ALSO BY JANE FONDA

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My Life So Far

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Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020

Copyright © Jane Fonda 2020

Jane Fonda asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Photograph Credits Pages 16, 161: courtesy of Jane Fonda; pages 79, 99, 214: courtesy of Madeline Carretero; pages 71, 82, 85, 86, 90, 91, 111: courtesy of Liz Gorman; page 324: courtesy of Vanessa Vadim; other photographs courtesy of Greenpeace/Tim Aubry

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100% of the author’s net proceeds from What Can I Do? will go to Greenpeace

Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008404611

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When I was young, I thought activism was a sprint,

and I worked around the clock, hoping for quick change.

When I was older, I learned activism is a marathon,

and I learned to pace myself.

At eighty-two, I realize it is neither sprint nor marathon;

it is a relay race. The most important thing we adults can do now

is join and support the next generation of climate activists

ready to lead the movement.

It is to them that I dedicate this book.

Contents

COVER

ALSO BY JANE FONDA

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

NOTE TO READERS

DEDICATION

CHAPTER ONE

The Wake-Up Call

CHAPTER TWO

The Launch

CHAPTER THREE

The Green New Deal

CHAPTER FOUR

Oceans and Climate Change

CHAPTER FIVE

Women and Climate Change

CHAPTER SIX

War, the Military, and Climate Change

CHAPTER SEVEN

Environmental Justice

CHAPTER EIGHT

Water and Climate Change

CHAPTER NINE

Plastics

CHAPTER TEN

Food, Agriculture, and Climate Change

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Climate, Migration, and Human Rights

CHAPTER TWELVE

Jobs and a Just Transition

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Health and Climate Change

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Forests and Climate Change

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Holding the Fossil Fuel Industry Accountable

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Stop the Money Pipeline

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Fire Drill Fridays: Going Forward

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

APPENDIX A: AN INTRODUCTION TO UNDERSTANDING THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY

APPENDIX B: CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

GREENPEACE NONVIOLENCE GUIDELINES

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Jane sits with Annie at Greenpeace USA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., at the very first Fire Drill Fridays planning meeting in September.

CHAPTER ONE
The Wake-Up Call

During Labor Day weekend in 2019, I was in Big Sur with my pals Catherine Keener and Rosanna Arquette. I have a history with Big Sur dating back to 1961, when I first ventured there by myself in search of Henry Miller. I had just read a pamphlet he wrote, To Paint Is to Love Again, and I wanted to meet him and talk. He wasn’t there, but I ended up spending a week at the hot springs (later to become Esalen), and it was transformative.

Now here I was once again in need of transformation. I’ve been an environmental activist since the 1970s, installing a windmill at my ranch in 1978 and solar heating and electricity in my Santa Monica home in 1981, speaking at rallies, attending Greenpeace marches in both the United States and Canada, and later getting an electric car, stopping my use of single-use plastic, recycling, and cutting back on red meat. But I was still ill at ease. Existential angst? I had just learned that there are 2.9 billion fewer birds in North America than there were in 1970; I knew that sea turtles are strangling from tumors caused by pollution in the oceans; whales are found dead with fifty pounds of plastic in their bellies; polar bears are starving; 93 percent of children worldwide are breathing polluted air that is endangering their health; and untold numbers of people were living in the midst of oil wells and refineries that were causing them major health problems. But I hadn’t really focused on what the scientists were saying.* I knew we needed to reduce fossil fuel use and invest in clean energy alternatives, fast, but these things remained a disturbing reality sitting out there somewhere, removed from me. I hadn’t taken it in and metabolized it. Instead, I would wonder if perhaps humankind deserved the fate it had created. I remembered what E. O. Wilson said decades ago, which I paraphrase: God granted the gift of intelligence to the wrong species. It should have gone to non-meat-eating creatures with no thumbs such as whales and dolphins. I agreed. Just get rid of us Homo sapiens ASAP and things will restore themselves.

But all the while, I knew this fatalist thinking was a cop-out, and I didn’t like myself for it. I’d be reminded of the recent birth of my grandson, and my two older grandkids, and the many people out there fighting for a better planet. No, fatalism couldn’t be for me. Yet I was compartmentalizing my grief rather than letting it into my heart.

Catherine Keener reminded me recently how, on the five-hour drive to Big Sur, she would go on an hourly rant: What can I do? Tell me what to do! Where are the leaders? I need someone to tell me what to do! I felt impotent, angry with myself for my inability to give her the answers she needed because I felt the same way. What can I do?

The very morning we left for Big Sur, I’d received an advance copy of Naomi Klein’s new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. All my life, the exact book I needed without even knowing it had come to me at the perfect time and changed my trajectory. Here it was again. I began reading it the next day, and a quarter of the way through I was shaking with intensity.

Over time, I’ve asked myself what it was about Naomi’s book that so affected me. One was the way she wrote about Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old Swedish activist who, in 2018, started a movement called Fridays for Future that had inspired school strikes for climate action around the world, involving millions of students. I knew about Greta. A lot had been written about her, including that she was on the autism spectrum. But until Naomi, I hadn’t understood what that had to do with the power of her connection to the climate crisis and the way she communicated about it. Naomi explained that unlike the rest of us, people with Asperger’s don’t look around and take cues about how to behave and feel from the people they see. They receive information pure and direct. If they study the science of climate change as Greta, a self-described science nerd, did, they aren’t able to read the stark facts, feel scared for a while, and then go about business as usual. When Greta, with her unfiltered focus, her inability to compartmentalize or cope with cognitive dissonance, read the science showing disaster was looming, she didn’t believe it at first. “It can’t be true, because, if it were, nobody would be speaking of anything else. All people would be doing is trying to figure out how to fix it.” But when she realized the science was true and nobody was behaving as they should in a crisis, she became traumatized. She stopped speaking and eating.

Reading this was like a kick in my stomach. I knew that what Greta had seen was the truth, that, as she said, we should be behaving as if our house were on fire, as if we were in a crisis, because we are. The brave, young student was exhorting us to get out of our comfort zone and do something. Learning this about Greta permitted me to take the science into my own body. This was the second thing in Naomi’s book that changed me: the clarity with which she conveyed what the scientists were saying in the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Virtually unanimously, the scientists make clear that given the worsening disasters we’re already seeing, and the additional warming that is already baked in because we didn’t act forty years ago, we don’t stand a chance at changing course in time without profound, systemic economic and social change, and they say, as of 2020, we have a brief ten years before the tipping point is reached. Ten years to reduce fossil fuel emissions roughly in half and then reduce to net zero by 2050 to avoid uncontrollable unraveling of the natural life-support system.

But the scientists also believe that we have the technology to make the transition in time to clean, renewable energy and that the most important factor in whether we can pull off what’s needed will be collective actions taken by social movements on an unprecedented scale. Social movements. In my fifty years of activism, I’d been part of social movements that changed policy. For instance, in 1972 and 1973, Tom Hayden, my second husband, and I launched the Indochina Peace Campaign, and together with scores of activists we crisscrossed the country educating the people whom the then president Richard Nixon described as the Silent Majority about the Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers, and the need to cut the funding that was shoring up the government the United States had installed in South Vietnam that was keeping the war going. Especially because the just-released Pentagon Papers revealed that a succession of administrations had known we couldn’t win. The Pentagon Papers were to the Vietnam War what I think the IPCC 2018 report was to the climate crisis: irrefutable proof of lying and deceit on the part of people in power. In the end, the aid was cut, our client government collapsed, and the Vietnam War ended. Yes, I had experienced the effectiveness of mobilizing and organizing with a clear strategy and authoritative documents to back us up.

The third thing in Naomi’s book that struck me was how she explained the Green New Deal (GND). When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey introduced the Green New Deal resolution in 2019, I thought including issues like low-carbon jobs and environmental and economic justice in a document about climate was taking it too far and would easily be dismissed by the right as a leftist wish list. But Naomi’s book made me understand justice is at the heart of solving what led to the climate crisis. The Green New Deal beckons us into a future where everyone can see a place for themselves.

When you’re famous, there are so many ways to lift issues and amplify voices. God knows I’ve done it before to varying degrees of success. But what can I do? What’s the right way to use my platform now, when things are getting worse fast?

Naomi’s book made clear that right now is the last possible moment in history when changing course can mean saving lives and species on an unimaginable scale. A true civilizational responsibility rests on our shoulders!

I knew what I needed to do, and I felt it so strongly I was quivering all over.

“I’m going to move to Washington, D.C., for a year and camp out in front of the White House to protest climate change,” I told Rosanna and Catherine over dinner at the Post Ranch Inn. “If Greta can do it, so can I.”

There, I’d said it to my pals, and now I couldn’t back out.

Being brave, gung ho gals, Catherine and Rosanna were all for it and pledged to join me when they could. Over the next few days we hiked, and I kept reading Naomi’s book. I felt more strongly that if I got the word out, others would join me. It had happened before during the later years of the Vietnam War. At night I lay in bed trying to remember where I’d stored my sleeping bag and bivy sack that have seen me through downpours and blizzards at fourteen thousand feet. I’ve done a lot of camping in my life and had all the right equipment, but I’d never camped in a city. Where will I poop and pee? I wondered. I’m way older now and have to get up during the night more often. Rosanna, Catherine, and I studied maps of D.C. trying to pick a spot where I would set up, but I realized I didn’t want a lonely vigil. What would be the point of that? I needed expert help to plan this. That’s when I tried to call Annie Leonard, the director of Greenpeace USA, because they were fearless supporters of big actions and, while I wasn’t certain, I felt my action might become big. I paced in front of Rosanna’s house, trying to get a phone signal, when I finally managed to reach her.

“Annie, it’s Jane Fonda here, do you have a minute? I have an idea and I need your advice.”

Annie assured me she did, so I rushed on. “I’m reading Naomi’s book, and I’ve decided to move to Washington for a year and camp out in front of the White House. I want to start in three weeks. Can you help me figure it out?” See, I’m someone who, when she gets an idea, is 100 percent ready to take a leap of faith and just do it. In fact, leaps of faith are my only form of exercise these days.

There was a rather long silence on Annie’s end, and then she said, “Well, Jane, that’s so wonderful and I’m blown away that you’re ready to put yourself out there like that, but, see, you can’t camp overnight in Washington anymore. It’s been made illegal after Occupy Wall Street camped there and more so in the current anti-protest climate in D.C. But let’s figure out what is possible.” She offered to set up a conference call with her, Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, Naomi, the environmental lawyer Jay Halfon, and me. Time was of the essence, so Annie and I arranged to do the conference call the next day.

