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  • Jane Fonda at Spirit Rock: Mindfulness, Climate Action, and Community

    Jane Fonda at Spirit Rock: Mindfulness, Climate Action, and Community

    Jane Fonda did not come to Spirit Rock to offer comfort.

    She came to invite attention toward what we’re inheriting, what we’re losing, and what we still have to protect.

    For different generations, Jane Fonda has arrived in various forms. Some of us know her as an Oscar-winning actress whose early roles challenged cultural norms in films like Klute and Coming Home; others might remember her from her iconic fitness workouts in the early 80s (if you know, you know.)

    But Jane Fonda doesn’t just redefine herself decade after decade, she reframes and rebuilds the very structures and movements she’s a part of. Whether that’s turning fitness into accessible self-care for women, relaunching the Committee for the First Amendment (free speech, anyone?), taking on the climate crisis by starting the Jane Fonda Climate PAC, or redefining vitality for anyone later in life through her role on the beloved show Grace and Frankie. These chapters, however, only hint at a deeper through-line.

    Jane Fonda models a form of mindful leadership rooted not in legacy, but in invitation, showing how presence, curiosity, and connection can awaken action in every generation.

    For decades, Fonda has leveraged her visibility as a platform, founding media outlets, funding grassroots organizing, lending her body to protests, and repeatedly engaging in uncomfortable conversations in service of collective change. Today, she directs that same attention toward the climate crisis, whether by forging relationships with younger artists like Maggie Rogers, who went on to more openly use her platform for climate and social advocacy after connecting with Fonda, or by studying with Roshi Joan Halifax to deepen her meditation practice and the way she shows up in the world.

    One thing is for sure: Jane Fonda models a form of mindful leadership rooted not in legacy, but in invitation, showing how presence, curiosity, and connection can awaken action in every generation.

    Mindfulness As Training, Not Escape

    Fonda recently spoke as part of Spirit Rock’s EcoDharma & Transformational Culture Program (ETCP), a three-year initiative launched in January 2025 that explores how mindfulness and contemplative practices can support more intentional responses to climate change. While this program draws on Buddhist teachings, it is intentionally inclusive, inviting participants from diverse faiths and backgrounds.

    In ETCP’s context, “spiritual” refers to practices that help cultivate awareness, compassion, and resilience—tools for understanding and responding to climate-related stress. The program addresses the intersection of mindfulness, ecological issues, and the urgent need for thoughtful, effective action.

    For many readers of Mindful, meditation may feel like refuge, a place to step away from the unrelenting churn of news cycles, politics, and ecological grief. What this gathering at Spirit Rock made clear is that mindfulness was never meant to be an escape hatch. It was meant to be training. 

    At a moment when the climate crisis feels simultaneously overwhelming and dangerously normalized, Fonda’s presence at Spirit Rock Meditation Center landed with the weight of lived experience—decades of activism, moral reckoning, and an unshakeable belief that we cannot separate inner work from outer action. Her conversation with climate journalist Greg Dalton functioned as a deeply reflective inquiry into what it means to stay awake, empathetic, and engaged as time runs out.

    For many readers of Mindful, meditation may feel like refuge, a place to step away from the unrelenting churn of news cycles, politics, and ecological grief. What this gathering at Spirit Rock made clear is that mindfulness was never meant to be an escape hatch. It was meant to be training.

    Freepik.com | DC Studio

    Urgent & Hopeful

    Fonda spoke with respect to urgency, but not from a place of hopelessness. Instead, she framed this moment as one that demands both honesty and courage. “This is a moment when we have to bring our empathy to the fore,” she said, speaking to the deep divisions defining public life. Empathy, for her, is not a passive feeling—it is an active discipline, one she traces directly to her life in the arts.

    “Acting is a profession of empathy,” Fonda explained. “We have to enter the skin of another human being and understand them … You can’t do that without empathy. And you have to have empathy even for somebody that you don’t like.”

    That capacity, to stay open rather than armored, has helped to shape her activism as much as her performances. Fonda spoke candidly about how long it took her to soften what she called an “armored heart,” and how belonging to movements, rather than acting alone, made vulnerability possible. “There can come a moment in life when you enter a situation and, you know, this is where I’m supposed to be,” she said. “If you’re not alone, if you’re part of a movement, that sense allows you to become vulnerable and to open your heart.”

