TEARFUL FROM THE MEMORY of her father, Jane Fonda embraced the John Steinbeck Award that she had just received and thanked a standing audience in San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre.

“My father is in this statue,” said the 85-year-old film legend and political activist on Sept. 13. Her father, Henry Fonda, played Depression-era sharecropper Tom Joad in the 1940 film adaptation of Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath.”

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.