That day, Catherine, Rosanna, and I were visiting Esalen, the retreat center perched on twenty-seven acres of cliffs overlooking the Pacific. I figured Esalen would have decent reception for the conference call, and it felt appropriate that this possibly defining call would happen there. Generations of people seeking transformation often find themselves at Esalen, and the power it holds to create change is very much about its topography. It’s edgy. The sea off Big Sur is where the Arctic current meets the warm Pacific current. Land and sea touch each other at the base of jagged cliffs. It’s all the sharp edges and fierce winds, I think, that encourage people to break with their pasts, to look beyond dogma, and to examine new ways to be effective in the world. I remembered arriving there, a young woman in my midtwenties, the same age as many of the activists now driving the movement to stop climate change. Big Sur’s wild nature, those cliffs, was an important part of my transformation from child of the buttoned-up 1950s to someone who wanted to shake off the “good girl” shackles of my youth. In that way, it seemed right that I found myself in Esalen at this moment when I was rethinking how I could work to serve something larger than myself.

Turns out there was very poor cell phone service, but there was a bright red old-fashioned outdoor phone booth and a place where I could gather an hour’s worth of quarters.

Bill McKibben suggested that because camping was no longer permitted, perhaps a once-a-week protest that involved civil disobedience would be a better idea. Fridays had been claimed by Greta Thunberg and the student climate strikers, but the youth had also called on adults to join them. “Maybe you could do an action on Fridays as well.” Bill referenced what Randall Robinson, executive director of TransAfrica, had done in the mid-1980s, marching in front of the South African embassy in D.C. every day, committing civil disobedience by sitting down in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue, calling for freeing Nelson Mandela and ending apartheid in South Africa. “It was a very successful protest,” Bill said. In the beginning there were ten to twenty people, which grew to hundreds, and it spread nationwide until, in 1986, the first antiapartheid bill was passed in Congress.

Annie agreed, noting how important civil disobedience on behalf of climate has become. “For forty years, we’ve been polite, we’ve shared the science, we’ve petitioned, we’ve marched, rallied, written, pleaded. We’ve used all the levers of democracy available to us, and our elected representatives haven’t listened. Now we have to do more, step it up. Risk arrest if that is what it takes. It’s the fossil fuel industry who’ve led us to this. It’s time to be bold. Science demands it. Morality demands it. The moment demands it.”

Yes!

I dropped in more quarters and tried to breathe, not just because it was getting really hot in the phone booth, but because I could feel in my body that this was right. I was ready for this. I’d been getting ready for this my whole adult life … a weekly action that culminated in nonviolent civil disobedience. And I wouldn’t have to worry about pooping.

I wanted to start in a few weeks, so we decided I should go to D.C. as soon as possible to work out details and meet with some key environmental groups, including the student climate strikers, to get their input and buy-in. I began planning for the maximum time I could spend in D.C. before I had to get ready to film our seventh and last season of Grace and Frankie on January 27, 2020. It added up to four months, fourteen Fridays.

I started a list of the bare essentials I’d have to bring. I asked Debi Karolewski, who began assisting me in the early 1980s, to come with me. I knew I’d need my little dog Tulea, a fifteen-year-old Coton de Tulear. I couldn’t imagine being without her for four months. I also knew how sad I’d be to not see my two-and-a-half-month-old grandson, Leon, for that long.

I went about canceling everything on my schedule. Fortunately, I hadn’t booked any acting jobs during that time, but that also meant I had no source of income except a number of speaking gigs I had contracted for, and I soon realized they could sue me if I canceled them. Also, five of them were in and around Los Angeles with Lily Tomlin, and that would mean taking airplanes to and from Washington. Here I am, trying to reduce my carbon footprint, speaking out against fossil fuels, yet I’d be flying.

I spoke with Annie and several others about this contradiction. We weighed not flying against the possible good I could do in the climate movement by carrying out the Friday actions, and we concluded that the actions were more important. In the process of discussing this, I came to realize that as important as our individual lifestyle decisions are, they cannot be brought to scale in time to get us to where we need to be by 2030. I realized the importance of progress and not perfection. It’s structural change, new policies, that we need to focus on while at the same time continuing our individual commitments to the planet. Maybe the Friday actions would help bring about that policy change.

On September 27, en route to the Los Angeles airport with Debi, my little Tulea had a seizure. Tulea had already been diagnosed with an age-related enlarged heart and damaged heart valve. My own heart sank as I came to grips with the fact that I’d have to leave her behind. I conjured up the image of Greta. You have to leave your comfort zone. I left. It wasn’t easy.

Over ten days, the essential core team came together with Annie’s guidance. She brought in DC Action Lab, which handles logistics for all the big actions in D.C. Samantha “Sam” Miller with that organization has probably trained ten thousand people in civil disobedience and getting arrested.

In turn, Sam brought in our digital team, including Vy Vu, a young Vietnamese artist and student, to do our weekly topic-focused posters. Vy had to design the posters at night, after work, and at breakneck speed. When I first spoke to her by phone, I asked where she came from in Vietnam. “Hanoi,” she replied. “Oh,” I said, “I’ve been there a few times.” And she asked, “Really? How come you went there?” I loved it. There was no reason Vy should know all I had done in the 1970s to oppose the Vietnam War, decades before she was born, or for her to know that because of my trip to Vietnam in 1972, in some political circles they still refer to me as Hanoi Jane.

With just fourteen days to go, my team still didn’t have a name for the action. We had assembled on an emergency basis to come up with one, but after more than an hour of throwing out different ideas, we finally gave up and decided to reconvene the next day. As we were packing up to go home, Greg, the soundman from the documentary film company that had been shooting our work, capturing the process, took off his headphones and said, “What about Fire Drill Fridays?” We all looked at each other and burst out laughing. That was it!

As with all subsequent ones, the first big meeting in D.C. was convened in the Greenpeace office, and about a dozen people were there representing the Sunrise Movement, Friends of the Earth, Climate Action Network, Hip Hop Caucus, Oil Change International, and, of course, Greenpeace. It was critical to get broad movement participation and buy-in. I laid out my vision.

We spent a long time discussing who we were targeting with these actions. Climate deniers? Conservatives? Independents? Activists? And we decided we needed to aim for people who acknowledge there’s a man-made crisis; who support the climate movement and are thinking about maybe doing more but don’t know what that could be; who are confused, paralyzed, or tilting toward hedonism or fatalism. Hedonism being the thinking that because everything’s going to hell anyway, I might as well eat, drink, and tune out with shopping or debauchery. Fatalism being the thinking that I had started to tilt toward prior to Labor Day: Humans have done so much harm we don’t deserve to survive.

The bulk of the meeting was spent defining our demands and calls to action. We whittled it down to the three essential demands without which we will never meet the Paris Agreement on climate goals in a sustainable, fair way.

SUPPORT THE GREEN NEW DEAL

NO NEW FOSSIL FUEL EXTRACTION

PHASE OUT EXISTING FOSSIL FUELS WITH A JUST TRANSITION TO CLEAN RENEWABLE ENERGY

We decided our calls to action would be the following:

VOTE:

Vote for the climate in every election up and down the ballot. Vote for candidates who are in favor of a Green New Deal and a bold and responsible transition from fossil fuels to clean renewables.

VOICE:

Make your voice heard. Initiate conversations about climate with your family and colleagues. Tell your candidates or elected officials that climate can’t wait. Call them, sign petitions, and go to their town halls. Write letters to the editor of your local paper. Divest from fossil fuel companies and invest in a sustainable future.

USE YOUR FEET—WITH OTHERS!

Join an organization working for real climate solutions. We are stronger together than we are alone! Join marches, do outreach, recruit friends to join. Show up for the communities on the front lines of the fossil fuel economy. Show up for ALL OF US. Listen to communities most impacted by climate change, and if you can, put your body on the line wherever people are fighting on the front lines. Start by joining a student climate strike or Fire Drill Friday action in your own community!

After reading Naomi’s book, I recognized that there was so much more that I wanted to know and wanted to bring to a bigger audience. People needed to know what was really happening! I suggested weekly teach-ins before each rally, each one focusing on a different aspect of the climate crisis and featuring experts, scientists, and activists. Karen Nussbaum said rallies weren’t ideal places for teach-ins but we could hold them the evening before, maybe in a theater in D.C., and film them.

Karen is a labor movement activist who has been my friend since the early 1970s, when she was an organizer with Tom and me in the Indochina Peace Campaign. She is the founder of Working America, the community-outreach arm of the AFL-CIO, on whose board I sit, and in the 1980s she founded 9to5: National Association of Working Women. It was she who inspired me to make the film 9 to 5. Karen was here to help us find ways to bring more of the labor movement into collaboration with the climate movement; in addition, her husband, Ira Arlook, had agreed to serve as the press coordinator for our weekly actions.

That was when Carla Aronsohn on our digital team asked, “Well, why not do the teach-ins digitally. We’re setting up your website, and we can do them livestreamed and archive them on your site.” And that is how our Thursday evening teach-ins came to be.

In the days following, I had an important meeting with eight of the leading D.C. student climate strikers, ranging from fourteen to twenty-three years old, from the Sunrise Movement, U.S. Climate Strikes, Zero Hour, and Fridays for Future. Yes, the youth in these organizations had called upon adults to step up and join the fight for their future, but an aging movie star bopping in from Hollywood whose action would likely get a lot of attention on their Friday? I needed and wanted their blessings.

It was a real learning experience. I was amazed at the students’ depth of passion, organizing smarts, and sensitivity to the need to center vulnerable communities and indigenous peoples. Even the youngest wasn’t afraid to correct me if she felt I was on the wrong path. It soon became clear that they welcomed this addition to their school strikes, but there were many things we had to iron out with them before my first action, which was only ten days away. Would students stand with me for that action? Who should it be? Sebastian Medina-Tayac and his seventeen-year-old sister, Jansikwe, are members of the Piscataway Indian Nation on whose land we would hold our actions at the Capitol. It was decided Jansi would open by welcoming us to her people’s land. Jerome Foster II, a seventeen-year-old African American student and founder and director of OneMillionOfUs, which is mobilizing a new generation of young people to register to vote, has been climate striking every Friday for a year in front of the White House. He would march from the White House to join us at 11:00 a.m. and speak.