    This insistence on collective action, grounded in relationship rather than righteousness, ran through the entire conversation.

    ETCP’s mission is twofold: to support interfaith leaders and activists in meeting climate trauma with resilience and joy, and to empower a new generation of global citizens.

    Over the next three years, ETCP will offer online lectures, class series, in-person retreats, and training programs designed to support communities engaging with climate change not only as a scientific or political issue, but also as a profoundly emotional and spiritual one. The program is guided by a core planning team of respected teachers and leaders, including Ayya Santacitta, Bonnie Duran, Carol Cano, James Baraz, Kirsten Rudestam, Kristin Barker, Mark Coleman, and Yong Oh, in collaboration with partners such as One Earth Sangha, Braided Wisdom, Aloka Earth Room, and Awake in the Wild.

    Its mission is twofold: to support interfaith leaders and activists in meeting climate trauma with resilience and joy, and to empower a new generation of global citizens. At its heart is a radical proposition—that joy, mindfulness, and love for the Earth are not distractions from climate action, though essential to sustaining it.

    When Mindfulness Meets the Climate Crisis

    For many meditators, the connection between mindfulness and climate change is not apparent. Sitting quietly with the breath can feel worlds away from melting ice caps, polluted water systems, or data centers sprawling across the landscape.

    Fonda expressed concern about AI and the rapid speed of technological advancement. “I’m horrified by it,” she admitted, acknowledging her own complicated relationship with technology. “I have ChatGPT on my phone. I feel guilty… I don’t understand it well enough to know how to combat it.”

    Rather than offering easy answers, Fonda modeled something rarer: the willingness to stay with not-knowing without disengaging. Climate action, she suggested, does not begin with mastery; it starts with attention.

    Her reflections on Indigenous knowledge underscored what has been lost through disconnection. Recalling time spent learning about the Ecuadorian rainforest, she talked about communities that live in conjunction with the land. “They showed us which plants heal which diseases,” she said. “We once knew how to listen to plants. We’ve forgotten how.”

    Mindful engagement does not mean doing everything. It means doing something with intention, alongside others.

    EcoDharma, as Spirit Rock frames it, is precisely this remembering—not as nostalgia, but as practice. And the key part of practice, when we hold both the Dharma and the environment front and center in our minds, is to understand that we all have something to do, no matter how small the task or step may be. As ETCP leaders emphasize, mindful engagement does not mean doing everything. It means doing something with intention, alongside others.

    Identifying Our Unique Role to Play

    A recurring question throughout the retreat was one many people quietly carry: What can I do?

    Fonda’s answer was pragmatic and unsentimental. After years of protest through Fire Drill Fridays, she and a small group of collaborators recognized a gap between public pressure and policy change. “We haven’t got the legislation that’s commensurate with what science is saying we have to have,” she said. “The reason is that so many elected officials take money from the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries.”

    That realization led to the creation of Jane Fonda Climate Pac, a political action committee focused on down-ballot races and state and local positions that often receive little attention but wield enormous influence over climate outcomes. “Public utilities, school boards, city councils, state legislatures, attorneys general,” Fonda noted. “All these people have huge power.”

    The results have been striking: hundreds of climate champions elected, many of them women and women of color, willing to stand up publicly for environmental rights. “It’s working,” she said.

    Alternate Entry Points to Climate Action

    For those wary of politics, Spirit Rock’s EcoDharma program offers additional entry points and ways to engage, with an emphasis on joy-based action, interconnection, and resilience. This programming is designed precisely for people who feel overwhelmed, polarized, or exhausted by climate discourse.

    Perhaps the most resonant moment of listening to Fonda speak was when she was asked about courage—how she continues to speak so openly, without becoming defensive, after decades in the public eye.

    “It has been a process,” she said. “It took me a long, long time to open my heart.” What changed was not confidence, but belonging. “Being part of a movement… allows you to become vulnerable.”

    She spoke about care—sleep, community, working with people she admires—as essential, not indulgent. “I’m a late bloomer,” she said with a smile. “But being a late bloomer is okay as long as you don’t miss the flower show. And I’m in the midst of a flower show.”

