Jane Fonda has been many things: an actor, fitness guru, and mother, but through it all, her activism has remained her true calling. For decades she’s been a passionate critic of the Vietnam War and supporter of Indigenous, LGBTQ and women’s rights.

Inspired by Naomi Klein and Greta Thunberg, in 2019 she began protesting on the steps of the U.S. capitol in an action she called “Fire Drill Fridays” – to bring awareness to the urgency of the climate crisis.

“A majority of Americans, like 70%, are very concerned about the climate. But they haven't taken action. And they say because they haven't been asked. This is our job now. To reach the great unasked,” she says. 

Fonda has empathy for fossil fuel workers and plenty of rage for fossil fuel executives. 

“They knew 40 years ago that what they were burning was going to destroy the planet. They knew and they didn't stop drilling,” she says. Fonda has also launched a climate PAC with the goal of defeating political allies of the fossil fuel industry.

“That's all we focus on, is getting out the oily electors, especially the Democrats, and we primary them strategically. And we want to get climate champions elected to office, up and down the ballot. Because right now, you can't get much done in Congress right now. But down ballots, state legislatures, city councils, supervisors, controllers, they have such power, you have no idea how much influence they could have over this climate crisis.” 

Over a lifetime of activism, she’s realized the power of taking a stand and speaking out for what she believes in, as well as fighting for those with less privilege.

“I have found that every single time I start to get depressed, if I take action it disappears. Greta Thunberg said, don't go looking for hope, look for action and hope will come. And she's right.”

Related Links:

Fire Drill Fridays

Jane Fonda in Five Acts

Ozark Highlands Radio is a weekly radio program that features live music and interviews recorded at Ozark Folk Center State Park’s beautiful 1,000-seat auditorium in Mountain View, Arkansas.  In addition to the music, our “Feature Host” segments take listeners through the Ozark hills with historians, authors, and personalities who explore the people, stories, and history of the Ozark region.

This week, a special road trip episode.  OHR visits Rogers, Arkansas’ Railyard Live Concert Series featuring Eureka Springs hard-driving folk quartet, Front Porch, recorded live at Butterfield Stage in Railyard Park in historic downtown Rogers.  Also, commentary from Rogers Arts & Culture Coordinator Kinya Christian on the exciting things happening in the Rogers Entertainment District.

Rogers, Arkansas’ Railyard Live Concert Series began in 2021.  Held on the city’s Butterfield Stage next to Railyard Park in historic downtown Rogers, it features live concerts every weekend throughout the Spring, Summer, and Fall.  All of the Railyard Live events are either free to the public or at very low cost of admission.  The concert series features a wide array of musical styles and interests designed to appeal to the diverse population of Rogers and invite them to experience the newly revitalized Railyard Entertainment District.  The Ozark Folk Center State Park and the City of Rogers, Arkansas partnered to bring Ozark Highlands Radio to capture a little slice of this modern Ozark culture.

Front Porch is a hard driving four piece folk ensemble.  Self described as “contemporary bluegrass, old time and mayhem from Northwest Arkansas,” the band is based in Eureka Springs.  Front Porch is Petey Wesley on banjo & fiddle, John Henry Holthus on guitar, Alex Hawf on mandolin, and Cameron Keeling rounding out the low end with upright bass.  In true bluegrass fashion, all the guys in the band sing, but that’s where the traditional ends.  Front Porch performs with all the usual ingredients of bluegrass and folk but bakes them up into a post-punk old-time acid jazz barn-burning bluegrass fusion that will have you jumping.

In this week’s “From the Vault” segment, OHR producer Jeff Glover offers a 1981 archival recording of Ozark original Uncle Floyd Holland performing the tune “Nellie Gray,” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives.

In this week’s guest host segment, renowned traditional folk musician, writer, and step dancer Aubrey Atwater explores variations of the traditional folk song “Polly Put the Kettle On.”

The summer of 2020 was a hinge point in American history. The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police inspired racial justice demonstrations nationwide. At the time, the FBI was convinced that extreme Black political activists could cross the line into domestic terrorism – a theory federal agents had first termed “Black identity extremism.”

That summer, Mickey Windecker approached the FBI. He drove a silver hearse, claimed to have been a volunteer fighter for the French Foreign Legion and the Peshmerga in Iraq, and had arrest records in four states that included convictions for misdemeanor sexual assault and menacing with a weapon, a felony. He claimed to the FBI that he had heard racial justice activists speak vaguely of training and violent revolution in Denver. 

The FBI enlisted Windecker as a paid informant, gave him a recording device and instructed him to infiltrate Denver's growing Black Lives Matter movement. For months, Windecker spied on activists and attempted to recruit two Black men into an FBI-engineered plot to assassinate the state's attorney general.

Windecker's undercover work is the first documented case of FBI efforts to infiltrate the 2020 racial justice movement. Journalist Trevor Aaronson obtained over a dozen hours of Windecker's secret recordings and more than 300 pages of internal FBI reports for season 1 of the podcast series Alphabet Boys. 

A decades-old lunar mystery gets an update in this week's Planetary Radio. Matt Siegler from the Planetary Science Institute shares his team's surprising findings about the granite formation that might lie beneath Compton-Belkovich, a thorium-rich hot spot on the far side of the Moon. Then Bruce Betts, chief scientist of The Planetary Society, shares What's Up in the night sky.

The Big Switch; Episode 1, Season 3: A Crisis in the Making
Host: Charli Shield/Dr Melissa Lott

ClassicalWorks (Episode 182)

Zadie Smith is a writer who matters, twenty years now after White Teeth, her breakthrough novel when she was just out of college. Her new one is titled The Fraud: fiction that pops in and out of two centuries. It can feel very Victorian and it can feel very 2023. Frauds, trials, disbelief abounding.

Think of Zadie Smith as the current title-holder in the glorious old lineage of English and American fiction, looking both forward and backward and sideways in this new novel about her professional family over the generations: literary ancestors and cousins in the game today. It can feel confessional at one moment, comical the next, stone serious before you’re done. Founders of the Victorian novel turn up in The Fraud. At the same time, she’s addressing the extended family of readers and writers today. 

Later this week, Joe goes in for three root canals at one time, so he and Katie Marie put together an hour of trad music looking at sickness and health. We even have a blistering track from the new release from Doolin-based piper, Blackie O'Connell, joined by Cyril O'Donoghue.

The artists this week: Joe McHugh; Burning Bridget Cleary; Kevin Burke; Seamus Ennis; Fiddlehead; Michael Black; Michael & Hervé; Johnny B. Connolly; Grosse Isle; Dermot Byrne; Éamonn Coyne & John Doyle; Louise Mulcahey; The Chieftains; Mick Mcauley; Great Big Sea; and Blackie O'Connell & Cyril O'Donoghue.

Our FairPlé score this week: 27