only spaceship.

JF: Yeah, it's the existential crisis that's looming over us all, and because there is so much noise — and it's important noise, I mean, the impeachment has an impact on climate change, so I don't need to explain that — it helps to have a movie star get arrested, and have her friends join her to keep the climate crisis on the front line.

RM: Well, by this time I think you're more than a movie star; you're Mother Courage crossed with the Energizer Bunny. You're also doing the Progressive Strategy Summit, on the 25th of October, aren't you?

JF: Yeah, I called Pramila Jayapal, the congresswoman from Washington State, and she got me invited to speak at the Congressional Progressive Caucus, so, yes, I will be there.

RM: But it's also organizers and grassroots activists, and influential people, and congresspeople and so forth. So you're hitting on all cylinders. This does not mean — my listeners will be upset if I don't ask — this does not mean the end of Gracie and Frankie?

JF: I met with Ted Sarandos, who is the head of Netflix, and I said, “Ted, this is what I want to do. Can you give me a year's hiatus, so I could do it for a year?” And he said he would try, but then he told me I can't do it because of everybody's contracts; it's too complicated. So I have to stop in the middle of January to go back to work on Grace and Frankie, and I’m perfectly happy about that, but I would have liked to do what I'm doing for a year.

RM: Well, you'll just have to spread yourself  even thinner, and do that for a while, and then come back. I'm afraid that the crisis will still be waiting.

JF: I'll come back afterwards.

RM: You're amazing. So, Fire Drill Fridays, 11:00 a.m., in front of the Capitol. Those congresspeople need their spines stiffened. And this involves pretty much every environmental group from Green Peace on through women's groups and civil rights groups …

JF: Rain Forest Action, Climate Action Network, Oil Change International, League of Conservation Voters, Friends of the Earth, you name it.

RM: And you'll be speaking, and whoever else is an expert…

JF:  … on the topic. There will be expert scientists, celebrity activists, kids, and frontline community people. That means people representing communities that are the most vulnerable to climate change. Like yesterday I was in Lowndes County [Alabama], where sewage is coming right in the backyards, up through to ground, because of all the rain, for example.

RM: Yeah, and the counties in California that are going up in flames, and the low-lying counties, and the shore counties. And of course, globally we've only just begun to touch the refugee and migrant problem, because we haven't even begun to really see climate refugees yet.

JF: Well, actually, a lot of the refugees are climate refugees.

RM: Well, yes, they're fleeing drought and fallow fields. But it's going to get much worse.

JF: Oh, it's going to be by the millions and millions — climate refugees, mass migration — and we have to figure out how to deal with this. You know, those people who don't like refugees should understand then we have to stop climate change.

RM: Yes, well, we have to stop climate change in order to do anything else. Have you ever been able to figure out how they can be so blind? They have children, too. How they can deny so flatly? How do they do it?

JF: I think what we're staring at is late-stage capitalism, where people are so greedy, and the public sphere has been wiped off the face of the earth in their minds, all that matters is them and their wealth, even more than their families, I guess. You know, if they think they're immune, and by “they” I just want to clarify we're talking about the fossil fuel industry — not the workers, but the people who run the companies, and the politicians they bought off. You know what just makes me so angry, my throat closes up — the fossil fuel industry, with their scientists, knew thirty years ago what they were doing. They knew they were poisoning the environment, and they lied about it. And they hoodwinked us. To this day they're lying about it. Had we known what was known thirty years ago, and started to act, the transition off of fossil fuels could have been incremental. It could have been moderate. But it's too late for moderation now. You know, that's what's so important about a Green New Deal. It is profound, and it's going to take every single one of us.

RM: They did the same thing with tobacco. They knew…

JF: Yeah, that's true. Except that tobacco only affected people who smoked.

RM: That's correct, though also those immediately around them.

JF: This affects my three-month-old grandchild, you know, people who had nothing to do with what we're facing, what we're … not just facing, we're smack-dab in the middle of it.

RM: I think one of the things is that media, every time it covers a fire, the raging fires in California, or floods or “unusually strong storms,” or “My goodness, Category 5 hurricanes happening more and more and more,” it should connect the dots and link that to “this is climate change. This is climate change. This is climate change.” That we're in it, now.

 



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