    EcoDharma does not ask practitioners to abandon stillness. It asks them to let stillness inform their response. To allow mindfulness to widen into care, and care into action.

    In that image, flowers blooming against the odds was a quiet invitation. EcoDharma does not ask practitioners to abandon stillness. It asks them to let stillness inform their response. To allow mindfulness to widen into care, and care into action.

    As Fonda reminded the room, hope is not something we wait for.
    It is something we practice—together.

    For more ways to connect, here’s a mindful action guide to use & share. Links are also provided below.

    A mindfulness infographic over ocean water, inspired by Jane Fonda, lists ways to get involved in climate action with care and presence.



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  • Nearly 900 Mn Poor People Exposed To Climate Shocks, UN Warns

    Nearly 900 Mn Poor People Exposed To Climate Shocks, UN Warns

    Nearly 80 percent of the world’s poorest, or about 900 million people, are directly exposed to climate hazards exacerbated by global warming, bearing a “double and deeply unequal burden,” the United Nations warned Friday.

    “No one is immune to the increasingly frequent and stronger climate change effects like droughts, floods, heat waves, and air pollution, but it’s the poorest among us who are facing the harshest impact,” Haoliang Xu, acting administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, told AFP in a statement.

    COP30, the UN climate summit in Brazil in November, “is the moment for world leaders to look at climate action as action against poverty,” he added.

    According to an annual study published by the UNDP together with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, 1.1 billion people, or about 18 percent of the 6.3 billion in 109 countries analyzed, live in “acute multidimensional” poverty, based on factors like infant mortality and access to housing, sanitation, electricity and education.

    Half of those people are minors.

    One example of such extreme deprivation cited in the report is the case of Ricardo, a member of the Guarani Indigenous community living outside Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia’s largest city.

    Ricardo, who earns a meager income as a day laborer, shares his small single-family house with 18 other people, including his three children, parents and other extended family.

    The house has only one bathroom, a wood- and coal-fired kitchen, and none of the children are in school.

    “Their lives reflect the multidimensional realities of poverty,” the report said.

    Two regions particularly affected by such poverty are sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia — and they are also highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

    The report highlights the connection between poverty and exposure to four environmental risks: extreme heat, drought, floods, and air pollution.

    “Impoverished households are especially susceptible to climate shocks as many depend on highly vulnerable sectors such as agriculture and informal labor,” the report said.

    “When hazards overlap or strike repeatedly, they compound existing deprivations.”

    As a result, 887 million people, or nearly 79 percent of these poor populations, are directly exposed to at least one of these threats, with 608 million people suffering from extreme heat, 577 million affected by pollution, 465 million by floods, and 207 million by drought.

    Roughly 651 million are exposed to at least two of the risks, 309 million to three or four risks, and 11 million poor people have already experienced all four in a single year.

    “Concurrent poverty and climate hazards are clearly a global issue,” the report said.

    And the increase in extreme weather events threatens development progress.

    While South Asia has made progress in fighting poverty, 99.1 percent of its poor population exposed to at least one climate hazard.

    The region “must once again chart a new path forward, one that balances determined poverty reduction with innovative climate action,” the report says.

    With Earth’s surface rapidly getting warmer, the situation is likely to worsen further and experts warn that today’s poorest countries will be hardest hit by rising temperatures.

    “Responding to overlapping risks requires prioritizing both people and the planet, and above all, moving from recognition to rapid action,” the report said.



    Severe flooding in Sudan is an example of how the world’s poorest people are also exposed to climate risks


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  • Eating to Fight the Climate Crisis 

    Eating to Fight the Climate Crisis 

    The EAT-Lancet Commission lays out the best diet for human and planetary health.

    “Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to ‘tell it like it is.’” In November 2019, more than 11,000 scientists from 150 countries declared “clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.” As you can see in a series of graphs starting at 0:33 in my video Win-Win Dietary Solutions to the Climate Crisis, CO2 levels are rising and the glaciers are melting, as is Antarctica. The oceans are getting hotter, and more acidic. Sea levels are rising, and extreme weather events are escalating. Yes, the use of fossil fuels is going up, for air travel, for example, but so is per capita meat consumption. In fact, one of the solutions offered by scientists to help the climate crisis is “eating mostly plant-based foods while reducing the global consumption of animal products….”

