Jane Fonda discusses her climate activism while campaigning for Garcia Richard

Sep. 30—In her first visit to New Mexico since selling her 2,300-acre ranch on the outskirts of Rowe seven years ago, Academy Award-winning actress Jane Fonda described her return to the Land of Enchantment this week as bittersweet.

"Do you know how depressed I am?" the 84-year-old asked at the start of a nearly 45-minute sit-down interview with The New Mexican at La Fonda on the Plaza.

"I have not been back since I sold my ranch, and I miss it so much," Fonda said.

She returned to New Mexico not to house hunt or play tourist but as part of her lifelong activism.

Fonda is squarely focused on the plight of the planet amid the ongoing threat of global warming and working to get people she calls "climate champions" elected.

"Climate change isn't something like in the future — it's happening right now," she said. "It's facing us right now, and we have eight years to avoid the tipping point, and that's why time is of the essence. The window is closing."

Fonda, who this year started a political action committee with a mission to "defeat fossil fuel supporters and elect climate champions at all levels of government," has been campaigning for incumbent Democrat Stephanie Garcia Richard in the race for state land commissioner.

"We visited her office [Wednesday], and she took us down to the basement," Fonda said. "There's this corridor that has all these photographs of former land commissioners, and there were all these white men, and then suddenly there's Stephanie. She's the first woman, the first Latina and the first educator to be land commissioner. But she is also starting construction on the largest wind farm in the Western Hemisphere. What I love is that potentially, and she is working for this, New Mexico can become the front line of renewable energy for other states."

Fonda listed several other accomplishments under Garcia Richard's tenure at the State Land Office.

When she heard about Garcia Richard and her reputation of being "very progressive and very good on environmental issues," Fonda signed up for a fundraiser the land commissioner was hosting on Zoom.

"She was really surprised when I appeared, and it turned out that my stepdaughter, Ted Turner's daughter, Laura, was on the call," Fonda said, adding her ex-husband, a media mogul, is a large New Mexico landowner.

Fonda joked she cared about New Mexico before Turner did.

"Before we even started dating seriously, he came with me to Santa Fe because I was closing escrow on a piece of property out on Tano Road," she said. "I was so proud of it. It was

70 acres, and I remember standing on a hill overlooking this property, and he said to me, 'What could you do there?' And I said, 'Live.' But then I married him and I realized, you know, he has ranches. He has a ranch in Northern New Mexico that's 650,000 acres."

Later, she joked, "No, I didn't marry him for his ranch."

Fonda, who was recently diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, said she has been receiving chemotherapy treatments and is "a little bit scatterbrained."

Although she lost her train of thought a couple of times, Fonda was composed throughout the interview, frequently displaying her quick wit and sense of humor.

"I feel like this is the most important thing I will ever do in my life," she said, referring to her efforts to fight climate change, "and I will be doing this until I die, which doesn't mean much because my age."

Asked if there was a turning point that prompted her to start the Jane Fonda Climate PAC, Fonda explained a series of events that led up to its creation.

"It was early 2019, and I was really depressed because I was a climate activist, and I was doing what I could, but I knew it wasn't enough given that I'm a celebrity and I have a platform," Fonda said.

She read a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change.

"What they said was so clear: We have to cut emissions in half by 2030," she said.

Fonda then started reading the writings of Greta Thunberg, a young Swedish environmental activist.

"This child who was like a savant in science understood, and she said, 'If our house is on fire, we have to behave like it's a real crisis.' And that did it for me," she said.

Fonda said she then called Annie Leonard, co-executive director of Greenpeace USA, and told her she wanted to go to Washington, D.C., "and do something that people will notice."

She wanted to spend a year protesting in the nation's capital but couldn't get out of her contract for the Netflix comedy Grace and Frankie, which also stars Lily Tomlin. Fonda said the head of Netflix laughed when she asked him if the subscription streaming service and production company could postpone the next season of the series for a year.

"So I went [to Washington, D.C.] for four months," she said. "We decided that every Friday we would have a rally, and then we would engage in civil disobedience and risk getting arrested."

The risk turned into reality. Fonda has been arrested five times for protesting what she has called the government's inaction on climate change.

"I turned 82 in jail," she said.

Fonda said the purpose of her so-called Fire Drill Fridays, a weekly protest centered on civil disobedience to draw attention to the government's refusal to pass laws to address global warming, was to mobilize the public.

"I wanted to move them from concern to action, and they came from all over the country," she said.

After the coronavirus pandemic hit, the protests were held virtually.

"We're still doing it virtually," Fonda said. "We had our 10 millionth viewer last week, and they are becoming activists. That's all very good. However, in the meantime, what we began to realize is that good climate legislation was not passing."

That realization initiated the start of the political action committee.

"I sold a bunch of stock [to get the PAC off the ground], and my financial manager freaked. He said, 'No, you can't do that. It will become many millions of dollars.' I said, 'Well, what is the point of having a big portfolio if there's no planet?' " Fonda recalled.

Fonda, who has often been vilified for her activism, from protesting the Vietnam War to her war on climate change, said she's not calling for an immediate end to fossil fuels.

"We have to phase out, but we have to do it gradually, gradually," she said, adding new drilling has to stop in order to meet the goal of cutting emissions in half in eight years.

"Part of that gradual has to be what we call a just transition," Fonda said. "Workers in the fossil fuel industry are well paid, union jobs. They can afford to send their kids to school and buy a house. And they're not responsible for the climate crisis. We have to be sure that during the transition those workers are not left behind."

While the future of the planet had caused her to feel depressed, Fonda said she remains optimistic.

"Activism is the best way to deal with depression," she said. "Loss of hope will disappear when you start to do something. As long as I'm doing everything I can, then I can remain hopeful."

Follow Daniel J. Chacón on Twitter @danieljchacon.