Ripple Effect: The Movement to Protect our Oceans – A Conversation with Jane Fonda and Douglas McCauley

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This is a podcast episode titled, Ripple Effect: The Movement to Protect our Oceans – A Conversation with Jane Fonda and Douglas McCauley. The summary for this episode is: <p>"Climate change is a life-and-death crisis." That's the message Jane Fonda wants us all to hear in this urgent and important conversation in this week's episode of Blazing Trails. As part of our special Dreamforce 2021 coverage, the Academy Award-winning actor, producer, author, and activist shares how she turned her despair into action and became a champion to save our planet. In a discussion with Douglas McCauley, professor of ocean science at UC Santa Barbara and director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative, Fonda talks about concrete steps we can all take to battle climate change and why protecting our oceans is key. Tune in to the episode for more! </p>

Michael Rivo: Welcome back to Blazing Trails. I'm Michael Rivo from Salesforce Studios, and today we're kicking off our special Dreamforce 2021 coverage. This year's Dreamforce theme is Success Anywhere, Dreamforce Everywhere, which is how Dreamforce is happening this year, both in person and digitally, from September 21 to 23, on the newly launched Salesforce Plus. So head over to salesforce. com/ plus. That's P- L- U- S, to experience Dreamforce this year. And we're kicking things off with an important and urgent conversation about climate change with academy award- winning actor, producer, author, and activist, Jane Fonda, in conversation with Douglas McCauley, professor of ocean science at UC Santa Barbara and director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative. So let's just jump right into the conversation. Here's Jane Fonda and Douglas McCauley.

Douglas McCaulyey: I am Douglas McCauley. I'm a professor of ocean science here at UC Santa Barbara, and I direct the Benioff Ocean Initiative, which is based here at UCSB, and we're an applied research center that tries to use science, sometimes technology, to create fixes for the major problems that are facing ocean health. We work on a whole range of different things. Unfortunately, we're spoiled for choice when it comes to challenges to ocean health, that includes working on issues related to endangered whales, to plastic pollution and a lot on climate change these days. And frankly, climate change is the thing that's keeping me most up at night these days, not only because of the impacts that climate change will have on our oceans, but of course, across our entire planet. And it's been a hard year, indeed, for people that are tracking what climate change is already doing to our planet and to our oceans and to the people on our planet. It's like looking at the headlines is a constant exercise of scanning new climate related disasters, from fires to drought to more intense storms, the heat waves, the list goes on and on. And as a scientist and as a parent, as someone who loves our planet, it's hard. I'm not going to lie. Sort of seeing all of these bad news events that are climate related stack up, it sometimes gets to me and I've been feeling a little bit of my own climate despair. I think it's okay for us to have some ups and to have a few downs in our conversation. When I try to process my own climate despair, as an ocean scientist, I sometimes think about the words of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. I'm a classical musician fan. He says something along the lines of," Despair provides evidence that you really care and believe in something." And for me, that's the best way to process the silver lining in my own despair. I care about my kids, which are being affected by climate change. I care about nature, which is really deeply being influenced about climate change. I care about the people on our planet that are most vulnerable and most impacted by climate change. So as we all process these feelings in this journey from despair to climate action, I think we have no better person than Jane Fonda to take us and think about that journey, because Jane literally with the book on this subject, What Can I Do? My Path from Climate Despair to Action. I'd like to dive in our conversation, maybe by just asking, you've worked on so many different issues, social issues and environmental issues over your career. Why this new laser focus and how did you come to this new laser focus on climate change?

