Olivia Rudgard | (TNS) Bloomberg News
When Cathy Fulkerson walked into her bank in Reno, Nevada, she was ready to cancel her credit card. Carrying a letter stating her concerns, Fulkerson explained to the manager why she wanted to cut ties: its investments in fossil fuels.
“The manager was very nervous and very confrontational, and I was a customer. I was shocked,” Fulkerson says — though she was also quite thrilled. “It was obviously very uncomfortable for him and obviously made a statement.”
Fulkerson is no righteous 19-year-old. She’s never thrown soup at a painting or glued herself to a highway. The 67-year-old, who recently retired from a career in higher education, is part of Third Act, a U.S. group that gets older people involved in climate activism.
Ever since Greta Thunberg burst onto the scene in 2018, climate protest has been seen as a primarily youthful pursuit. Not only do younger people have the chutzpah to storm public spaces and tussle with police, they are arguably the cohort most impacted by systems they had no part in creating. In 2050 — the global deadline for net zero and the point by which warming is expected to graze 2C — many Baby Boomers will be out of the picture. Millennials will be reaching their own golden years, while today’s teenagers will be in their prime. It’s common to hear that the next generation will solve problems that today’s leaders couldn’t, or wouldn’t.
A growing group of climate retirees are countering that narrative. They’re playing a major role in protesting fossil fuel expansion, exhorting their contemporaries to vote with the climate in mind, and even taking part in the most confrontational types of protest.
“There’s no known way to stop old people from voting, and we ended up with an awful lot of the country’s resources, [including] most of the money,” says Bill McKibben, 63, a longtime environmental advocate who founded Third Act and who published his first book, “The End of Nature,” in his late 20s. “If you want to pressure Washington or Wall Street or your state capital, having some people with hairlines like mine is not the worst plan in the world.”
Mark Coleman, a Church of England priest based in northwest England, managed to make it to 60 before his first arrest. The father of two and grandfather of one marched against nuclear missiles in the 1980s; but it wasn’t until 2019, when he joined climate street protests spearheaded by Extinction Rebellion, that Coleman ended up in a jail cell. He was arrested again two years later for taking part in Insulate Britain protests, whose participants blocked traffic to campaign for better energy efficiency ahead of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow.
Coleman has found that retirement creates “space just to think about [climate change]” that young families don’t necessarily have. His own family is supportive of his activism, though it has forced him to rethink some of the diktats he handed down to his children. Among them: Don’t break the law.
“The new edition says sometimes it’s OK to break the law when the law is wrong or when …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
