Climate Activism Is No Younger’s Game Anymore

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(Bloomberg) — When Cathy Fulkerson walked into a bank in Reno, Nevada, she was ready to cash out her credit card. With a letter expressing her concerns, Fulkerson explained to her manager why she wanted to cut ties: investments in fossil fuels.

“The manager was very nervous and very confrontational, and I was a customer. I was shocked,” said Fulkerson – although he was also very happy. “It’s clearly very uncomfortable for him and it’s clearly making a statement.”

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Fulkerson was not a godly 19-year-old. He never threw soup on a painting or stuck it on the highway. The 67-year-old, who recently retired from a career in higher education, is part of Third Act, a US group that gets parents involved in climate activism.

Since Greta Thunberg burst onto the scene in 2018, climate protests have been seen as a mainly youth effort. It’s not just young people who have the chutzpah to invade public spaces and get into fights with the police, it’s probably the groups most affected by a system that’s out of touch. By 2050 – the global deadline for net zero and the point at which 2C warming will occur – many Baby Boomers will be invisible. Millennials will reach their golden years, while today’s teenagers will be prima donnas. It’s common to hear that the next generation will solve the problems that current leaders can’t or won’t.

A growing group of climate pensioners is fighting that narrative. He has played a leading role in protesting the expansion of fossil fuels, urging his contemporaries to vote with the climate in mind, and also participating in the most confrontational types of protest.

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“There’s no discernible way to prevent parents from voting, and we’re getting a lot of state resources, (including) a lot of money,” said Bill McKibben, 63, a longtime environmental lawyer who founded the Third Amendment and who published a book the first, The End of Nature, in the late 20s. “If you want to pressure Washington or Wall Street or your nation’s capital, having a few people with hairlines like mine isn’t the worst plan in the world.”

Mark Coleman, a Church of England priest based in the north-west of England, managed to reach 60 years before his first arrest. His two fathers and one grandfather marched against nuclear missiles in the 1980s; but it wasn’t until 2019, when he took part in a climate road protest led by Extinction Rebellion, that Coleman ended up in a prison cell. He was arrested again two years later for taking part in the Insulate Britain protest, in which participants blocked traffic to campaign for better energy efficiency ahead of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow.

Coleman found that retirement creates “a space just to think about (climate change)” that young families don’t necessarily have. His own family supported his activism, although they forced him to rethink some of the diktats he gave his children. Among them: Don’t break the law.

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“The new edition says sometimes it’s OK to break the law when the law is wrong or when the law protects those who do wrong,” he said.

Sue Parfitt, Coleman’s fellow cleric, was also arrested at the Insulate Britain protest. Parfitt was 79 at the time – he brought a camping chair to sit on the road – and has since become one of Britain’s most prominent climate protesters. Earlier this year, he broke glass in a display case protecting the Magna Carta at the British Library in London, and faced criminal damage charges.

Much of the modern climate movement has a wider age range than people think, says Graeme Hayes, a sociologist at Aston University in Birmingham, England, who has written a demographic analysis of British climate activists. “One of the things we really found was the idea of ​​being a parent, or the idea of ​​being a grandparent, and that was a very important motivating force for why they were acting,” Hayes said.

In court, the arrested protestors spoke about their responsibility to do something because of their age. “As part of a comfortable generation that has caused this emergency, I have to prepare to be arrested,” said one woman, born in 1942, quoted in the study.

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Climate activism has slowed as the threat of warming grows, but there is growing evidence of older people – especially older women – taking part in other direct action protests. In the 1980s, women of all ages set up camp on Greenham Common in Berkshire to protest against nuclear weapons. In 2014, a group of women calling themselves “pineapples” led an anti-fracking protest in Lancashire. In China, many retirees led protests against cuts to medical benefits last year, and the elderly have long joined protests against Medicaid and Medicare cuts in the US.

That demographic is “hyper-legal,” Hayes said. “They can’t be arrested, because how can you turn around and say that grandparents don’t have a stake in the future and how are they going to create problems? This is an identity that you can manage.”

The Third Act revels in the maturity of its members. One style of protest is the Rocking Chair Rebellion, where members sit in rocking chairs outside banks to force divestment from oil and gas. The group has not defaulted to physical protests – efforts to block the expansion of LNG exports from the Gulf of Mexico began with letter writing – but they are confident of arrests if necessary. (McKibben says he has been arrested at least a dozen times.)

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While incarceration can make life and work more difficult for young people, Third Act members often discuss how little they have to lose, said Lani Ritter Hall, 78, a retired teacher from Ohio who joined the group in 2022.

“We talked about (how) we got time and we got finances,” said Ritter Hall. “We have some wisdom down there.”

Insulate Britain, which wants its members detained as a means of embarrassing the government, seems to be actively cultivating an older demographic, Hayes said. The group conducted recruitment and organized meetings in the church hall. Extinction Rebellion had an even age split during its 2019 heyday, but Hayes said older people were disproportionately represented among those arrested.

Retirees also have their own interest case to argue in a warming world: They are especially vulnerable to these effects. Elderly people are at greater risk for the harmful health effects of extreme heat, and most heatstroke deaths occur among the elderly.

The vulnerability came to light in April, when a group of older Swiss women called KlimaSeniorinnen won a landmark victory at the European Court of Human Rights. The court ruled that Switzerland “failed to fulfill its duty” on climate change in a case that emphasized women’s vulnerability to the harmful effects of heat. The ruling forces an important concession: that the government’s failure to create effective climate policies violates human rights.

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“The more serious and damaging it is, the more important it is to the courts,” Kelly Matheson, deputy director of climate litigation at Our Children’s Trust, said at the time.

A few weeks after the Swiss decision, protesters affiliated with European Grandparents for Climate gathered before the EU elections to chant, chant and hand out leaflets outside the European Parliament in Brussels. This group was created last year, and thousands of members quickly pointed out that people over 65 make up more than 20% of the European population.

On an afternoon in May, protesters in many cities across Europe braved the rainy weather. From Vienna to Stockholm, they sang and sang “Ode to Joy” and “Sing for the Climate”, a Belgian song that matches the Italian national anthem “Bella Ciao.” Among the handouts was a bookmark with an illustration of a voting booth and two children outside. It read: “Grandma, are you thinking about our grandchildren too?”

The square outside the European Parliament was off-limits to protesters, said Axel Vande veegaete, 68, of the Eyang committee. But the police made an exception for the group to take pictures.

“You will be more respected,” said Vande veegaete. “And people open up to parents who protest.”

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