Things were coming together. It was no longer one person’s idea. It was taking shape and evolving into a team effort, and other organizations were feeling included and heard. In fact, it felt meant to be.

Jane speaks at the first Fire Drill Friday, holding up a copy of Naomi Klein’s book On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal.

CHAPTER TWO
The Launch

It was a beautiful day. On the morning of October 11, 2019, we all gathered in the United Methodist building near the Capitol for a pre-rally briefing. I wore the red coat I had bought on sale a few days before at Neiman’s and a black-and-white-checked cap to hide the two inches of gray hair I was letting grow in. Hair epiphanies have always accompanied my life transformations, and going gray felt right for my new (and maybe final) turning point. Little did I know that the red coat would become a popular Halloween costume a few weeks later and a pop culture totem.

I was scared and I hadn’t slept. It’s that fear: What if I give a party and no one comes? We thought it would work, but none of us were certain if this weekly action would actually gain traction and make a difference.

The core team was all there plus two of the speakers and about a dozen activists who wanted to engage in civil disobedience with me and risk arrest, like Karen Nussbaum, Annie Leonard, and Steve Kretzmann, director of Oil Change International. My step-granddaughter, Vasser Turner Seydel, showed up in a bright red sweater. I had filmed her birth and now here she was, twenty-four years old and ready to risk arrest with Grandma Jane. I was moved and impressed.

I greeted people as they came into the somewhat cramped room filled with a long, oak refectory table running down the middle and sturdy chairs that reminded me of the furniture at Emma Willard, my old boarding school.

Jane stands with Naomi Klein, at the morning briefing ahead of the launch of Fire Drill Friday on October 11.

At 9:30, Sam, our head of logistics, quieted us all down and began the briefing that she would do for every subsequent Fire Drill, explaining where we would go when we left the building, who would speak when, where we’d commit the civil disobedience, and what to expect if we were arrested. At her direction, everyone planning to risk arrest took off their jewelry and made sure we had $50 and an up-to-date photo ID on us. If they didn’t have the $50, we gave it to them. I saw Dr. Sandra Steingraber, a distinguished scholar in residence at Ithaca College and a biologist who would be speaking at the rally, taking off her necklace. Ah, no ordinary scholar, she’s risking arrest! How cool!

Then Firas Nasr, from our digital team, told us that because we’d be putting our bodies on the line, we’d best get into our bodies, and he took us through a brief meditation, bringing us inward, which I needed to calm my nerves. That was followed by three from-the-gut martial arts shouts to ground us. It worked.

Flanked by the speakers and friends holding the Fire Drill Friday signs with our three demands, I stepped out into the warm, welcoming day. I felt tears running down my cheeks. Here we go.

We were met by a phalanx of television cameras and photographers, walking backward as they filmed us marching and chanting. There were more of them than there were of us. The interviews Ira had arranged for me to do with big media outlets had clearly generated attention.

As we crossed the intersection between the Supreme Court and the Capitol, their majestic columns and curves spoke to me of history and of moral authority. Would that the goings-on inside right then matched these imposing facades. The impressive buildings added to the feeling that our little group was ragtag and inconsequential. Our chants lacked confidence, and there weren’t enough of us to make a lot of noise anyway. At the stage where our banner was erected, I could see our supporters. Sparse. Fifty at most. Well, it was a start, and hopefully the media coverage and our livestream of the rally would expand our reach.

I welcomed people and thanked them for coming. “I’d like all of you to think about this,” I said. Good. My voice felt strong. “The same toxic ideology that took this land from people who already lived here, that kidnapped people from Africa, turning them into slaves to work that stolen land, and justified it by saying that those kidnapped and displaced people were not human beings, cut down the forests, and exhausted the natural world just as it did the people. This foundational, extractive ideology of commodification is the same one that has brought us the human-driven climate change that we’re facing today.” And with that, I invited Jansikwe Medina-Tayac to come up and welcome us to her people’s land.

The size of the crowd at the launch.

Jansikwe Medina-Tayac kicks things off at the first Fire Drill Friday.

Jansi, with her long curly hair and blue jeans, stepped from behind the banner to the mic. I was glad that we had already spent time together. Without the young climate activists who had been striking every Friday supporting us, these actions would not have worked out. Giving them this platform was proof of our unity.

“Hello, everyone, my name is Jansikwe. I am seventeen years old, and I am a member of the Piscataway Indian Nation.” Her voice was strong and confident. “Our traditional territory spans all the way from the Potomac River down to the Chesapeake Bay. I’m here not only to welcome you to this space, but to remind you that indigenous people have been fighting for this earth since the early 1600s. We are the original protectors of this earth and its indigenous ways of life.”

As I listened to this young indigenous woman, I marveled at how remarkable it is that despite all that European colonizers have done to the original inhabitants of this land, many are still willing to offer welcome, advice, and guidance about how we must live in relationship with nature and each other. In the course of the fourteen Fire Drill Fridays, I would learn so much more about the critical role indigenous peoples play in fighting climate change and how disproportionately impacted they are by fossil fuel extraction.

“We need to recognize and change the system that encourages us to take and take and never give back,” said Jansikwe. “Native kids in places like Standing Rock should not have to take time off from school to fight for their lives. We need every person, every helping hand, every heart in the world, to come together and help end this attack on our planet.” She stepped off the platform to rejoin her mother and brother.

Because this was the launch, I wanted to take this opportunity to explain why I had moved to D.C. to hold these actions.

“So much is happening in the news. There’s so much noise, right? We have to ensure that the climate crisis remains front and center, and that’s why we’re here.” I spoke about how Naomi Klein’s book, Greta Thunberg, and the student climate strikers had inspired me to get out of my comfort zone. “So the question for the rest of us is, what are we willing to give up? What time and energy will we devote to it? What sacrifices will we make?

“I’m standing with the young people. I want to help lift their message. Greta Thunberg said we have to behave like we’re in a crisis. Our house is on fire. And so we’re calling these rallies Fire Drill Fridays.

“Every Friday for the next four months at 11:00 a.m., we’re going to be right here. And every Friday, we’re going to focus on a different aspect of the climate crisis.”

I listed our demands: Pass a Green New Deal, stop fossil fuel expansion immediately, phase out fossil fuels as soon as possible but definitely within thirty years, secure a fair deal for workers and communities most impacted by this transition. Our other mission was education. Each Friday we would invite scientists, experts, and people from frontline communities along with celebrities to focus on a different aspect of the climate crisis. “We need to understand that at least 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists agree that we are facing a drastic emergency, that it is man-made, that we have a little over a decade before the tipping point is reached. Ten years to reduce fossil fuel emissions roughly in half and then reduce to net zero by 2050. There aren’t two sides to this story.”

When I was done, I brought up seventeen-year-old Jerome Foster, who startled me with his command of the stage. Clearly, he was accustomed to speaking at rallies. I had spoken at many myself over my years of activism, but not on a regular basis, and of late my throat had had a tendency to close up at rallies, making it difficult for me to project. I knew I had to be careful, warm up my voice, and not overdo the chants.

Jerome focused on the need for unity. “Change can only happen with unity. Change can only happen when everyone is at the table, because only in the cracks of division can corruption seep in, and only in the cracks of division can pollution seep in. We are a part of one earth, one pale-blue dot that’s in the middle of an endless sea of blackness. What we’re saying is that we must act as such, we must act as if we are one people, one planet, and one globally interconnected nation.” Then he exhorted people to vote and to write to their elected officials, and he led us in a chant:

Jerome Foster at the first Fire Drill Friday.

Take it to the polls!

Take it to the streets!

Take it to the polls!

Take it to the streets!

Next, Sandra Steingraber, the biologist and scholar, took the mic. She described how fracking “swung a wrecking ball at our climate system” and how it exhumed the life buried deep in the earth thousands of years ago to quell our unquenchable thirst for oil.

“Diatoms and sea lilies and squid. We blow up a cemetery of prehistoric sea creatures that we rename fossil fuels in order to light their bodies on fire in the crematoria we call power plants and internal combustion engines,” Professor Steingraber said.

A brilliant mind, Professor Steingraber illuminated connections to bring a fresh focus on the destruction inherent in the way we live. It was hard to hear her list all that we had lost and what we’d be losing in the near future. Fracking destroys our drinking water and discharges dozens of carcinogens into our atmosphere. The carbon released by the oil it collects destabilizes our oceans, our food supply, and our water supply, sending millions of climate migrants in search of safety.

“We are losing the world’s fish stocks and coral reefs,” she said. “We are losing insects, pollinators, and reliable rainfall. Failed harvests are driving migration crises across the globe. Does that sound like a smart energy system to you? No, it’s primitive and crude. Crude as in crude oil.”

The other crude effect of fracking goes mostly unnoticed, she pointed out. Energy companies sell off the by-products of fracking to chemical companies to make the single-use plastics that are choking our ocean life and often end up burned in incinerators—adding to climate change and pollution.

The passion I heard in her voice came from personal experience. Forty years ago, when she was just twenty, she was diagnosed with a rare cancer that her doctor said was likely caused by environmental carcinogens. Immediately she decided to become a public health research scientist instead of a doctor, but at that moment she wasn’t sure she’d live long enough to realize any of her dreams.

“Like any teenager, I had felt immortal. After the diagnosis, the future was uncertain and, if it existed at all, was full of dread and suffering,” she said. “So my message to youth today is, I get it. When you say that your future has been stolen and held hostage by the actions of others, I understand. When you see grown-ups all around you carrying on as if everything is still fine and there is no catastrophe, I know that unbearable feeling, too. We’ve all become cancer patients now.”

Dr. Steingraber’s speech was a revelation: The bodies of marine animals that died 400 million years ago are being weaponized to destroy the bodies of sea creatures living in our oceans now.

Sandra Steingraber speaks.

I hadn’t made that connection. Nor the fact that making plastics was a way for oil companies to use the chemical industry to deal with their waste disposal, thereby creating the horrendous waste problem the rest of the world is trying to solve. What an interesting woman, Sandra Steingraber. A biologist, an activist with the creative instincts of a poet who, despite the dangers she described, left us with a message of hope, the same one her adoptive mom had given her when she started her battle with cancer: “Don’t let them bury you until you’re dead.”

“Friends, I am here today with science in my hands, with love in my heart for the whole sunlit planet and all of those who walk its surface, and with a cancer survivor’s fierce determination to fight for life, no matter what the odds,” she said. “The fossil fuel industry will not bury us. We will live to bury them.”

