We are so excited to host the new book on the Climate Crisis but i would first like to introduce the executive director. Amy played an integral role in helping organize and was one of the inspirations behind the book so we will bring her up first. Its so wonderful to be here. Im delighted to introduce. The last time we were purchasing in washington, d. C. So its perfect we are here with our favorite politics and prose and im counting the days until we are able to do that again. The need is greater than ever and i hope that you will read the book and be able to join us when we protest again. Its so dark out from the smoke it looks like it is the middle of the night. It is disorienting and so apparent im almost at a loss of words how extreme the situation is. Jane fonda needs no words. We know her acting career currently with the netflix hit grace and frankie and her work on incredibly important issues. Everybody knows the actor and the activist so i want to introduce a different side, another side. Jane is a hungry learner and understood the urgency about climate and wanted to learn more so she dove in. I remember we had these climate experts breathing on the policies and one of them said i dont want to get too much in the weeds and she said get in the weeds. She speaks out and listens to voices on the front lines on the voices often ignored its been such a joy to work alongside of her this past year and see it captured in this book. I asked maureen dowd the other day what she thought of the book and she said it is an odyssey of selfdiscovery. That said great description to guide us on that odyssey from climate despair to action that we all need so much, so welcome. We also have amber with u ambero moderate the evenings program. You might recognize her from many covers of fashion magazine and her acting work and entrepreneurial work founding the cutting edge but i know amber from marching together in the streets demanding climate action. Throughout all of her work in fashion and business into and activism, shes been committed to advancing environmental awareness and very importantly inspiring others to get involved in the collective joyful work of driving social change. Shes joined multiple rallies speaking, marching. The impacts which we see unfolding on the west coast and around the world today. It is great to see you both. Im counting the days until we are back demanding the leadership. Until then, over to you to take it away. It was about a year ago when i realized we have to get out of our comfort zone and behave like we are in a crisis because we are in a true crisis. I knew the person i had to call was the director of greenpeace. I mean, is there a braver organization . I know that they embrace big, strong powerful actions that wake people up and annie is at the helm. It means so much to me we were able to get this thing going and continuing to grow. I cant wait to get to all of that and hear how it started. Thank you for asking me to do this and thank you to politics and prose. It has been an honor to march with you and to be rested and learn from you and feel so blessed to be here tonight so i just wanted to say when i was reading your book, i love tell personal this book was because you were talking about big issues we were facing about Climate Change and you interwoven your own personal history and stories and i found it so inspiring and it helped me to make it human and connect the dots so i hope others will find that. I just wanted to start by saying that. I loved hearing all the stories and people that showed up for you. Just amazing. I know youve been an activist but you were also aware of the Environmental Issues even as early as the 70s. What led you a year ago now to start a fire drill friday . I was pretty depressed because i kept asking what can i do. I did all the personal things. I cut back on meat and i have an electric car. I know thats the onramp, thats the first step. But those of us that our celebrities have a platform. How do i use my platform appropriately. It was naomi kleins book and maybe some people watching have read it. It was that book that really shook me and how she quoted greta to get out of your comfort zone and put yourself on the line. Thats when i realized. I called and said i want to move to dc for a year. Im going to camp out in front of the white house. I remember the silence on the phone and then she said thats great that you want to put yourself out there, but its illegal. We cant camp out anymore so we have to find another way and then we worked out the once a week friday fire drills. I love how you came up with that name. We didnt know what to call it. There was a documentary film crew following us. We spent the day in the room and we couldnt think of one so we were packing up to go and the sound guy said what about fire drill fridays. You spoke about feeling kind of despair and i think that we all have been challenged with feeling this despair and sort of whats going to happen coupled with whats happening in california and texas and louisiana and not just in the United States but all over the world we are seeing the effect of Climate Change. How do you stay above all of that . Guest sometimes i dont. We have a governor who just today on the news said he will not tolerate people that are denying Climate Change but he keeps assigning permits for further drilling and that is what we have to decide. When he claims to be and is a climate activist but he cant stand up to oil, many of whom have been on fire drill fridays. Its knowing how people change. I think 16 people got arrested and when we left, there was well over 300 people. Now weve been doing them for six months virtually. We had Something Like 750,000 following us which is pretty amazing. They are now doing things that really matter, calling in writing and texting and reregistering people and loving how they feel they are making a difference. That is what helps me get over climate despair is activism. What do