Jane Fonda: Good to talk with you, Douglas. Thank you. Well, the climate crisis, I mean, it's almost become a cliche, is our existential crisis, which means that it will determine our existence going forward. In other words, if we can't address and minimize the climate crisis, keep it from becoming a total catastrophe, we can't really do anything else. It's like Russian nesting dolls, the out outer doll is the climate crisis and inside is the crisis of racism, the crisis of democracy, the crisis of inequality, of patriarchy, because they all come from the same mindset. Use everything until you can't get anything more out of it, commodify everything, profit is the bottom line, not justice or empathy or fairness. And so I think that if we can face the climate crisis, realize that it's bad, that it's real, that it's man- made and that there's hope to do something about it, then we can begin to see all these other issues. I think that... I've been an environmentalist for many, many decades, but what made me kind of leap from my seat and decide to move to DC and start what has come to be known as Fire Drill Fridays was reading Naomi Klein's book, On Fire: the Burning Case for a Green New Deal, because what she did was she explained the science in a way that really got to me and that and... because people are environmentalists and climate activists and they never mention fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are at the center of the climate crisis. Yes, there are other things, methane from animals and various other... but the main culprit is fossil fuels. And what Naomi showed me is the science... scientists are saying that we absolutely must not allow warming to go above 1. 5 degrees Celsius, above what it was before we began to burn fossil fuels before the Industrial Revolution. That is very specific, 1. 5 degrees Celsius, and we have to do that by cutting our fossil fuel emissions in half by 2030. That's so clear and so specific, and even in their new report that came out very recently, the global climate scientists say the same thing. We have, now, nine years left and we have to cut our fossil fuel emissions in half. So in the wake of Ida and all the destruction and the fires and the flooding and so forth, the talking heads on television during that week, I noticed nobody mentioned fossil fuels. They mentioned, this is a catastrophe, it's code red, we have to move towards green energy and everything, but people don't talk about fossil fuels. So I decided that I have a platform, I'm a movie star. I have a hit TV series behind me, Grace and Frankie, that if I went to Washington and I engaged in civil disobedience that would put me in a position where I was risking getting arrested, that people would take notice. And I was right, they did. We've marched, we've petitioned. You know this, Douglas, you've done it yourself. We've written books and articles and we've lobbied, we've done everything that is within our democratic toolkit to do, and we haven't been listened to. And so what remains is civil disobedience, is risking arrest. It's what, throughout history, has changed history, basically, whether it's the Civil Rights Movement in the south, or Gandhi, or the Boston Tea Party, or... there's so many examples throughout history of people putting themselves, their bodies on the line, to call attention to a wrong that they're trying to right. And so that's what I did.

Douglas McCaulyey: Thank you for that leadership and thank you for that direction. I think it... what I really love most about Fire Drill Fridays was just that we could come together with you virtually, or in person, and find a way to do just what you said, try to take this urgency directly into our leader's face and try to actually get some change done, but also educate along that journey. I love how you're guided and inspired by science. Obviously, I have a little bit of a bias there as a scientist, but I love that the opening words in your audio book, where we have a chart, we have a supplement you can go to with data and science to help give you guide. Thank you for staying so close to that science and that inspiration. I wanted to ask, you mentioned a thing a moment ago, and I actually, as an ocean scientist, was there listening in for the Fire Drill Friday session on oceans. During that session, talked about a bunch of different things related to oceans, but the main characters in that particular conversation weren't coral reefs or kelp forests or ocean acidification. You spent a lot of time actually talking about something you just mentioned, which was a connection between racial justice, racial equity and the climate crisis. I think that connection is so important and I love the attention. I appreciate the attention you've given to that. Can you just maybe unpack those connections there a little bit more for us between racial equity and climate action?