I found her speech so profound, so striking. The imagery she used to stir the crowd to action stayed with me a long time after she finished. As soon as she left the podium, I asked her for a copy of her remarkable speech, because I knew I’d read it again.

When the rally was over at noon, we marched behind the big “Fire Drill Friday” banner, chanting,

Tell me what democracy looks like!

This is what democracy looks like!

The seas are rising and so are we!

The group risks arrest at the launch.

We marched past a line of police cars toward the Capitol steps, the press in front of us walking backward, occasionally tripping and running into things. The line of about ten police officers standing on the steps began to move to the side to make room for us. They were well practiced. There were around sixteen of us who mounted the steps and turned around to face the small crowd and media people, which was being pushed back by another line of police. “Move back, people. Move all the way back.”

And soon there was a wide distance between those of us risking arrest and the others, though we all kept chanting. My step-granddaughter, Vasser, was right next to me along with Carroll Muffett, director of the Center for International Environmental Law; Steve Kretzmann, director of Oil Change International; Wendy Fields, director of Democracy Initiative; Medea Benjamin with CODEPINK; the twenty-four-year-old climate activist Sebastian Medina-Tayac; Annie Leonard, director of Greenpeace USA; the Greenpeace staffer Madeline Carretero; and Sandra, the poetic biologist.

The head police officer gave us the first warning that we must leave or risk arrest. We kept chanting. Then a second warning. A few people left, but we kept chanting. The final warning, and that was it. One at a time, officers secured our hands behind our backs with white plastic zip ties. They hurt.

Annie Leonard and Maddy Carretero get arrested on the Capitol steps.

I wasn’t scared. I had been arrested before, but this was my first arrest for civil disobedience. In 1970, I had been arrested in the Cleveland airport returning from Canada, where I had just begun a national speaking tour about the atrocities of the Vietnam War.

Back then, the arresting officer told me the Nixon White House had ordered my arrest. The police took my notebooks and my address book and dozens of little plastic bags containing the vitamins I took with each meal. The charge was drug smuggling. I was put in a cell with a woman in the throes of drug withdrawal. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me.

This time was different. I stood chanting on the steps of the Capitol, energized. I was doing what I had wanted: putting my body on the line and aligning myself fully, body and spirit, with my values. I felt empowered. The people around me seemed to feel the same. As each of us was taken by an officer to the waiting vans, people cheered, clapped, and chanted in support. It felt good.

Jane Fonda gets arrested. Behind her stand Annie Leonard and Maddy Carretero.

When I arrived, several women were already sitting in a row on one side in the back of the van, which was divided in two. Even though I’m strong, it was a high step up with nothing to hold on to and my hands cuffed behind my back. The officer helped by boosting me up by my behind, and I flashed onto a scene in the sixth season of Grace and Frankie when Peter Gallagher had to help me into an SUV the same way because Grace is too old to do it on her own. Oh, well, Fonda. This is your new reality.

It took an inordinate amount of time before we finally arrived at the police station, where we were off-loaded and taken inside. There, we were searched, and everything we weren’t wearing, including glasses that weren’t prescription, identification, and money, was put in a clear plastic bag and marked with our name. Given what we were committing civil disobedience for, the extensive use of plastic was glaring. My red coat was so new I hadn’t yet realized it had real pockets that had to be unstitched open. Hence, my money and driver’s license were in my bra, which the officers seemed to find amusing. They had to release me from the cuffs so I could get them.

The thin white plastic handcuffs were cut off, tossed, and replaced by thicker black ones that screwed into place and were apparently recycled after use. Then we were led into another room containing two cells, each painted hospital green, each with a sleek metal slab of a bed/bench and an all-metal toilet. There was nothing that could be removed or broken off. No sharp corners.

In the cell with me were Vasser, Sandra, Medea, and Wendy Fields. I knew that Vasser’s father was nervous about her risking arrest, and I was happy and proud that she felt empowered by her decision to do it. Karen, Annie, Maddy, and the other women were in the next cell over.

While I did wall squats (hey, you gotta seize the opportunity when you can), we talked about climate’s connection to many things, from democracy to war to health, and I got more ideas for upcoming teach-ins.

Turned out that both Medea and Sandra had known my ex the late Tom Hayden. Sandra told me that back in 1965, students at the University of Michigan had been protesting the escalation of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War and of military research being done on campus. Tom, who was the editor of The Michigan Daily at the time, and three thousand other protesters took over Angell Hall, a kind of hallowed place on campus. All night long they held seminars and gave speeches about the history and culture of Vietnam and about Lyndon Johnson’s bombing campaign. And right then and there, it was labeled a teach-in, a new concept. Instead of a walkout or a sit-in, this was a teach-in. Soon the idea of teach-ins spread to other schools.

“In 2015, fifty years after that original teach-in,” Sandra recounted, “Tom and I were invited back to a teach-in on climate change. It was held in the same hall as the original teach-in, Angell Hall. I believe that was Tom’s last big speech before he died.”

This story brought up so many emotions for me. I thought about the fact that next Thursday we would have our first teach-in. I was happy for that link to Tom. I missed Tom and wished he could be with us now to guide and advise us. Strategy was always Tom’s strength. I wondered what he’d think about me being in this jail cell with Sandra and Medea following civil disobedience. I know he would have loved the fact that my step-granddaughter was in there with me. He always favored cross-generational organizing.

To be truthful, though, I had been privately wondering if I could have gotten up the nerve to move to D.C. and launch the Fire Drill Fridays were Tom still alive. I had always been in awe of his fierce intelligence and broad movement-building experience, always feeling myself the student to his teacher. Had he been the least bit skeptical of my idea, which he often was for reasons that sometimes felt arbitrary and personal, I might well have backed off. But then again … maybe not. I was also aware of how much more confident I had grown in the thirty years since Tom and I divorced. Maybe I would have been capable of laughing it off as part of Tom’s quirky ego that could no longer intimidate me.

After three hours or so, people started to be processed out, but I was unable to see who went first. An officer came to talk to Medea about the fact that this was her third arrest of the year and that they were considering keeping her overnight. Instead, they gave her a court date to appear before a judge and let her go, telling her that if she had another arrest before her court date, she would definitely spend a night or two in jail. I was learning the rules that would come in handy in the coming months.

I was one of the last to be released, and as I sat in the cell alone, I had time to reflect on this action that we had hurriedly pulled together based on my sense of urgency the month before. I felt proud that we had done this. I loved the voices we included in this launch: respect for the native land, for youth, and for science. A good beginning but not nearly enough. There was so much more I wanted to learn about all the different topics we planned on covering. Where would we be a month from now? Two months from now? I was ready for that!

About four hours after we were brought into the cell, I was thumb printed, paid my $50 fine, and got my possessions back. Out I went into the glaring sunshine, where I saw the team, plus Debi, my assistant, Annie, Maddy, and Karen, all clapping and cheering and offering chips, tangerines, and water. I was surprised to see that people had waited, but Sam explained that this is what’s called jail support. I hadn’t expected it, all those people there to hug me and thank me for being willing to get arrested for the cause made it different and special. And for every one of our fourteen Fridays that involved arrests, rain or shine or frigid weather, jail support was always there, and in time, when I could no longer risk arrest, I would be part of it myself.

That day cemented for me how important it was to work across movements, to bring together people who work on democracy and women’s issues, indigenous issues, antiracism, peace, labor, and more. It’s not just a matter of good movement manners. We didn’t need to do that; we could have just started this on our own. But taking the time to engage people across movements makes us stronger. There is a saying: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” The more I was learning about the climate crisis, the more I knew that building a community was how we would grow the army that was needed to change the way this country does business—literally, and for the long haul.

As I thanked everyone for sticking around and started to leave, a Fox TV reporter showed up and stuck a mic in my face while his camera rolled.

“Why have you done this, gone to jail?” he asked with an edge in his voice.

“To get you to cover climate,” I replied, and got into a waiting car.

Sam Waterston gets arrested for the first time.

CHAPTER THREE
The Green New Deal

I was bleary-eyed the morning after our launch, but when I looked at my iPhone, I realized Fire Drill Friday had gone viral. Ira reported later that there were 8,670 press articles online, on TV, and in print with amazing images of the entire thing, especially my arrest in my red coat. People had been calling and texting me from all over to congratulate me and thank me for standing up for the planet. I thought, Oh my God, what’s happening?

I did twelve more interviews that week, and we had another four-thousand-plus stories in the media … all around the world. And while all this was going on, I had to study up on the Green New Deal, the focus of the next week’s first teach-in on Thursday and Fire Drill Friday, when I’d be joined by my friend the actor Sam Waterston and two high-profile experts on the Green New Deal. At my age, the whole livestreaming thing was foreign, and I was nervous.

Wednesday morning, one of the experts let me know that his young daughter was ill and he wouldn’t be able to come, and Wednesday afternoon the other one told Greenpeace that she was too ill to attend. Clearly Sam and I couldn’t hold a teach-in on the Green New Deal by ourselves. I went into meditation mode to quiet my growing panic. Was it always going to be this dicey?

Fortunately, Greenpeace got a Thursday morning commitment from a young activist, Joanna Zhu, a fellow within the Sunrise Movement’s political department who, though not a full-on Green New Deal expert, knew enough to explain it to our teach-in audience.

The Teach-In

I arrived at the Greenpeace conference room, which we were using as the digital teach-in set, early Thursday evening. Firas had suggested that the teach-ins have a homey vibe, so I had rented furniture online and created a comfortable sitting area with couch, chairs, and coffee table in a corner of the conference room. I made sure Naomi’s book was prominently displayed on the coffee table, pilfered some plants from staff desks to dress up the side tables, and arranged the Fire Drill Friday and Green New Deal posters appropriately. It was the first time I’d seen everything all put together, and I must say the effect worked pretty well. The documentary crew was there to film, and Carla, with the digital team, set up an iPhone on a tripod to livestream the whole thing.

Because there was no teleprompter, I had note cards for the opening and closing, as I would for every subsequent teach-in, with questions for the guests and additional points I wanted to make if there was time.

At 7:00 p.m. sharp, Carla counted down, 3, 2, 1, and off we went.

“The Green New Deal is not a policy or even a bundle of policies,” I said. Talking to the tiny camera on a tripod about six feet away felt funny. It was hard to believe that that little camera could potentially be the eyes and ears of tens of thousands of interested people from around the world, which, as it turned out, it would become.

