Before a packed hall, actor and activist Jane Fonda gave the keynote at the U.S. Green Building Council’s twentieth-anniversary Greenbuild International Conference in San Francisco on November 2. In a 45-minute chat with comedian Louis Virtel, she discussed her work addressing the climate crisis and her optimism for climate action. But it was Fonda who got the laughs, as she interspersed strident calls for change with zingers. In response to Virtel’s opening query about her recent diagnosis of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, Fonda said she almost wished her treatment would have made her lose her hair: “I was going to shave my head and tattoo ‘climate emergency’ on it.”
Virtel then asked Fonda about her Fire Drill Fridays, a weekly rally on Capitol Hill that she instituted in 2019 with Greenpeace USA, where participants engage in civil disobedience to protest the government’s climate inaction. “I figured this little old lady from Hollywood shows up and gets arrested every week,” she said, “that’s going to get people noticing.” Fire Drill Fridays moved online during COVID but will return in person next month and respond to the results of the midterm elections.
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