Jane Fonda: Thank you. Yes. A study came out in 1987 that was really shocking. What it showed was that fossil fuel companies, oil, gas, coal, whatever, refineries, petrochemical companies, how they chose where they were going to put their infrastructures, their waste, their toxic waste and so forth, was not what you would've thought scientifically, close to an aquifer or where the soil was permeable or... no. It was in communities of color and low income and indigenous communities. Deliberate. It was deliberate, the placing of these toxic infrastructures was in those communities. It's why people of color and indigenous people and low income people have been so vulnerable to COVID, because all their lives they've been breathing in toxins, deadly toxins that cause asthma and heart conditions and cancer and all kinds of problems, birth defects. They're all over. They're all over California. I took the First Lady, Jennifer Newsom, to tour a place where people right outside their bedrooms there'll be an oil well, an oil pump. And the governor keeps issuing more permits. So when president Biden and his Build Back Better Bill says that he will target a good deal of the money that's being spent on building up our infrastructures and cleaning up. He promises to do it in the communities that have already been the most heavily impacted, and this is really important. It's the first time that that's ever happened, and the reason is that environmental justice activists have been working so hard for so long to... in the beginning, all the big green organizations were primarily rather wealthy white men, and I was part of that. I'm not a man, but my various husbands were white and they were men and they were part of this, thinking that in the environment is about wilderness and wild animals. And that's great and they should be protected. They have to be for the sake of the planet, but environment is any place we work, play, live, pray, it's everywhere. And so part of the environmental movement has to take into consideration the people that are living next to Superfund sites, waste sites, the chemical plants that are leaching now along the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas, but particularly Louisiana. My friend, the activist, Hop Hopkins, he said," If there weren't racism, if there wasn't racism, there wouldn't be a climate crisis." And that is very true. And it's why we emphasize... most of our speakers were people of color, indigenous people, working class people, celebrities came to introduce them, which is what celebrities should do. That's where the two things become intersected.

Douglas McCaulyey: Thank you, Jane. I think those intersections are so fundamental and so well- summarized. If there wasn't racism, we wouldn't have a climate crisis. Good words for focus for us. Can I ask also, you haven't been shy and a very constructive way about speaking directly about particular businesses and the role of business and trying to deal with some of these issues over your career. Specifically here, as we think about the climate crisis, the reason I ask here about the role and the responsibility and the platform of business is because we have so many people listening to us today in the world of Salesforce, that is a major company, but they themselves are actually connected in important ways to a whole network of the world's most influential businesses. And of course, they use those relationships to do business, but also they use those relationships and they leverage those connections to do good. I know that because I get to work with some of the folks that do just that. What marching orders do you have for them, or for business CEOs and businesses themselves, about the role of business in taking more leadership in fighting this climate crisis?

Jane Fonda: Number one, you have to be sure that your business doesn't invest its pension fund, or whatever, in fossil fuels. In my book, I have a whole chapter on stop the money pipeline. We've got to stop the funding of the fossil fuel industry. First of all, it's a really, really bad investment and second is if we want to save the planet, we have to stop. We have to stop doing this, so that's one thing. Another thing is, depending on the business, for example, I'm a brand ambassador for L'Oreal, the skincare company. What's important for them is to look at all of their products and see, how do we get rid of the plastic? How do we stop using single use plastics? How do we use less water? All those kinds of things, but especially the plastics. There are so many alternative options that can be used. Don't wrap your products in and plastic. Find alternatives. That's critical because I'm old enough to... I grew up when you didn't see a lot of plastic on beaches anywhere in the world, and now it is, as you know, you've seen pictures, it's just stunning. We are polluting, especially oceans and the animals are found with hundreds of pounds, if they're whales, of plastic in their stomachs when they wash up dead. And sea turtles are tangled up in plastic, and we have to stop with the plastic. So those are two things, and there's more in my book, What Can I Do, that people could look at to see how their company can make a difference.

Douglas McCaulyey: Thank you, Jane. And a lot more in there for what we can do as individuals, what we can do as part of companies, what we can do as part of communities to get out of this despair, turn that despair into our own fuel for action. I wanted to ask, in listening to the book and you read the book, I understand that the focus of the Fire Drill Fridays and the focus of the book itself is really to get this message to people that maybe already have the memo on climate change, understand it's important, but don't really know how to actually get activated and do something. There are clear marching orders in the book for all of those folks, but I wanted to ask what about the rest of the folks out there that maybe haven't got that memo? How do we actually speak to audiences that maybe don't yet know how important this climate crisis is, or maybe they recognize, they acknowledge that climate change is real, but they don't put it at the top of their list of things that we need to focus as a country, as a community, we need to do something about. How do we get to the folks that aren't yet converted on this climate crisis issue?