I was so jacked up that I introduced Sam Waterston as Sol Bergstein, which is the name of his character in Grace and Frankie, and was momentarily confused when Sam kept saying, “No, Jane. I’m not Sol Bergstein.”

“The Green New Deal is a framework,” I said, “an integrated, systemic response to the multiple crises of climate, of democracy, and of equality.”

When I had finished my opening, I asked Joanna to explain the Green New Deal to us. She spoke for a minute instead of five and then turned to me. My heart sank. OMG, that’s it? I was going to have to wing it.

The three of us did a pretty decent job describing what the Green New Deal is, but let me just summarize it here so we’re all on the same page.

THE GREEN NEW DEAL

The Green New Deal details the steps our country needs to take to prevent the most severe impacts of a changing climate. Introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey in February 2019, the Green New Deal warns that for us to survive and to avoid huge climate catastrophes, we must prevent global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. This requires a 40 to 60 percent reduction in global carbon emissions by 2030—in a decade—and then further reduction to net zero by 2050.

As the country that has produced 20 percent of these emissions through 2014, the United States must lead on this issue. We have the capital and the technology to show the world how to transform our way of life to one that is healthy and sustainable for all. The Green New Deal describes a ten-year mobilization to save the planet, where the government funds thousands of good-paying jobs that will bring clean water and clean air and access to nature and to healthy food for all of our citizens while establishing renewable, zero-emission energy sources to power our economy.

This is why having “New Deal” in the title makes sense. To tackle such large issues that affect so many people, the effort is similar to the New Deal and World War II, dire times when the federal government rose to the challenge. We need just that kind of effort to head off climate catastrophe. And the Green New Deal shows us the way.

Much like the New Deal, the Green New Deal begins with jobs, good ones: retrofitting and upgrading buildings for maximum energy efficiency; updating water quality and conservation; remediating toxic waste dumps; and generally increasing efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability. As with the jobs created under the New Deal in the 1930s, people would be trained in skills that would be in demand in the new economy created by the transition off fossil fuels. The work to be done is local, and the local communities will be the ones that benefit from these changes. While polluting industries are phased out, other sustainable industries will replace them, spurring economic development.

The changes wouldn’t just come in the cities either. The Green New Deal would also work with farmers and ranchers to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector by investing in electric cars and trucks, farm machinery, buses, and high-speed rail. The GND supports family farming, invests in sustainable land use practices, and restores the natural ecosystems through proven low-tech solutions that increase soil carbon storage and clean up hazardous waste sites.

The genius of the Green New Deal is its inclusiveness. It doesn’t just focus on greenhouse gas emissions. Vulnerable communities including indigenous peoples, communities of color, poor and low-income workers, and people who live in rural communities are the primary victims of pollution and extraction of natural resources; under the Green New Deal they would be the beneficiaries. The GND jobs program would focus on opportunities for workers affected by the transition off fossil fuels and training and advancing the right of all workers to organize, unionize, and collectively bargain would be guaranteed, and the overseas transfer of jobs and pollution would be stopped.

Truthfully, I was originally upset that the resolution seemed to go far beyond climate. But the more I learned, the more I realized it couldn’t be any other way. We can’t just move to green energy and leave it at that. The transition to a fossil-free world must be framed in such a way that people and communities that have been most directly harmed by the old energy system can be made whole and given agency over their energy delivery systems. Had there been a Green New Deal in place in early January 2020, COVID-19 would have been much easier to contain and our health-care system much more resilient.

With Fire Drill Fridays, I wanted people to see the climate crisis as a chance to create a world of new possibilities for fairness, prosperity, and good health. If enough people demand it, just as they did with the original New Deal, we can make it happen. This will mean the climate movement has to stretch in a few ways.

First, the conventional nature/wildlife conservation people need to widen their perspective on “environment.” Environments where fossil fuels—coal, oil, and gas—are drilled and processed may be industrialized and polluted, but they are environments nonetheless. Many people in the United States never see these communities on the front line of the fossil fuel economy. Too often they are out of sight and out of mind. Through the Fire Drill Fridays platform we were creating, I wanted to use my celebrity to make the real impacts of fossil fuels visible to everyone. To pass a Green New Deal, the environmental movement must unite and grow to include people who hadn’t considered their environment something they had the power to change.

Second, the climate movement needs to approach fossil fuels from two sides: using less and making less. See, when it comes to efforts to reduce fossil fuel emissions—which are the primary driver of the climate crisis—environmentalists and elected leaders have historically focused on the demand side, meaning they support approaches to reduce the demand for fossil fuels with new green sustainable energy, electric vehicles, and energy conservation. Those are all great, and we need them all, but to add up to enough emissions reductions to keep below that crucial goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius, we also need to reduce the supply of fossil fuels being extracted, pumped, and fracked. Without a reduction in fossil fuels at both ends, it is easy for people to look around at the growing number of solar panels and electric vehicles and think the problem is being solved while being unaware of what’s happening to people different from them in environments they may never be exposed to. To pass a Green New Deal, the traditional environmental movement must grow to include issues beyond conventional conservation and wildlife concerns and include people who might be very different from themselves. That’s how we will build a movement big enough to win and ensure we leave no one behind.

Critics say shifting away from fossil fuels will wreck the economy, but many experts see enormous potential to create jobs and stimulate the economy through a Green New Deal. The Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson, in his study published in the journal One Earth, described how going 100 percent green could pay for itself in seven years. Revamping power grids and remaking transportation, manufacturing, and other systems to run on wind, solar, and hydro power would cost $73 trillion. But, Jacobson says, that would be offset by annual savings of almost $11 trillion. Jacobson claims in his paper that studies among at least eleven independent research groups have found that transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy in one or all energy sectors, while keeping the electricity and/or heat grids stable at a reasonable cost, is possible.

During our livestream, I asked Joanna what she would say to the critics who call the Green New Deal a “wish list for the far left”? I liked her response: “It isn’t just a wish list; it’s a to-do list. It’s our statement of intent.”

Cities around the United States are already moving to implement certain aspects of a Green New Deal, eliminating fossil fuels from their electricity systems, moving to electrify mass transit vehicles, and requiring new homes to have electric heat pumps. These are great signs of progress, but without the power and resources of the federal government we can’t scale it up fast enough. Hence, it’s too late for moderation.

I said, “Forty years ago, Shell and Exxon’s own scientists warned them that what they were spewing into the atmosphere had the potential to cause irreversible damage. Had they not lied and hid that from the public, we could have had a moderate, incremental transition to renewable energy.”

“Yes, and I am a moderate and I am here and that’s the reason,” Sam said. “Because the time to do this in a gradual and moderate way is past, so a moderate person wants to hurry up because that’s the only available choice now.”

Sam turned and looked directly into the camera. “So, whatever your temperament is, whatever your inclination is, this is the definition of moderation now, taking these different kinds of very bold steps. What looks like radical today is actually moderation, given the size of the problem itself and the time we have left in which to slow it down.”

Sam Waterston speaks.

Sam added, “The insidious thing about this is that the catastrophe is being experienced differently in different places and that makes it possible for a privileged person like me to deny that it’s happening. ‘I’m okay. There’s a little trouble over there maybe, but we’re all right.’ But what we need to do is exercise our empathy and our imaginations. We have to be able to see ourselves in the typhoon victims in Japan and people that are being driven out of their homes because of climate change in Latin America. We have to see that their problem is our problem. This isn’t just altruism. It’s enlightened self-interest.”

“Right,” I said. “And because of the heat already baked in, it’s going to get worse before it begins to slow down. Hence, one of the things that the Green New Deal talks about is doing everything we can to prepare for the really challenging emergencies that are going to happen no matter what we do. And a country whose people feel safe and respected, people who are paid a decent wage, communities that know they are not considered sacrifice zones, are going to be much more able to withstand what’s going to come at them in terms of extreme weather. The Green New Deal will grow resilience in people and in communities.” Five months later, the coronavirus provided a tragic lesson on the importance of being prepared.

I was exhausted by the effort it took to make our first teach-in work in spite of the challenge of having two of us non-experts in the Green New Deal. I fled home to my hotel room and fell into a deep sleep.

The Rally

The next morning was the second Fire Drill Friday, and it was a very different scene from the prior week. The rally area was overflowing with press, paparazzi, and more people.

Onstage I opened with a brief history of the 1930s New Deal, because I wanted to remind people of this country’s ability to rise to the occasion when faced with a monumental crisis.

“Make no mistake, change is coming, by disaster or by design,” I said. “The Green New Deal provides the design to bring us all into a sustainable future.”

Most of our speakers that day were young, and it wasn’t until I heard them that I realized the extent to which many are traumatized by the prospect that the future they will inherit may well border on unlivable and are resentful that they must sacrifice their time, their educations, their chosen professions even, to fight for a future. I was reminded how the Green New Deal gives these young people, specifically, a vision of that future worth fighting for.

The first person to speak, Abigail Leedy, was an eighteen-year-old organizer with the Sunrise Movement. She told the crowd that a month earlier she found out she’d been accepted to college on a day when she was part of a sit-in at a congressman’s office to demand that he support the Green New Deal. When she thought about what was happening to the climate, how the world was on fire, she decided she had to forgo college to fight full-time for a Green New Deal.

She spoke from personal experience about how, in her hometown of Philadelphia, summers now are the hottest on record, and the school district canceled classes for six days in her senior year because the temperatures were so high it feared it was not safe for the students to be inside the un-air-conditioned classrooms.

WE’VE DONE IT BEFORE: THE NEW DEAL

The monumental circumstances that created the original New Deal came about at a time of tremendous social unrest when the Great Depression threw a quarter of the population out of work. It was a time of labor protests, social protests, and riots about economic insecurity and inequality. People demanded that the government step in to alleviate these hardships.

The Depression was also a time of environmental collapse and mass migration. Fossil fuel companies encouraged midwestern farmers to shift to mechanized plowing, which disrupted native grasses that held the topsoil in place. When drought hit the region in the 1930s, high wind and choking dust killed livestock, and crops failed on the overplowed land, forcing 2.5 million people to flee. My father, Henry Fonda, starred in the movie The Grapes of Wrath about that crisis.

Angry, organized citizens, workers, and farmers made their demands known to Roosevelt, and what he said to them is important for us to keep in mind today. He said, “I agree with you. Now go out and make me do it.” Pressure from citizens made him do it, and in order to lift the country out of its deep suffering, the president launched the New Deal.

In his first hundred days after he was sworn in as president, Roosevelt created government programs that put many millions of people to work in hundreds of public projects all across the country.

