Jane Fonda's Climate Story: A Long Road to Environmental Action

By Eugenie Lewis, August 30, 2026

Photo:  Eugenie Lewis and Jane Fonda, Los Angeles, August 2026

I have long admired Jane Fonda in many ways — her acting achievements, her focus on health, and now as an environmental advocate. It was a particular privilege for me to recently have the opportunity to meet her at an event in Los Angeles, where she shared some of her work to elect climate champions. This was an emotional event for me to have the opportunity to meet her in person. I consider her to be a role model and hero for using her celebrity platform to speak up on important issues of the day.

You might know Jane Fonda from her acting career, her exercise videos, or her climate activism. You might wonder: how did she become so concerned about the environment? Her story starts earlier, in the hills above Los Angeles — and it's a story that has as much to say to young people today as it does about her.

Who is Jane Fonda?

Jane Fonda is one of Hollywood's most decorated actresses, with a career spanning more than 60 years. She has received two Academy Awards — one for Klute in 1971 and a second for Coming Home in 1978. In the 1960s and 70s, she became one of Hollywood's most talked-about actresses and a vocal anti-war activist. In the 1980s, she reinvented herself again as a fitness icon with a hugely popular line of workout videos. She more recently starred in the Netflix series Grace and Frankie. Alongside all of this, she's had a decades-long parallel life as an activist — which is where her environmental story comes in.

Childhood in Los Angeles

Fonda was born in 1937 and grew up in the Santa Monica Mountains. Home life wasn't easy — her mother struggled with mental illness and died when Fonda was 12. Her father, Henry Fonda, also a famous actor, was distant. As a child, Jane spent time outdoors, where she found solace in nature, with trees and flowers to turn to. She's described bobcats, mountain lions, coyotes, and meadowlarks as being close enough to feel like friends. As a kid, she admired Native Americans for living in balance with the land rather than apart from it. Standing in Los Angeles decades later, she summed up just how different that world was: "I grew up in Los Angeles. There was no freeway, there was no smog."

Watching it disappear

Fonda's story is a lifetime of watching her own backyard change. In personal terms, she notes growing up with meadowlarks everywhere, and now asks: where have they gone? This question lines up with the sobering fact that North America has lost roughly three billion birds since the 1970s. She also became aware that lifeguards were getting cancer, songbirds were vanishing, and there was smog so thick you could no longer see Catalina Island from the coast.

There is real history behind Fonda's concerns. For decades, a Torrance, California plant called Montrose Chemical was the largest DDT manufacturer in the country, dumping an estimated 1,700+ tons of DDT-laced waste into the Los Angeles sewer system, which flowed straight into the ocean off the coast. The result, off the Palos Verdes Shelf near Santa Monica Bay, became one of the largest underwater DDT dumps on Earth — so contaminated that in 1996 the EPA designated it a Superfund site, one of the country's most hazardous. People spending long hours in and around some of these coastal areas were exposed to contamination that lingered on the ocean floor for decades. Separately, Los Angeles's notorious mid-century smog — thick enough to blot out a view of Catalina Island, 26 miles offshore — was a defining feature of the region for years before stronger air-quality regulations took hold.

The turning point of urgency

In 2019, Fonda found herself walking under a hazy orange sky thick with wildfire smoke — nothing like the clear California she remembered as a kid. She's described the realization hitting her physically, like a jolt straight to the gut, and said it made her understand the crisis was no longer just about the environment, but about the whole planet.

That same year, inspired directly by Greta Thunberg, the global youth climate strikes, and journalist Naomi Klein's writing on climate change, Fonda moved to Washington, D.C., and — alongside Greenpeace — launched Fire Drill Fridays: weekly rallies on Capitol Hill. She was arrested multiple times. She's been candid that the name itself came from Thunberg's warning that we have to "act like our house is on fire — because it is."

Crediting the next generation

Fonda points to young people as the reason she got serious about addressing climate change. She notes being inspired by young climate activists and calls them, in her words, very brave. She's said the entire premise of Fire Drill Fridays was that young activists shouldn't have to carry the fight alone — that older generations needed to show up too.

Turning momentum into elected champions

In recent years, Fonda has focused increasing energy on a different kind of climate action: elections. She founded the Jane Fonda Climate PAC, which works to support climate champions running for office — from city council to state legislature to Congress — who prioritize climate action. Rather than focusing on any single office or party, her focus is on down-ballot races, noting that mayors, county commissioners, and state legislators often have outsized influence over the environmental decisions that affect people's daily lives.

In its first cycle, 42 of the 60 candidates the PAC backed won their elections. By 2024, that support had grown to more than 100 candidates across the country. The through-line of the effort isn't ideology — it's a bet that durable climate progress depends on who holds office at every level of government, not just the presidency.

