Getting Grounded

Julia Jackson, the founder of Grounded, a community of scientists and activists fighting climate change, is feeling tired on the morning we speak by Zoom. She is jet-lagged, having recently returned from the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland (commonly referred to as COP26). But jet lag is not the primary source of her fatigue.

Jackson tells me that she has grown weary of an international community in which government officials and business representatives who do not have a true sense of urgency about addressing the climate crisis are in the negotiating rooms, while those who have front-row seats to humankind’s greatest environmental crisis are left out. She describes a situation at COP26 where some youth activists and tribal leaders were invited to speak, but within the all-important negotiation rooms there were strikingly few young activists, Black or indigenous people or women.

“It is vital that the people who actually see what we’re up against are in those negotiation rooms. That’s what matters,” says Jackson. “The disconnect between inside the conference and the energy of civil society out on the streets—that energy on the streets was much more urgent and palpable and community oriented. It was interesting, and also sad, to see how disconnected those two spaces are.”

Jackson says a central goal in founding Grounded—an organization that, without mincing words, is devoted to “ensuring a liveable planet”—is to support and give voice to the people who fully accept the nature of the climate crisis, the people willing to act before it is too late, the people Jackson describes as “solutionists.”

As Julia Jackson speaks, her left and right brain seem to be passing the baton to each other, working in sync. Her approach to facing and working to solve the climate crisis—what she describes as her life’s calling—is equal parts logic, data and legalese and, on the other hand, feelings and creativity. Every statistic noted, every strategy outlined, is fueled by the heart-based truths behind her ardent commitment.

As a member of the Jackson family, one of the most prominent winemaking families in the world, Jackson’s youth in Sonoma County was surrounded by vineyards and open spaces. Connected to and dependent upon the land, she tells me that she always had a personal fascination with plants and animals. This love affair with the natural world never diminished as she studied at Scripps College and began her career in the international business sector of Jackson Family Wines. The work led to the development of what she describes as a “global mindset,” an understanding of our interconnectedness on this planet.

“Then, when my father [Jess Jackson] died of cancer when I was in my early 20s, I did a lot of research on the connection between environmental degradation and increased rates of diseases. That was a gateway into being more curious about the environment and the meat industry and what we consume,” she says. “I began connecting human health and wellness to the environment. I started reading books on climate. When you start learning, you can’t unlearn. The more I read, the more urgency I felt, and the more alone I felt with that sense of urgency.”

It was a few years later, as Jackson was continuing her self-education and digesting the most difficult realities of climate change, that the 2017 wildfires swept across Northern California.

“It was devastating and felt like we were in the apocalypse. Based on what I was learning about the urgency of the climate crisis and that ‘we have to turn this around,’ I felt deep despair and hopelessness. I guess what you would call ‘eco-anxiety.’ I felt like there was nothing I could do—we were all heading off a cliff.” It was soon after that she discovered a book that changed everything. That book was Paul Hawken’s New York Times bestseller Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (Penguin Books, 2017). “That one book changed my life. I felt hope and optimism, like there was a road map to turn this crisis around.”

Inspired to take action, Jackson decided to take a sabbatical from the family business. Having previously made charitable grants to various nonprofit organizations operating independently from any government (NGOs) through Jackson Family Wines, she says she had noticed that there were many “siloed” efforts, without much cross-pollination and collaboration. From her perspective, the slice of the philanthropic pie dedicated to environmental causes is too small for this type of inefficiency. “When you have less than 2% of philanthropic giving going to the environment and a bunch of environmental NGOs competing for a tiny slice of the pie, there’s a dysfunctional environment. Organizations are not working together,” she says. “I wanted Grounded to be activist-oriented and to de-silo environmental efforts, to bring solutionists together.”

The idea behind Grounded was to create a summit convening these “solutionists”—the scientists, policymakers, investors and leaders of front-line organizations, people working in realms from ocean health to regenerative agriculture, from Arctic permafrost conservation to rainforest protection and wildfire prevention. The goal was to “elevate and amplify” climate solutions, and Jackson got to work the good old-fashioned way: cold-calling people she had read about in Hawken’s Drawdown, and elsewhere.

“Honestly, I didn’t expect them to return calls, but that’s how I started it,” she says. “Here was this community dedicated to turning around the climate crisis, giving everything, doing amazing work.”

The first summit organized by Jackson’s Grounded gathered in March of 2019, in a geodesic dome built on Jackson family property. By that time, Jackson had attended several other climate conferences, and she knew she wanted to turn the status quo on its head.

“I noticed at these conferences there are a lot of world leaders, government officials and CEOs patting themselves on the back—basically greenwashing—and I had always wondered where the real solutionists were,” she says. “The Grounded summit put solutionists on the stage and the CEOs in the audience. Government officials were in the audience. Civil society was in the audience.” Students from local high schools were invited as well. “I wanted people to learn and feel what I felt—that we can do this, we can learn and we can turn it around—and here are some of the solutions.”

Exhausted and exhilarated after the initial summit, Jackson dove back in, thinking ahead to the 2020 summit. Through Grounded she had found a community of people with the same sense of urgency, others who were channeling all their energy into the climate crisis, and she grew increasingly committed to the work.

A few months later, in early October 2019, disaster struck again when the Kincaid Fire burned down Jackson’s own home near Geyserville. Jackson shared the news on Twitter: “My home just burnt to the ground last night. Stuff is just stuff, thank god I’m alive. This is why I’m doing the work I am doing. This is why. This is why.”