The Civilian Conservation Corps employed three million young men to restore the Great Plains; the Works Progress Administration hired millions to construct public buildings and roads like the dams and waterworks that brought power to the South through the Tennessee Valley Authority. This massive outlay of money for the public good built America’s middle class.

It wasn’t perfect. In order to get southern Democrats to support it, Roosevelt cut African Americans out of much of the New Deal, and women were largely ignored. We must learn from those mistakes and do better going forward. But the New Deal got so much right, and we benefit from that today.

The rich and powerful hated the New Deal because it set a precedent for the federal government to play a central role in the economic and social affairs of the nation. It was criticized as fascist or socialist; bankers tried to overthrow Roosevelt. Big Business, Big Railroads, Big Banks ranted and raved against it, but there were millions in the streets demanding that Roosevelt do even more because it was helping them, and because of that it succeeded.

This is exactly the kind of brave leadership we need to see from our next president, and there are very smart policy experts putting together a first-ten-day plan for that president, laying out things he can do through executive order without waiting for Congress. This will be a huge, disruptive, superambitious undertaking, and yes, it will cost a whole lot of money. But the cost of inaction is huge. Over the last three years, the total cost of billion-dollar weather and climate events exceeded $450 billion! And the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that government can find the necessary money in an emergency.

The same interests that hated the New Deal are the ones today telling us that the Green New Deal is bad, that Big Government is bad, and they’ve convinced a lot of people of this, the very people who are actually hurt because government is being shrunk and taken over by corporate interests.

The fact is, the policies proposed by the Green New Deal are in line with what the American people have done before … because there was no choice.

There is no choice now.

“In Philly over a hundred people have died in the last ten years during heat waves. They send us home from school, but most kids go back to homes without air-conditioning and neighborhoods that are 10 degrees hotter than in the suburbs,” she said.

Abigail described an oil refinery situated in a densely populated poor neighborhood where large numbers of children suffer from asthma. That refinery exploded in 2016, raining down debris on the homes of South Philly. Although no one was killed, the disaster released five thousand pounds of hydrofluoric acid into the air.

“In Philly people die because of fossil fuels, because we don’t have nurses in public schools, because they are poor. Young people are born poor, stay poor, and maybe die later from a heat wave or a fossil fuel explosion that they had no role in creating.

“My friends have a running under-the-green-new-deal joke: Every time we think of something so good it feels impossible, we make the joke. Under a Green New Deal, corporate bookstores are public libraries. Under a Green New Deal, we’re going to turn all these gas stations into parks. Under a Green New Deal, all the public schools have air-conditioning. It’s mostly a joke, but it’s also not.”

I found Abigail’s words heart wrenching.

Jasilyn Charger spoke next. She was one of the indigenous youths who had run two thousand miles from Standing Rock, North Dakota, to Washington, D.C., in 2016 to deliver a petition with more than 140,000 signatures to the Army Corps of Engineers asking them to stop building the Dakota Access Pipeline through their lands and waters. She, too, questioned why young people have to be on the front lines of the climate crisis instead of “living our lives as young people. It’s because we feel the fear in our hearts and souls that our future is threatened. But today, just to see that we’re supported by the young and the old, by the rich and the poor, standing united as one, on a field in front of the Capitol building brings so much strength to my heart.”

The next speaker, Charlie Jiang, a twenty-four-year-old climate campaigner at Greenpeace USA, had wanted to be a physicist to uncover the mysteries of the universe and had expected that he would lead a comfortable life.

Jasilyn Charger speaks.

“But in the face of a crisis where so many of my friends and family are suffering from pollution and fire, comfort is no longer an option for people like me because first and foremost, as global citizens, we have a duty to each other and I had to ask myself, how could I look at the stars as a physicist when so many people are suffering on this planet?”

Charlie said a new age of a Green New Deal was possible if millions of people come together, take to the streets, vote, and engage in civil disobedience.

“The next decade is going to be crucial, and the next year will be crucial. We’re going to need all hands on deck in 2020 to take bold actions so that we can elect leaders who will be champions for a Green New Deal and pass policies to end the era of fossil fuels.”

Charlie Jiang speaks.

I concluded the rally imploring people to vote. “Make sure that you’re registered to vote. Make sure that everyone you know is registered to vote. When the time comes to vote, reach out to people who may not be able to get to the polls and drive them to the polls. Every vote counts. And I’m not just talking about the president or the Senate or the House but state legislatures, governors, boards of supervisors, every one of the elected officials that you can vote for can make a difference. And before you vote for them, find out how they feel about the climate crisis. Make sure that they understand the urgency that’s involved because who we elect next November is going to be so important. And then you have to mobilize. Think about the original New Deal in the 1930s. Realize that what got Roosevelt to do what he did, that really brought this country out of despair in desperation, was because people were in the streets. They forced him to do it. Demonstrate. Organize. Vote.”

Our march from the rally to block the intersection between the Capitol and the Supreme Court was chaotic as reporters pressed in, shoving microphones in our faces. It seemed as if they were five-deep on all sides. Most were friendly, but there were also the “Jane, did you take a plane to get here? Don’t you think that’s hypocritical?” and “Hanoi Jane, why do you think you can speak about climate?” I refused to engage. My daughter, Vanessa Vadim, surprised me by taking the train down from her home in Vermont to be with me. One of my closest, longtime friends, the film producer and curator of the Tribeca Film Festival Paula Weinstein, had come, too. They were so buffeted about by the cameras pressing in from all sides, it was hard to keep moving ahead, in a line, chanting and holding the six-foot-long “Green New Deal” banner.

All of them, Vanessa, Paula, Sam, and the actor Katherine LaNasa along with twenty or so others, planned on engaging in the civil disobedience. I was supposed to receive the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellence in Film that Friday, but I knew I couldn’t attend the ceremony because Fire Drill Fridays were my priority. As I was being led away by the police with my hands in ziplock cuffs, I was filmed shouting, “Thank you. I’m honored!”

A MODERATE’S VIEW OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Sam Waterston

“I came out of getting arrested a different person than I went in. Pieces of myself came together that were being held apart by dread of—if I faced it—how much bigger than me the climate problem was going to be and denial, the old delusion that if you stick your head in the sand, the problem will go away or, at least, not land on you. As I’ve said before, I’m not a radical. In a radical situation, though—and the climate emergency is a radical situation—radical action is the moderate thing to do. To even feel a little bit whole, we need to do something out of the ordinary about it. Getting arrested over any cause was completely new to me. So far in my lifetime, there have certainly been other issues that merited it, but the climate emergency is at the top of any list. Of course, we all need to be modest about what we as individuals can accomplish, but getting arrested might actually work! Everyone should try it. As always, Abraham Lincoln hit the nail on the head: ‘We must think anew, and act anew, and then we shall save our country.’ That’s what it feels like to get arrested over the climate emergency: thinking, and then acting, anew. I can’t recommend it highly enough.”

Apparently, the clip was enthusiastically received at the gala event. I hoped it would inspire more celebrities to join. Whether we like it or not, our society is very celebrity focused, and having a famous person publicly join a movement helps bring the press out and expand the reach of the message. The passion and life-changing commitment of the students moved and inspired me deeply. By bringing celebrities together with these youth leaders and climate activists, Fire Drill Fridays was helping to amplify the voices that needed to be heard.

This time, because there were more of us, instead of being held in the cells inside the police station, we were taken to a large, cold warehouse used for processing by the police for these types of occasions. I kept an eye on Sam, who was chatting with some of his fellow detainees and seemed in fine fettle. I knew Paula would be okay. As an anti–Vietnam War activist in the 1960s and 1970s, this was far from her first encounter with the Capitol Police.

I met interesting people during our three hours of detention: a manicurist from Delaware who had heard about Fire Drill Fridays on the radio and had come with her daughter, neither of whom had ever done anything like this before; a professor of rhetoric from a midwestern university who had a bit of Diane Keaton humor in her; and a Pakistani woman who works to protect Muslim refugees from ICE.

It was still daylight when we paid our $50, gave our thumbprints, and were released. There was a contingent of young climate strikers along with our jail support team waiting for us. I could see that Sam had been affected by the whole experience in a positive and deep way.

A few weeks later, Sam, the self-described moderate who had never engaged in civil disobedience or gotten arrested until our second Fire Drill Friday, had joined the students protesting their university’s fossil fuel investments during halftime at the Harvard-Yale game and gotten arrested on the field. He sent me a photo someone took of him in handcuffs looking up with a big grin. “Now look at what you’ve done!” And Sam came back to D.C. with his sister Ellen for the twelfth Fire Drill Friday and did it again.

Vanessa was off to visit some friends, so Paula and I joined Jerome at his weekly climate strike at the While House.

I could feel my voice starting to weaken, so I left the chanting to Jerome and was amazed at his vocal stamina and persistence. He stood there, shouting climate chants for at least thirty minutes while I engaged with people who stopped by for selfies and talked about the climate crisis until it was time for us seniors to call it.

It was the end of another week, another Fire Drill Friday under our belts. I could feel it was growing.*

What Can I Do?

The surge of public interest in a Green New Deal is so exciting! Finally, we’re talking about a response as ambitious as the science requires. The Green New Deal resolution, introduced by Senator Ed Markey and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is just the start. There is much work ahead to fill in the details, build support, and then make it real. There are many ways to get involved.

With gridlock in the Senate and White House stalling meaningful federal action, we will likely see more progress on Green New Deal policies at the state and city levels. Many states and cities are working on Green New Deals tailored to their specific needs. The GND in Seattle—known for its terrible traffic—includes free public transit. California has a statewide GND act that proposes strong action on climate while increasing affordable housing and addressing homelessness, which is a crisis in the state.

Many local governments are advancing the GND, even if they don’t use that name. About twenty states and a hundred cities have plans to achieve 100 percent renewable electricity. So check out if there is a GND initiative—whether named GND or not—where you live. If not, gather friends or contact a local climate group to write to your city and state representatives to urge them to get going. Organize community dialogues to identify what is necessary to start a GND where you live.

The GND plan your city or state develops will be better, and support higher, if diverse stakeholders, including labor and environmental justice groups, are engaged from day one. The New Consensus has useful materials for building unanimity around a Green New Deal; see its website for the different components of a Green New Deal and build one that suits your community. The Sunrise Movement has loads of opportunities for young people to get involved locally and nationally, including a guide for starting a local group to work for a GND. Sunrise’s website lists the U.S. Senate and congressional co-sponsors of the GND resolution: Check if your representatives are there. If not, write and call them—and recruit friends, too—to rally support.