    What makes “designing a sustainable diet” so easy is that “the dietary advice is the same: eat less meat.” It’s good for our personal health (by reducing the risk of our number one killer, for instance), as well as planetary health. As you can see below and at 1:24 in my video, the least healthy foods also cause the worst environmental impact. 

    Indeed, the foods with the most nutrition just so happen to be the foods that cause the lowest greenhouse gas emissions, as shown below and at 1:31 in my video, so the effect is a win-win. 

    Let’s put it all together. If we are to “redesign the global food system for human and planetary health,” which is to say human health, planetary health, and future human health, what would it look like? Enter the EAT-Lancet Commission. What was the “result of more than 2 years of collaboration between 37 experts from 16 countries”? Suggesting a cut in total meat consumption down to no more than an ounce a day (28 g), which is around the weight of a single chicken nugget, and, concurrently, a dramatic increase in our intakes of legumes (beans, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils), vegetables, nuts, and fruits. We aren’t only in a climate crisis, but a health crisis, too. “Unhealthy diets pose a greater risk to morbidity and mortality than does unsafe sex, and alcohol, drug, and tobacco use combined.” But we can address both crises at the same time by “increasing consumption of plant-based foods and substantially reducing our consumption of animal source foods.”

    Eating such a diet could save the lives of more than 10 million people a year. It may also help save the world. The Paris Agreement had set out a boundary condition, an aspirational goal for a carbon budget to help prevent catastrophic impacts. “Staying within the boundary for climate change can be achieved by consuming plant-based diets.”

    What’s more, “the economic value of the health benefits associated with more plant-based diets is comparable with, or exceeds, the value of the environmental benefits….” Just the healthcare benefits alone of a healthy global diet that’s predominantly plant-based, vegetarian, or vegan could exceed the price of the carbon saved, as you can see below and at 3:11 in my video. We’re talking up to $30 trillion a year saved from just the health benefits of more healthful eating. 

    Now, if the health of yourself, the planet, and your loved ones doesn’t quite motivate you, consider you may also be facing threats to the global beer supply. The title of the paper tells the story: “Decreases in Global Beer Supply Due to Extreme Drought and Heat.”

    And healthier diets don’t just reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “Livestock production is the single largest driver of habitat loss,” so reducing meat consumption is also the key to biodiversity conservation. Researchers “suggest…reducing demand for animal-based food products and increasing proportions of plant-based foods in diets, the latter ideally to a global average of 90% of food consumed.” As well, “livestock production is also a leading cause of climate change, soil loss, and water and nutrient pollution,” yet it appears to be “a blind spot in water policy.” “Despite the fact that animal products form the single most important factor in humanity’s WF [water footprint], water managers never talk about meat or dairy.”

    It isn’t only animal products, though. Yes, at least 80 percent of the deforestation in the Amazon is to raise cattle and grow feed crops like soybeans to export to other farm animals, but it’s also to make vegetable oil, mostly from palm and soy. Both crops have been expanding, “resulting in massive deforestation accompanied by declines in biodiversity and the release of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere…It will be particularly egregious if that deforestation takes place for the sake of junk food….”

    Not everyone agrees that we should be moving to healthier diets, though. The World Health Organization actually pulled out of the EAT-Lancet Commission that “promotes global move to plant-based foods.” See, if we “focused on promoting predominantly plant-based foods, and excluding foods deemed unhealthy, including meat and other animal-based foods,” such a diet could save 10 million lives a year and $30 trillion in healthcare costs, and help save the entire planet, but it “could lead to the loss of…jobs linked to animal husbandry and the production of ‘unhealthy’ foods….”

    So Which Foods Have the Lowest Carbon Footprint? Find out next, then stay tuned for Which Diets Have the Lowest Carbon Footprint?.

    Before this video, I think the only global warming video I had to date was Diet and Climate Change: Cooking Up a Storm. I’m pleased I could add to this important topic.

    One way to reduce the climate impact of meat is to switch to plant-based or cultivated meat. I did a webinar on it, and you can get the digital download here.



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