Jane Fonda just spent eight powerful days with us in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where she witnessed firsthand Indigenous Peoples’ fight to defend their rainforest homelands from the Southeastern Oil Round, which threatens to auction off 8.7 million acres of their ancestral territory.
She traveled by canoe to meet with Indigenous leaders in their homelands.
She walked with Indigenous elders and glimpsed the rainforest through their eyes.
“Wiña, a Waorani elder, thought to be in her late 80s like me, walked in front and chanted in her native language, and the forest became a church.”
She visited Lago Agrio and learned about the oil town’s history—how the A’i Cofán’s ancestral lands were transformed into a hub for Big Oil, and how children were poisoned by contaminated rivers.
She sat in on strategy sessions with the Amazon Frontlines and Alianza Ceibo teams to discuss the plan to stop the Southeastern Oil Round.
She felt the sticky, tar-like oil that companies dump into the rainforest, letting it seep deep into the earth.
She left with a strong sense of solidarity with Indigenous Peoples and doubled down on her commitment to protect the Amazon and join us in our campaign to protect the rainforest from oil extraction.
“Before oil arrived in these territories, the Indigenous Peoples had everything they needed; their food, their homes. Now they are fighting to get back what was taken from them.”
On this Earth Day, stand with us to stop the Southeastern Oil Auction and help strengthen our powerful alliance between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples – driving real change, one connection, one movement at a time.
This past weekend, we officially launched the All Out On Earth Day national mobilization (April 18–30), strategically placed between Hands Off! (April 5) and May Day Strong to ensure the climate and environmental justice movements are visible, coordinated, and cross-sectional during this pivotal spring window—especially as Trump’s anti-climate reconciliation bill looms.
Here’s a quick topline of where we are and where we’re headed:
Over 3 million participants mobilized on April 19 alone, including actions organized by our partner 50501, who adopted our shared demands and distributed our toolkits across their network.
18+ national orgs are now co-leading, including Sunrise, 350.org, Climate Power, NAACP, Third Act, Solutions Project (with amplification from Mark Ruffalo’s 15M+ followers),Dayenu, Labor Network for Sustainability, and more.
Our anchor events in NYC, DC, and Honolulu have drawn hundreds of thousands. From April 22 to 30, organizers are continuing to mobilize, with many weaving our demands into existing efforts—some public, others more discreet.
Strategic Purpose
This isn’t just about visibility—it’s about re-engaging the climate and environmental base. These actions are reactivating thousands of climate organizers who’ve been trained to push forward a visionary agenda—not defend against authoritarian backsliding—and are now searching for their role in this moment. We’re making sure climate stays at the table: not siloed, not sidelined. And we're making sure we do our part for the larger fight.
As you know, environmental programs have faced some of the deepest proposed cuts in the Trump regime’s budget and upcoming reconciliation bill.
So, we’ll be sustaining momentum through:
Meeting requests with asks to protect specific programs and local projects
Office visits and if needed, escalations like pressers, canvasses, and protests.
Narrative coordination
A continued drumbeat through Labor Day, when the reconciliation bill is expected to drop.
Anticipating Executive Orders
We are also preparing for expected Executive Orders from Trump targeting environmental nonprofits as early as tomorrow. We’re coordinating closely with legal counsel and movement partners behind the scenes to respond swiftly—but we won’t be caught flat-footed. If they attack, we want the public to see why we’re a threat to authoritarianism, not just hear about it after the fact.
What We Need From You
We’re not asking for new commitments today—but we do invite you to:
Sign-on your organization or plug your event into the April 22–30 wave of actions, if you haven’t already.
Elevate aligned narrative work—especially connecting climate, corruption, and democracy.
Prepare for shared defense if the administration escalates legal attacks.
We’ll continue to provide updates and are happy to coordinate deeper alignment around regional events, rapid response, or campaign strategy.
Mahalo nui for being in this with us.
E Ho‘ohui,
Kaniela Ing He/They/ʻO ia National Director, Green New Deal Network
Daniel Taylor spent decades solving the mystery of the yeti, the hairy, Himalayan cryptid. Following its giant footsteps also led him to become a conservationist who helped found more than a dozen national parks in and around the Himalayas. He later founded a university focused on a model of human development called SEED-SCALE.
Sound and Vision
There are a handful of semi-recent recorded media and event appearances featuring Eric that might be interesting to someone:
How to Eat for Bees (Keynote talk to the 2024 Colorado Pollinator Summit): Before retiring from the Xerces Society last year, Eric spent a decade and a half engaging the food industry in pollinator conservation initiatives. Satisfying and frustrating at the same time, much of the discourse around the impacts of agriculture on bees ignores the central issue of our own personal diets. This talk tackles that issue.
Buzzkill Episode One: Save Which Bees? (Podcast by the Food & Environment Reporting Network): In a similar vein to the How to Eat for Bees talk above, Eric makes an appearance in this serialized environmental podcast at a large-scale Bee Better Certified blueberry farm in Oregon to share the work of creating on-farm habitat for wild bees and honey bees alike. It’s an episode on bee diversity, and how our food system shapes the landscape for those small creatures.
Making Meadows: Alchemy & Science for Designing, Installing & Managing Open Spaces (Washington Native Bee Society guest lecture):This recorded presentation serves as a bit of a primer for folks new to planting and maintaining meadows, and possibly has a few emerging ideas for more experienced meadow people.
And Finally…
If it seems to you like posers and con-artists are ascendent on the public stage right now you are not alone in that sentiment. A toxic attention-economy has gripped our politics, social interactions, commodity-entertainments, and commerce. Greed has eclipsed principles to a degree that feels new, exponential, and unexpected. It feels like we are inhabiting a new era, and settling in for an extended stay.
Such dark timespans sometimes take root. Long centuries can occur when cleptocratic instincts run amok, enforced by smiles and lies, or casual violence. It would be great if this were hyperbole, but we all know that it’s true.
And yet, within the contours of such times, perhaps there are a few things to keep in mind:
First, as a wise person said: to struggle is a gift. Hope and gratifying work are born of challenge. Life is our great challenge.
Second, history settles scores. Lots of ruthlessly self-important people have always wanted to be remembered as celebrity prophets. Most end up remembered as something like a disease of the past – their name appended with “-ism” -- if they are remembered at all.
Meanwhile, the countless good but largely anonymous people who surround you all the time are quietly carrying forward the grand and generous project of being human: cooks and cleaners, carpenters and CPAs, nurses and street dwellers and rideshare drivers, HVAC installers and keyboard salarymen…mostly kind-hearted, bumbling, well-intentioned intrepid explorers of deep-time. The lady in traffic next to you eating soup while driving and the man shaving in the airport bathroom are part-time saints and bodhisatttvas. They are children of someone who loved them, questioners of the uncanny origins of our universe, artists of lives mundane and tragic and comic and spectacular.
To be in their presence... to be in each other's presence... is a stellar gift.
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Envision forests of the future: ♡❥ return to the primordial solution 💎 🐰 plant trees #GAIA 💚 🌎 🐝 🌱 🌳 💜 #EarthDay mission: Dare to be dirty (in the soil)
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