Jane Fonda: You know, Douglas, time is not our friend. We are running out of time. We have nine years and right now the United States, and most other advanced developed nations, are moving in the wrong direction. We are not reducing our fossil fuel emissions. Given that, and that's important to keep in mind, we don't have a lot of time. I have to say that we don't really need to convince everyone. We don't need to. Social histories, studies, research of histories and social movements show that you never have a majority. You just need enough people, and there are 25 million Americans who are alarmed, not only do they know there's a climate crisis, but they're alarmed and they've never done anything because nobody's asked them. There are 13 million people who would engage in civil disobedience, but nobody has asked them. So right now, given our time constraints, what's important is to ask the people who know it's a problem to stand up and act. We can't change anything if we don't take action, which isn't just individual action, like changing... getting rid of single use plastics in your kitchen and changing the straws you use, and et cetera, and so forth. This is a collective crisis that requires a collective solution and that means that we have to get together in unprecedented numbers and make demands and we have to do it quickly. So again, I think Fire Drill Fridays was... that was who we were targeting, those people who are alarmed but haven't done anything, and I must say they came from all over the country, people who had never, ever engaged in civil disobedience before, and they found it transformative. This is what we have to do. We also have to understand, and I'm sorry because I know that there are a lot of businesses, people representing businesses that may be tuned in, but the climate crisis is not going to be solved by cap and trade. Means," I'm going to make up for what I'm doing, pollution- wise, by protecting a forest or something like that." We have to stop the pollution. We have to stop the emission. So things like that, taxing, carbon taxing and cap and trade, they are not the main things that need to happen. It is people in huge numbers, demanding of their government to do what is needed and when I say government, I just don't mean federal government, I mean state governments, governors, state legislatures, everybody all the way down. We... I mean, this is a life and death crisis. I have grandchildren, I have a two year old grandchild and a future... the future for a child that young may not look so good. Let me just give you an example. Hurricane Ida was a 4. 4 category hurricane, right? That's very high, but it wasn't a five. Next year, it'll probably be a point 5, category five hurricane. So imagine that. Worse than Ida, a category five, and then a week later, another category five and then two or three weeks later, another category five. I mean, and look, the damage was not just in the south where it hit, it was all across the country, including up into upstate New York and further, and the droughts will get worse and that means the fires, and that means farmers going broke and the food systems having to be totally rethought because we're not going to be able to eat the way we always have. And water is disappearing, water that is safe to drink and so forth and so on. So how do you... so much money is going to go into saving people from disasters, trying to make ourselves a little bit safer. That's why this Build Back Better Bill,$ 3. 5 trillion, it should be$ 10 trillion, but anyway, it's an absolutely essential that we pass that. So one thing that we can all do is put pressure on our elected officials to pass it, because if you imagine a world with category five hurricanes, one after the other, after the other, plus all the other storms and drought and floods and fires that'll happen, it's hard to have a democracy. It's hard to make gains in any area. The coral reef will be gone. The whales will be gone. The polar bears will be gone. The fish, I mean, a billion fewer birds exist in North America that existed in 1970. I mean, there was a time last year when it was 112 outside my home, and I read that birds were falling dead out of the sky. I mean, it's here and it means that things that allow us to live the way we do are no longer going to be there. This is what I think about all the time and the way I prevent despair is through activism. COVID was hard, because I couldn't do it anymore, but we all have to put our shoulder to this effort and push as hard as we can to get out of our comfort zone and make sure that our children and our grandchildren and nieces and nephews will have a livable future. And we have to do it very quickly, and it's all about phasing out of fossil fuels and doing it in a way that will protect the workers, the fossil fuel workers, that they can move into jobs that pay as well as their current jobs do. We have to pay attention to them and, Douglas, because you... oceans is closest to your heart, I just... and I love oceans too, most of us do. The oceans are our biggest allies in combating the climate crisis. They absorb huge amount of the heat that we... I have it written down, 93% of the heat that we generate gets absorbed into the ocean. 40% of the carbon dioxide, the oxygen that we breathe, most of it comes from the ocean, from a tiny little micro... tiny microscopic plant called Phytoplankton. Phytoplankton is dying because the ocean is becoming acidified because of fossil fuel. The carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning is going into the ocean. Oceans are dying. Our friends, the oceans that might save us because they absorb so much of our dirty work, our heat and our carbon dioxide, are dying. And I'm not good with 90 per... people have eaten most of the... 90% of the big fish have been eaten. People around the world depend on fish, depend on coral reefs. They're going to be gone. So... and that's just the ocean. You can talk about forests and everything else. These things that help us survive, we are killing off. And how heartbreaking is that? Mean, whales, octopus, porpoises, dolphins, they feel, they have kinships, they like to play. They talk to each other and they have empathy. The Famous biologist, E. O. Wilson at Harvard once said," God granted the gift of intelligence to the wrong species. Should have granted it to the dolphins, maybe, some species that didn't have a thumb and wasn't carnivorous." These are great... octopus, if you've seen My Octopus Teacher, octopus, they play and they feel sad and they feel empathy and they reach out and we're allowing these things to die off, and we have to stop doing that. We have to save them.