Many communities are building on the Green New Deal: Indigenous activists with the Red Nation have a Red Deal that incorporates Native leaders’ wisdom, ocean advocates are crafting a Blue New Deal to protect our oceans alongside a GND, and feminists have developed a set of feminist principles for a Green New Deal. Discuss incorporating these ideas—or others—into the GND campaign you join or start.

When you’re putting together a Green New Deal package for your community, don’t forget transitioning off fossil fuels! That means stopping the permitting of new fossil fuel operations, responsibly winding down existing operations, and ensuring those whose fossil-fuel-dependent jobs get eliminated find good work elsewhere. A GND that advances equity and security for all has the power to steer our country toward true prosperity as we address the climate emergency.

Of course, we’re not going to get a GND passed if we don’t elect climate leaders at all levels of government. Ask every candidate—for president, governor, mayor, city council, zoning board, planning commission—every single one—if they support a Green New Deal. Let them know that you support climate leaders on Election Day—and every day! Ensure that friends, neighbors, and co-workers are registered, and then let’s all get out the climate vote!

Ted Danson gets arrested.

CHAPTER FOUR
Oceans and Climate Change

The week leading up to our third Fire Drill Friday was probably, physically, the hardest week of all for me. On Saturday, I flew to California, where Lily Tomlin and I had contracted to do five speaking engagements in the Los Angeles area. On Thursday, I hosted the teach-in remotely via webcam and planned to take a red-eye back to D.C. so that I could arrive in time for the Friday rally. Red eyes and I don’t get along very well.

This Fire Drill Friday was especially emotional. You see, the first two focused on why I was doing them, what our demands and goals were, and what we saw as the solution. This week I was studying the effects of climate change on our planet, starting with oceans. My stomach was in knots.

I grew up in Brentwood, California. For my first decade of life, before the emergence of freeways and smog, I could see every day from our house in the hills a wide, shimmering expanse of ocean that inspired my little tomboy self. I spent summers at the Santa Monica beach learning to dive under waves and bodysurfing with my brother. I have snorkeled on the Great Barrier Reef while it was still fully vibrant and thriving. I’ll never forget my first plunge off the wing of a seaplane far out at sea where there were no other people except my son and daughter. The wild variety of colors and shapes so startled me I almost swallowed a mouthful of water. I’ve been scuba diving with my children over coral reefs in the Caribbean and with sea turtles and seals in the Galápagos Islands. I’ve fished the high seas with every important man in my life, starting with my father. I spent ten years with Captain America, Ted Turner, who sailed every ocean on earth and won the America’s Cup race. His respect and love for the ocean was contagious. The idea that my grandchildren won’t have coral reefs to snorkel over because of climate change breaks my heart. Learning how much damage we have already done to the ocean, and how that destruction is accelerating, made this Fire Drill Friday urgent and personal.

Although I have loved the ocean all my life, I found there was a lot that I did not know about it, and I was ready to learn from our Fire Drill Friday experts.

The Teach-In

John Hocevar, the oceans campaign director for Greenpeace, joined us for our teach-in, and what he told us was eye-opening.

“The ocean absorbs 93 percent of the heat we generate and roughly 40 percent of the carbon dioxide we produce,” he said. “In fact, oceans are our biggest allies in the fight against climate change. What will happen if we are not able to reverse the damage we’ve done to them? Our climate crisis will continue to accelerate.

“People have eaten roughly 90 percent of the world’s big fish, which means that it’s difficult for fishing companies and seafood businesses to turn a profit. So many of them have cut costs by not paying their workers a living wage. Some have stopped paying their workers at all.”

John told us that they are seeing human trafficking, forced labor, debt bondage, and slavery on fishing boats.

“Besides the human labor abuses and the issue of overfishing,” John went on, “there’s the problem of the bycatch, which includes accidentally, or sometimes not so accidentally, catching a million sharks and hundreds of thousands of sea turtles that die in fishing gear each year. An important organization advocating for oceans, Oceana, estimates that overfishing, bycatch collection, and the demand for shark fins for soup kill 100 million sharks a year.

John Hocevar speaks. Behind him is Ted Danson.

“Did you know that for three billion people about 20 percent of their essential protein comes from the ocean? Did you know that about half of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean? Actually, that oxygen is generated by microscopic plants known as phytoplankton. These vital plants are one of the first casualties of the way climate change is acidifying oceans.

“As we burn coal, oil, and natural gas, carbon dioxide goes up into the atmosphere and warms our planet, causing climate change. That’s global warming. But a lot of that carbon dioxide is absorbed directly into seawater, increasing the acidity of the water. That added acid makes it difficult for organisms like clams and oysters and coral reefs to form calcium skeletons.

“Possibly the most serious consequence of all,” John said, “is its effect on plankton and phytoplankton, the small creatures that comprise the bottom of the food chain, feeding everything from tiny fish to giant whales. Most plankton, including the oxygen-producing phytoplankton, can be damaged by the acidification of the ocean water. They’re already starting to be degraded, and some have disappeared.

“What’s going to happen when we lose whole classes of plankton?” John asked. “We don’t know. But our oceans are already producing less oxygen than they were just a few years ago. We’re conducting an uncontrolled experiment in the open oceans at a global scale, and it’s not okay.

“Offshore drilling is a big part of what’s driving climate change right now,” John continued. Offshore drilling degrades the environment, and oil spills and burning of oil extracted from the ocean are big factors in climate change. John described the direct effect one oil spill had on wildlife. “After the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, I was there on the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise, working with scientists to determine the scope and impacts of the disaster. What I saw, the impacts on seabirds, upon dolphins, on really everything that swims and crawls in the Gulf of Mexico, gave me nightmares for weeks. And again, this is not okay. We can’t just let this keep happening.”

At the teach-in, we were also lucky to hear from Ted Danson, who has spent decades of his life fighting for the world’s oceans. It’s unusual for a major celebrity to be somewhat of an expert on something like oceans, but Ted Danson is, which is why I scheduled this particular Fire Drill Friday at a time when he was free to join.

“Basically, one-third of the world’s catch is being thrown overboard,” Ted said. He explained that seventeen years ago, in 2002, when he merged his American Oceans Campaign with Oceana, where he now serves on the board, they focused on the serious problem of overfishing and bycatch. “Fishing boats used to have to lift their nets over rocks, not to protect these fragile fish habitats, but because they didn’t want to tear the nets. But when their engines got more powerful, at least for the large trawlers, they had enough power to drag their huge nets on rollers along the bottom of the sea, destroying the seafloor habitats, turning it all into gravel pits. And, as John said, when they pull these enormous nets up, they are filled with all kinds of sea animals that they were not fishing for, which they throw overboard.

“Our message at Oceana became ‘Save the Oceans, Feed the World,’” Ted said. “We work with the fishing management systems in the twenty top coastal countries and get them to start fishing sustainably. The people who have investments in the huge trawlers fight us, but the locals understand that if you manage fisheries correctly, there’ll be more fish, more money, more jobs, more food. That’s been proven time and time again. And most of the fisheries and the nurseries are in that first two hundred miles of every country’s economic zone.”

John reminded us that though the coastal waters were important, to save the sea turtles, the whales, the seabirds, and the tuna, we had to take care of the high seas, too.

“These are all species that migrate across the world’s oceans. And right now, unfortunately, the high seas are poorly regulated, basically unprotected, and it’s the Wild West out there and there’s pirate fishing. We’re going to lose things in our coastal waters even if those are well managed.”

“Come on, John,” I pleaded, “give us some good news. I feel like putting my head under a pillow and crying.”

And he did. He told us that ocean advocates have had some real success stories recently and that in the summer of 2019 more than 190 nations came together through the United Nations to start negotiating a Global Ocean Treaty to establish ocean sanctuaries that will help preserve and grow ocean life. Sanctuaries are the most proven, cost-effective tool to rebuild depleted populations of fish, to protect biodiversity, and to increase the resilience of species and ecosystems so they have a better chance of surviving the impacts from climate change, plastic pollution, and ocean acidification.

“If we get this right,” he said, “and we have to get this right, this treaty is going to enable us to scale up ocean sanctuaries that actually will be able to fully protect 30 percent of the world’s oceans from extractive use for the first time. Right now, we have about 2 percent of the oceans fully protected and about 5 percent partially protected, but scientists say we really need to get to 30 percent or more by 2030.”

Ted shared some more good news about protecting fish stocks. Oceana has teamed up with Google and a satellite company called SkyTruth for an oceans surveillance program called Global Fishing Watch, partially funded by a generous donation from Leonardo DiCaprio. Every ship over three hundred gross tons traveling on international waters, ships that can be three hundred feet long and are capable of processing 350 tons of fish a day, has to have a device that lets a satellite know where it is and where it’s been. When a ship sails swiftly through a protected marine sanctuary, you know it’s going someplace else to fish. But if all of a sudden it slows down and zigzags, you know that the ship is probably fishing illegally. By notifying someone onshore when the ship docks, authorities can search it and hold the wrongdoers accountable. It’s tricky, though. Some of these ships get refueled on the high seas, where they off-load their often-illegal catch onto another boat. If a search of the ship onshore determines that it is not just fishing but engaging in human trafficking, drugs, and gun smuggling, activists can take this information to the ship’s insurance company and ask, “You know that ship that you insure? Here’s proof of all the illegal things taking place on board. Are you sure you want to insure that?” Without insurance, the ship cannot legally operate.

I learned so much during the teach-in. I had not known the role the ocean plays in generating the very air we breathe. Learning what business as usual has done to this and other parts of the ocean made it hard to sleep. I would lie in bed having conversations in my head with the members of the Senate who deny or delay on climate, feeling impotent because I couldn’t find the words that would make them understand what’s at stake and persuade them to do something.

Could they ever understand what it means that the Antarctic peninsula is warming faster than almost anywhere else on earth except the Arctic, which is warming even faster? Did they know that as we lose that sea ice, we’re losing the population of krill, tiny shrimplike crustaceans that are critical food, the energy source for penguins and whales and so much else?

Could I convince them of how important it is to protect the whales because of their vital role in fighting climate change? One whale can sequester thirty-three tons of carbon over its lifetime, which it does by pooping. As whales swim, they eat plankton, which absorbs carbon, and when they turn that into poop, the poop sinks to the bottom. When they die, their bodies sink to the ocean floor, taking that carbon out of the atmosphere and sequestering it at the bottom of the sea. So throughout their lives, and even when they die, they are taking carbon out of the lower atmosphere.

