What Can I Do?: The Path from Climate Despair to Action - Softcover

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Jane Fonda is a two-time Oscar winner and an Emmy award–winning American actress and a political activist. She sits on the boards of V-Day: Until the Violence Stops, the Women’s Media Center (which she cofounded in 2004), the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power & Potential, and Homeboy Industries. She lives in Los Angeles.

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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.

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