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Jane Fonda is doing whatever it takes to save the planet, including stop shopping. Yes! The American actress, political activist, and former fashion model revealed in a recent interview that it is possible to find pieces from “30 years ago” inside her closet. According to the superstar, this is a measure to avoid wasting clothes and items in good condition.
“We have to not waste so much. We have to be satisfied with less. I’m trying to not buy anything new anymore, no new clothing,” she explained to Interview Magazine. “But I also understand that I can say that because I still wear what I wore 30 years ago, and I have a lot of clothes, so it’s easy for me,” said the “Grace and Frankie” star.
The 82-year-old actress urged people to “pay attention to what you buy,” and also admitted that since she grew up with luxuries — a reason why it is easier to give up on them. “I mean, look, I have to be very honest. I am Henry Fonda’s daughter. I have always had privilege. When it was very slow going in terms of my ability to earn a living, I had savings that I could fall back on,” she said. “I don’t want to pretend that I was scraping nickels and dimes together. I lived pretty close to the bone for quite a while, but I always knew I could make it. I have to say that. My privilege protected me a lot.”
Fonda, who has been an environmental activist since the 1970s, also revealed what changed in her thinking that turned her to take actions in a radically different way. “Books have changed my life on a number of occasions. I read Naomi Klein’s book On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. It was the way she talked about science. She talked about it so clearly and so unequivocally,” she said to the publication. “That’s when I realized how little time we have left. Then she talked about Greta Thunberg and how Greta being on the autistic spectrum allowed her to focus in a way that the rest of us can’t. When Greta said, ‘We have to get out of our comfort zone. We have to put our bodies on the line. We have to act like we’re in a crisis,’ I knew right away that I had to do more than I’d been doing.”
According to the actress, she has been “marching and protesting and driving an electric car,” however she wanted to take one step further and “step it up as a celebrity with a platform.”
The Academy Award winner also revealed how she is closely working with the Latinx community. “I hooked up with Greenpeace, and we started these Fire Drill Fridays that really caught on. We are now doing them virtually, and we have, on average, 400,000 people every Friday,” she said. “In July, we had a million people tuned in across platforms. Thousands of people are signing up to do volunteer work, registering people to vote, re-registering people who have been purged from the polls, sending postcards, texting, calling—especially Spanish-speaking people who are working with the Latinx communities. It’s very beautiful what’s happening, and it makes me feel very hopeful.”
Fonda also highlights the environmental movement’s misconceptions and the terrible impact the climate crisis has on marginalized neighborhoods. “For a long time, people thought of the environmental movement as being white men. And for quite a while, it had been white men, with the mindset of conservation,” she said. “Across populations, the people who are being primarily impacted right now are people who live in areas where there are oil wells and fracking pits and refineries and incinerators and harbors where this stuff is exported. They are people of color because the fossil fuel industry deliberately puts this infrastructure in communities of color that they believe are powerless. They call them ‘sacrifice zones,’” she revealed.
For the actress is imperative to let people know of the danger Latinx, Indigenous, and Black communities, living in these zones, are facing. “The people in these communities have generational health problems. Lung diseases, asthma, heart diseases. All kinds of unusual cancers that are related to fossil-fuel toxins. The number of chemicals that are in the air that are known carcinogens are unbelievable,” she explained. “This is done deliberately,” she said, adding that “This is the reality of their lives, and we have to make it known.”