you think back on that first rally so much had changed especially in the United States, but globally theres been a lot of upheaval but here in the United States we have seen a big summer full of protests and massive amounts of social change. How do you feel now when you think about that first arrest compared to now . Guest i am glad her than ever that i was there and that i did it and that all of those wonderful people were there with me on that first day we kept at it. It was scary at the beginning. We didnt know. There were more photographers than there were protesters. In the midst of the triple crisis we are facing now theres the uprisings following george floyd. This is an important time. Not only do we have to deal with the election we also have to dig deep and figure out who we are. Who do we want to be. We have two fundamentally, and i hope that we will, we have to change the way that we feel and function and learn to care for each other and not let these dog whistling politicians who dont care at all lead us down a dead end road which is what is happening now. But i always tend to look at the bright side. Covid didnt break us. It exposed where we were already broken. People saw things i dont think they are aware of. They didnt realize how our federal government has been so weakened and crippled. When you are facing a pandemic and a Climate Crisis, you need a strong federal government that is coordinated and strategic and prepared. People now face what happens when we dont have that. Another lesson from covids Pay Attention to the experts, the medical experts and the scientists which havent been happening. People see now what happens when you dont have that. And then i think people are seeing the essential workers, the farm workers, the domestic workers, the delivery people, all of the people that make our lives function that are missing so much and getting so little in return. We have to really fight for them not just now, but in the future so that they can support themselves. All these things that reflect on who we are as a people. I feel very hopeful. Guest thats one of the things that i have come to realize getting involved in different types of activism is that all of these paths converge. Racial justice, womens issues, indigenous issues, sustainability, even things like clothing, oil industries, clean air, everything merges. People just dont realize how interconnected everything is. Each fire friday was about a different issue but you had people speaking on different backgrounds and you collaborated with people in different backgrounds. Can you talk about why its so important that we collaborate with different movements . Guest you are right when you say they are all interconnected. The mindset that is the foundation of the United States its the mindset that people are fungible and the land is to be used and then discarded. We treated human beings and the land and nature as disposable and now we are in the far extreme of that mindset and what its given birth to. Its staring us in the face so we have to get over it. We cant just have a new politician and policies. We have to have a new paradigm that guides us into the future. Host one of the things that is so important to that shift they dont understand how we could have their future and i know you have a lot of young activists, and work with you during fire drill friday. Talk about how you didnt necessarily need to do that but you all joined together guest imagine if i started these actions on friday without ever meeting with the folks that had been there every friday for a year already. It wouldnt have worked. It is to annies credit. She knew that in order for this to work we had to sit down with the people that had already been there and that included the young climate strikers and the heads of all of the other environmental organizations that believed in action. There are some environmental organizations that are about conservation and they dont do big actions. We got the organizations together that understand and it was together that we figured out what we needed to do and a lot of them spoke at the rally. I brought in celebrities who were my friends. To introduce these people of color, these young women, these young indigenous people, people whose voices are not heard. We wanted to give them a platform and their stories were potent and heartbreaking and important. But there was one, and environmental justicenvironments particular friday. What a lineup. There was a young girl from Standing Rock and the niece of walt disney and arianna from houston in the shadow of a refinery and what it was like growing up in a place people couldnt breathe and everybody has lung disease and so forth and then it was bobby kennedy. So, it was just beautiful and made me so happy. One of the things i love about this book is when you look at the pictures, you can see how it was centered in joy and love. It was great. Guest there was a lot of support. Martin spoke and gave that speech im not sure who it was that he wa but he was so pod generous and gracious with so many people. And there were so many other incredible people that came that day, people from all over. It was just powerful. Lets talk about some of the demands that you were making on fire drill friday and some of the biggest. I dont know if a lot of people fully understand the Green New Deal. Could you give a quick if possible summary so the people listening can understand why its so important and why we need this. Guest its easier if i describe why we dont need it. A lot of coal miners have black lungs because of their work. The owners canceled healthcare for these people. They are supposed to support the workers. That disappeared so theres all these out of work coal miners who see no future, who have no institutional help. They are the victims of the transition away from fossil fuel. That cannot happen. We need to make sure that when we moved from a fossil fuel based Energy Economy that the workers and