Leaving a legacy

Fonda, now in her late eighties, has said this is how she wants to spend the rest of her life: talking with young people, because — as she's put it — they're the ones who can actually make the difference.

Her story isn't really about celebrity activism. It's about a kid who loved a wild, undeveloped stretch of California, watched it erode piece by piece over a lifetime, and eventually let that grief turn into action — sparked, by her own account, by watching young people refuse to accept the world as it was handed to them.

A personal moment - what she told me

On a personal note, when I had a few moments to speak with Jane Fonda at the recent event, I asked her what she recommended to be focusing on to help the environment right now. She shared a deep concern about Proposition 45, which will be on the November 2026 California ballot.

Proposition 45 would change how California reviews the environmental impact of major construction projects, including modifying the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Passed in 1970, CEQA requires public agencies to study and publicly disclose how a proposed project — housing, a highway, a power plant — might affect the environment, and gives the public and courts a role in reviewing and, if necessary, challenging that approval before the project moves forward. Prop 45 would set a 365-day limit on that review process for projects labeled “essential” (including housing, hospitals, clean energy, and wildfire prevention), require courts to rule on related lawsuits within 270 days, and narrows what courts can consider when hearing a legal challenge.

Fonda is among a coalition opposing the measure that includes the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, the California Professional Firefighters, and the California Federation of Teachers. They argue Prop 45 would weaken CEQA's public disclosure and review process, potentially letting major projects — including polluting ones — move forward with less scrutiny and less opportunity for communities to weigh in. California's nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office has echoed part of this concern, noting the measure could lead to project approvals with unintended negative environmental effects.

Two specific concerns worth understanding in more depth:

●      Fossil fuels and polluting infrastructure. Prop 45's own list of “essential” project categories doesn't include oil or gas drilling directly. But opponents point out that some included categories — such as landfill gas facilities and CO2 pipelines — are fossil-fuel-adjacent, and argue that streamlining review broadly across large infrastructure categories could make it easier for polluting projects to move forward alongside genuinely clean ones, with less individualized scrutiny of which is which.

●      Biodiversity and wildlife habitat. CEQA currently requires agencies to specifically study and disclose a project's effects on wildlife before approving it. Environmental groups and habitat advocates argue that compressing review timelines leaves less time to identify a project's cumulative impact on fish habitat, wildlife corridors, and water resources — the kind of gradual, harder-to-spot harm that often only surfaces through a longer, more thorough review process.

Supporters of the measure, led by the California Chamber of Commerce, see it differently. Their coalition includes hospital associations, affordable-housing advocates, and clean-energy developers, who argue CEQA's current review process is slow and costly — adding significant expense to housing, hospitals, and infrastructure — and that reform is needed to speed up projects Californians need, including the same wildfire-prevention and clean-energy projects opponents want to protect. Recent polling shows real support for the measure, particularly among renters and lower-income voters concerned about housing and living costs.

It's worth noting this isn't a simple “environmentalists versus business” divide. Some pro-housing advocates who usually align with environmental causes support CEQA reform, arguing the law has occasionally been misused to block the kind of dense, transit-friendly housing that actually helps the climate. Other environmental groups counter that this particular measure goes well beyond fixing that narrow problem. This is a genuinely contested, unsettled question, not a case with an obvious right answer.

Whichever side of this specific debate you land on, hearing Fonda's concern firsthand was a reminder that environmental advocacy doesn't stop at marches and headlines — it plays out in the fine print of ballot measures, in choices voters make about what gets built and how carefully it's reviewed. It's exactly the kind of “down-ballot” decision she's spent recent years urging people, especially young people, to pay attention to.

Given how technical and consequential this measure is, I'd encourage every reader — especially young voters weighing in on a ballot measure for the first time — to go beyond any single summary, including this one. Read the official voter guide language, look at who is funding each side, and weigh the specific trade-offs (faster, cheaper housing and infrastructure against less time and opportunity to catch environmental harm before it happens) for yourself before deciding where you land.

I left my conversation with Jane Fonda feeling inspired, and thinking about how she has kept showing up for important issues of our day — for nature, youth, elections, and important policies affecting the environment and society in general. I hope I can be just a bit more like her to speak up and make a difference. And I hope, after reading her story, you feel a little bit of that same calling too.

Sources: Georgetown University; USC Annenberg Center for Climate Journalism and Communication; Climate One; CBS News; The Nation; TIME; Greenpeace USA; CBS News Los Angeles; CalMatters; California Legislative Analyst's Office; 2026 California Official Voter Guide.