If only our government representatives understood that if we were able to rebuild populations of whales to the point where they were before we started killing them, we would be able to capture about 1.7 billion tons of carbon per year. In spite of the scientific consensus, many of them still deny that carbon emissions are a problem.

At the very end of the teach-in, Ted had said something that surprised me. He said that when he had turned seventy, he thought it was time to slow down, relax, and enjoy. “And then you called and told me what you were doing in D.C. to confront the climate crisis and you asked me to engage in civil disobedience with you and risk arrest. The idea of getting arrested somehow focused my brain a little bit, and I began to realize that everything we’ve done, that people all over the world are doing, to make the oceans vital and healthy, can be undone because of climate change, the acidification and warming of the oceans and the harm that plastics are doing, and that’s related to oil as well … it all comes back to fossil fuels. I’m starting to think about all this in a new way.”

This was only our third Fire Drill Friday, and already Ted Danson, big influencer, was thinking in a new way. Do you have any idea what that meant to me?

SHOULD WE BE EATING FISH?

Ted Danson

“I don’t think we need to stop eating fish. But we need to be educated about what fish we shouldn’t eat: the big billfish, swordfish, king mackerel, sharks. The top feeders. You shouldn’t be eating those fish, because they have so much mercury in them from eating little fish further down the food chain.” Another reason not to eat the larger fish is that they have a longer growth cycle before they reproduce. When you eat a bigger fish, you might have interrupted that species’ reproductive cycle, depleting the fish population over time.

“The phrase that Oceana uses is eat small, local, and wild. Sardines, anchovies. There are a lot of wonderful fish you can eat that are not dangerous to your health. But farmed fish is tricky. You don’t want to eat farmed tuna or salmon because they are carnivorous, and it takes about five pounds of ground-up wild fish to feed and make one pound of farmed salmon. Many of the small fish fed to farmed fish are ones that we could be eating directly, making farming fish inefficient.”

The Rally

At the Fire Drill Friday rally, Jennifer Jacquet, an associate professor of environmental studies at NYU specializing in marine ecology conservation and evolutionary biology, encouraged us to think of the animals around us, on land and on sea, not just as commodities. “Aquatic animals are the last wild animals hunted at a global scale for food. There are at least one trillion fish killed every year by fisheries. We don’t think about fish as species; we think about them as seafood,” she said. She noted how fish are moving toward the poles at a rate of twenty-six kilometers a decade to avoid the warmer ocean temperatures. This means large numbers of fish will be disappearing from the tropics by 2050. How fish were behaving as their environment changed was telling us something about the future.

Jennifer Jacquet speaks.

“Some say the movement of fish represents opportunities for fisheries in the Arctic, and some worry about the future geopolitical conflicts over these fish. They speak about these animals merely as resources, instead of considering that this is nature sending us a signal,” she said. “Corals are bleaching, and fish are moving because we have made their world uninhabitable. They are moving so they can breathe. Climate change is just one threat to aquatic animals. The largest threat is still direct exploitation, the global fishing industry. Factory fishing has to end.”

The sea turtles face a different consequence of global warming, one that is painful to hear about. What I learned that day about them I will carry in my heart forever. As I said at the start, I have snorkeled with sea turtles, getting right up close and looking them in the eye. Kind, sorrowful eyes, they have. The reptilian version of a golden retriever. John Hocevar had already told me that because the sex of sea turtles depends on the temperature of the egg, due to warming seas practically all sea turtles in Florida are being born female. Almost no male baby sea turtles born in Florida for years. Thus no reproduction.

Whitney Crowder, Ted Danson, Jane, Maddy Carretero (behind Jane), John Hocevar, Jennifer Jacquet, Denise Patel, and Laura Flanders (behind Denise) pose for a shot in front of the Capitol before the rally starts.

I asked John Hocevar to be sure to say something at the rally to give us hope as well as what we can do. He did just that, saying, “I have to fight getting depressed about the damages being done to the oceans, but taking action, striving to make positive changes for the things I care about, helps with that and it can for you as well.

“It’s time to make a scene. The science is clear that our oceans are in trouble, and that we are in trouble,” John said, urging everyone to get more active.

“It’s important for us all to do what we can as individuals. But our real power comes when we work together to ensure that politicians and corporations understand that we want better options. We want a world where the choices we have available to us are not going to destroy us. When you succeed, spread the news and inspire others to do the same, and then take it to the next level, and work on your town or city, your county, your state, and your country. I promise you, you won’t be alone.”

Ted Danson and I joined many others to engage in civil disobedience. I caught sight of his face as he was handcuffed. He was radiant.

It was still daylight when we were released into the care of jail support. I got out before Ted, and when I went to hug and thank him, he took my face in his hands and said, “No, thank you, Jane. This has been important.” And the way he said it, and the way he made me look him in the eye, let me know that something had shifted in Mr. Danson.

And it wasn’t just the celebrities who spoke to me about the effect the actions had on them. Many others for whom civil disobedience was new told me, “I won’t be the same.” I have thought a lot about this. I think people’s reaction has something to do with what happens when you make the decision to put your body on the line for something you believe is right and important. You aren’t sure what’s going to happen, but you know you will be arrested and for a period of time you have no control and you go ahead and do it. For me, anyway, it’s like stepping into wholeness. You align your body and your values, and that’s something we don’t get many opportunities to do these days.

THE PLIGHT OF SEA TURTLES

Whitney Crowder

Whitney Crowder is a sea turtle rehabilitation coordinator at Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Florida.

“Sea turtles are dying in record numbers, and it’s directly because of us,” Whitney said. She described tiny turtles starving to death, their stomachs too filled with plastic to ingest food. Other sea turtles died entangled in discarded fishing nets or weighed down by our trash. Pollution-related diseases caused tumors to cover their bodies, including their eyes and their flippers, making them blind and unable to swim. All of this she had seen firsthand.

“Every year due to strong winds, hundreds of these little sea turtles are washed back to shore along our Florida coastlines and many of them die,” she said. “This year we have found 100 percent of our dead, washed-back sea turtles with stomachs full of plastic. Every turtle is filled with plastic. In one dead baby sea turtle, we found over 104 pieces of plastic in its stomach. These hardy sea turtles, who survived the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, were being wiped out by our plastic trash, which we see clogging the surface of the water. Our plastic trash that flows into the ocean is broken down by the sun and the saltwater into smaller pieces that the sea creatures ingest. We used to think this was just a problem for the creatures that live in the waters close to the surface, but in fact it filters down all the way to the seafloor, creating hazards for sea life all along the way.

Whitney Crowder speaks. Behind her are Ted Danson and Denise Patel.

“Losing sea turtles, we create a cascade of destruction in our oceans that we may never recover from,” Whitney said. “Sea turtles are an indicator of the health of our oceans. Without healthy oceans, life on earth cannot exist. Our oceans can’t wait. I never felt like we’re running out of time to make a change until now. The sea turtles are warning us now that they are in trouble and so are we. Is it possible that by saving the sea turtles, we can save ourselves as well? We have the power to turn this around, and I think we can because the future of our children will depend on the actions we take right now.”

What Can I Do?

Whether we live near or far from the world’s oceans, we can help protect and restore ocean life. To start, simply eat less fish! Reduce your fish consumption or avoid eating fish not only for the oceans themselves but also to protect the people who rely upon fish for their sustenance and livelihoods, such as island communities. If you need to eat fish regularly, try to eat smaller—and no less delicious!—fish that are lower on the food chain, such as anchovies, sardines, herring, and mackerel. For a regularly updated resource on which seafood to eat, check out Seafood Watch (seafoodwatch.org).

Fish markets and grocery stores need to hear that their customers care about sustainability. Ask at the grocery store, seafood market, and local restaurants where they get their fish. Ask how the fish was caught, and if the overall population of that species is healthy. (You may want to review SeafoodWatch.org before you go shopping or share this resource with the folks you talk to.) Does the fishing boat use ground trawlers that destroy the ocean floor and kill tons of sea life as bycatch? Was it line caught by a local fisher? Farm raised or wild? Are the workers on this fishing boat, or with this seafood company, treated well and paid fairly? Can the retailers verify that the seafood they’re selling was not caught by enslaved or human-trafficked people? If they don’t know, encourage them to find out so they—and the customers—aren’t complicit in wrongdoing.

The employee at the fish counter, or at the checkout stand, might not be able to answer these questions, or have any power to influence the supermarket chain’s practices, so be respectful and polite. We know, however, that consistent inquiries from customers about the items a store offers can make their way to the top of the corporation and change things. If enough people ask, sustainability and ethical sourcing can become part of a grocery store’s marketing, meaning something to brag about.

Because activities on land end up impacting the ocean, our personal choices such as how we commute, garden, and shop can help reduce pollutants making their way to the ocean, especially if lots and lots of people do them. As much as you can, choose biking instead of driving, stop using toxic pesticides and fertilizers in your garden, and eliminate as much plastic waste as possible, especially single-use plastic that is used once and tossed away in minutes.

If you’re lucky enough to be able to spend time at the ocean, take pictures of the plastic waste you see on the beach or in the water. Capture the corporate logo of the company that made this waste, and let it know that you expect better. If you use social media, post the pictures and tag the companies in your posts so they know their customers are paying attention.

While changing our individual consumption habits can help, the greatest change comes from collective and political action. Ask city and school officials if they’re using toxic pesticides or fertilizers, contributors to ocean dead zones where oxygen levels are too low to support life, on park and school grounds. Recruit neighbors and others to support phasing out poisonous chemicals. Organic landscapes are better for kids, better for groundskeepers, and better for oceans. Beyond your yard and neighborhood parks, ask your workplace to reduce or eliminate the use of toxic pesticides and fertilizers on company property.

Make sure your elected officials know you care about the oceans by writing to them to share information and urge action. This requires time, but thankfully you do not have to shoulder this burden alone. There are many organizations that support ocean life and advocate for policy change. Join Greenpeace, Surfrider, Oceana, or other groups that support ocean conservation, and ask your friends and family to do the same.

And above all, remember that healthy oceans help create a healthy climate! Everything we do to promote climate solutions in this book helps protect the oceans. That’s great, because they need us, and we need them.

Rosanna Arquette and Catherine Keener join Jane onstage.

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