Annie Leonard

Yeah.

So I read that book in high school, the story of stuff by Annie Leonard.

And it really was just eyeopening.

Like I knew like at that time when I was in high school that there was a lot of bad things happening in the world, you know, it was that eco warrior already.

Well, the Committee for the First Amendment started by Jane Fonda was really a relaunch of an effort that her father was part of during the McCarthy era to leverage the power and the voice of those in the entertainment industry to speak up for free expression and to protect the First Amendment.

And Annie Leonard, who used to run Greenpeace and myself, serve as the co-chairs and really support Jane and support the group of thousands of creatives all throughout Hollywood who are using their platform, using their voice, using their talents, their writing ability, their comedic talent to be able to reach more people about First Amendment issues.

And so we've been doing all sorts of work from protests in front of the Kennedy Center for obvious reasons to sort of push back on Donald Trump's takeover.

um protecting and standing up for people who have been under attack like don lemon and others um and so it's just been a wide range of really important work but this merger right sits at at the intersection of so many of the structural issues that i just talked about in terms of what's what how we actually get to be heard and counted invisible um in our democracy and our larger society And what happened is when the merger was announced, it was kind of considered like it was just going to sail through.

Well, the Committee for the First Amendment started by Jane Fonda was really a relaunch of an effort that her father was part of during the McCarthy era to leverage the power and the voice of those in the entertainment industry to speak up for free expression and to protect the First Amendment.

And Annie Leonard, who used to run Greenpeace and myself, serve as the co-chairs and really support Jane and support the group of thousands of creatives all throughout Hollywood who are using their platform, using their voice, using their talents, their writing ability, their comedic talent to be able to reach more people about First Amendment issues.

We've been doing all sorts of work from protest in front of the Kennedy Center for obvious reasons to push back on Donald Trump's takeover.

protecting and standing up for people who have been under attack like Don Lemon and others.

We taped all these conversations together in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club during SF Climate Week in April, and we're excited to revisit them now.

Annie Leonard is former executive director of Greenpeace USA.

She's got a new book called Protest: Respect It, Defend It, Use It, which chronicles a lot of the most famous protests you've probably heard of, and some that you might not have.

Yeah, I mean, we're talking about protests all the way back to Socrates and Martin Luther to the Boston Tea Party up to the No Kings protests that we're seeing today.

So as we started talking, I asked Annie Leonard to share the story of one of her favorite protests.

I'll pick one in San Francisco, because we're in San Francisco, the Section 504 sit-ins.

Absolutely amazing.

So instead, we have to shift our kinds of thinking and be much more creative and expansive about what does it mean to protest an authoritarian regime, uh, especially in this moment when the window to solve climate is shrinking.

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Environmental activist, author, and former executive director of Greenpeace USA, Annie Leonard, on protesting.

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