Douglas McCaulyey: Thank you for that, Jane. If I could have more acclaimed actresses citing Phytoplankton, and so clearly sharing inaudible of these facts of climate impacts on oceans, but also ways to leverage ocean health to fight climate change... it would be my dream. Thank you for your leadership.

Jane Fonda: Can I say something about eating?

Douglas McCaulyey: Oh, absolutely.

Jane Fonda: When you go into a restaurant, if you see that they serve swordfish or octopus, go to the kitchen and tell the chef," No, swordfish is a great wild animal that is going extinct. These are the last wild animals that are still being hunted for food. They are going extinct. We have to stop eating big fish. We have to stop eating octopus." So tell the people in your restaurants, when you buy food, ask how they're farmed and where they come from and so forth. We have to eat small local anchovies, sardines, things like that and a whole lot less of them. We can survive on plant protein. We don't have to always eat fish and meat.

Douglas McCaulyey: Absolutely. Very, very well put and very important. My happy thought here is 25 million people that you just mentioned, getting activated with these instructions to get out there, to join us, join all of us, talking to our representatives, in the streets, talking to their chefs, buying the right things, saying the right things, supporting businesses in the right way. I'm thinking about that army of new voices that are there that can really make a difference. And thank you also for underlying the gravity of this situation. I promised some ups and some downs. My up for closing after we wrap up in a second is I'd love to share with you, and the folks that joined us, this story of work that we're doing trying to actually conserve endangered whales to help with the climate fight, because every whale that we've saved, actually, because they're both beautiful, old ecologically important, they also capture as much carbon as thousands of trees. So love to share that story as we wrap up. But Jane, I just want to thank you. Thank you for your... for elevating this issue in such a important and intelligent way. Thank you for the inspiration you're giving all of us and more than the inspiration, thank you for the words you've given us here today, the words in your book that actually help us turn this inspiration into action. Very grateful for your leadership and thank you for everyone who's joined us today to absorb a bit of that. I'm leaving our conversation more optimistic that we can, with 25 million good friends, actually make a difference and fast, as you say. Thank you so much, Jane.

Jane Fonda: Thank you for your work.

Michael Rivo: That was Jane Fonda in conversation with Douglas McCauley, professor of ocean science at the University of California, Santa Barbara and director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative. If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to check out this year's Dreamforce on Salesforce Plus. That's salesforce. com/ P- L- U- S. Thanks for listening today. I'm Michael Rivo from Salesforce Studios.

DESCRIPTION

"Climate change is a life-and-death crisis." That's the message Jane Fonda wants us all to hear in this urgent and important conversation in this week's episode of Blazing Trails. As part of our special Dreamforce 2021 coverage, the Academy Award-winning actor, producer, author, and activist shares how she turned her despair into action and became a champion to save our planet. In a discussion with Douglas McCauley, professor of ocean science at UC Santa Barbara and director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative, Fonda talks about concrete steps we can all take to battle climate change and why protecting our oceans is key. Tune in to the episode for more!