families who were impacted are trained for new jobs, where they live in their communities. Union jobs to the right with collective bargaining so they dont lose anything except now the jobs are healthy and clean. In the fossil fuel industry a lot of the workers were unionized. We had action to leave that and go to work making solar panels for 30,000 a year, 40,000 a year. So, what the Green New Deal does as a resolution, it is a vision of how to move forward in such a way that we leave no one behind and raise up. We raise up those that work in the low carbon sectors, the ones that we call essential workers and they are listed to a place they dont live in constant anxiety they could have Maternity Leave and paternity leave and they were taken care of when they were sick in a sustainable economy kind of like what roosevelt did in the 30s when he was trying to lift the country out of despair during the Great Depression and by the way, he didnt do it because he was this great guy, there were millions of people that forced him to do it and he said at one point i agree with you now go out and make me do it so they did and the same time the same people that were opposed to him, he would have killed me knowing his son was marrying somebody that lived roosevelt and my father the only time i saw him cry a is the day roosevelt died. That wasnt part of our dna as a family. Thats what the Green New Deal does. Its not just lets take paint and paint over the conservation corps. It requires changing the way we think and live and all the people opposed to it they say its too expensive, its not real is the way that they did with Franklin Delano roosevelt. But one of the things the pandemic has shown is that government can come up with money. The money just has to be used not to put us back where we were before, but use the money after the elections. It needs to go to putting people to work in a green economy. Our country is not resilient. We dont have a country that can stand up to whats coming. Look what happened in california and houston and louisiana. Our homes and schools and stores and hospitals and Healthcare Systems need to be shored up and restructured so they can withstand. Lets move them away from piping oil to clean water and places that dont have clean water. The victim of the Climate Crisis and lack of water is scary. Directly to that point talking about the lack of water and how much they are linked to the Climate Crisis. Talk about the disparity between the White Privilege. You never have an oil drill or no clean water in santa monica or shooting out chemicals for people in this White Privilege to neighborhood where you do in the low Income Housing and indigenous communities so theres a huge disparity. Talk about how link to these are two Climate Change. Guest i write about it in the book. After she got out of school and studied, she studied things like how you would choose where to put an oil rig or refinery and in school she was taught you put it in this kind of geological place for obvious reasons. There was a study that came out if im not mistaken that showed how the decisions were made where it is assumed they dont have the power to fight back and so generation after generation goes up in the situations where kids are constantly having to use in a leaders when they are playing sports because the refineries are flaring and people are dying of cancer and Heart Disease and all kinds of things. We focus on that several times with the fire drill friday. There they go right next to a home or a school. They are fighting back now and we are standing together in this fight back because that has to stop. There is one reason why those communities are so much more vulnerable to the pandemic because they are already suffering from lung diseases and things that make them very vulnerable. I know that women are also disproportionately affected by Climate Change. Many of the refugees. Generally they are the ones going out and working taking care of the children at the same time. How do you see women leading the Climate Change, this Climate Movement . Theres a lot of reasons women are in the leadership and theres also a lot of really good men that are leading. We notice month after month that like two thirds of the people there are women and a lot of them have gray hair. You couldnt miss it and i think theres a lot of reasons for it. They become a little more sedentary and there is more estrogen than testosterone. Women are less vulnerable and we are conditioned to socially to depend on each other more but its also evolutionary. It was us sitting around the campfire telling each other where the water was better overr the poison weeds were growing and then that grew into book clubs and we hang together and the way that we relate to each other is just different. We relate face to face, i to i. Its a little bit less whether they relate to each other so this is extremely important right now because the people who are in charge want us to believe that individualism is a good thing. They are trying to make the word collective a bad word and women dont fall for that so i think its one of the reasons we relate more. We are the ones that they are the children and they suffer with the Climate Crisis because we carry toxins. It affects the toxins. I cant remember the word now, but sequestered. Women sequestered toxins in our body fat, goes to the fetus and kids are getting sick in huge numbers all over the world. I want to know why right to life dont get on the bandwagon if they care so much about children. So theres all kinds of reasons women are in the leadership of this vital movement. They come up with the ideas of having solar panels to heat schools. They tend to be the ones that sign the climate treaties. Theyve also done better during covid. Guest thats right. Good point. I know you are surrounded by guest laura and elizabeth and annie leonard, my friends are my heroes. Guest host this doesnt seem like it would be connected to Climate C