Climate Activism Is No Longer a Young Person’s Game

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(Bloomberg) — When Kathy Fulkerson walked into her bank in Reno, Nevada, she was ready to cancel her credit card. Carrying a letter outlining her concerns, Fulkerson explained to the manager why she wanted to sever ties: her 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 thrilled. “It was obviously very uncomfortable for him and he obviously made a statement.”

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Fulkerson is not a good 19-year-old. She never dumped soup on a plate or plastered herself 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 works to engage older people in climate activism.

Since Greta Thunberg burst onto the scene in 2018, climate protest has been seen as primarily youth activism. Not only do young people have the audacity to storm public spaces and clash with the police, they are arguably the group most affected by systems they had no role in creating. In 2050 — the global deadline for net zero and the point at which temperature rises are expected to reach 2 degrees Celsius — many baby boomers will be out of the picture. Millennials will be reaching their golden years, while today’s teens will be in the prime of their lives. It is common to hear that the next generation will solve problems that today’s leaders cannot, or have not, solved.

A growing group of climate retirees dispute this narrative. They play a major role in protesting the expansion of fossil fuel use, urging their contemporaries to vote with climate in mind, and even engaging in the most confrontational types of protest.

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“There’s no known way to prevent older people from voting, and we ended up getting… “On an enormous amount of the country’s resources, (including) most of the money.” He published his first book, The End of Nature, in his late twenties. “If you want to put pressure on Washington or Wall Street or your state capital, having some thin-haired people like me isn’t the worst plan in the world.”

Mark Coleman, a Church of England priest based in northwest England, had managed to reach the age of 60 before his first arrest. Father of two and grandfather of one, he marched against nuclear missiles in the 1980s; But it wasn’t until 2019, when he joined climate street protests led by Extinction Rebellion, that Coleman ended up in a prison cell. He was arrested again two years later for taking part in the British isolation protests, in which participants blocked traffic in a campaign for improved energy efficiency ahead of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow.

Coleman found that retirement creates a “space to think about[climate change]” that younger families don’t necessarily have. His family supports his activism, although it has forced him to rethink some of the dictates he handed down to his children. Among them: Do not break the law.

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“The new edition says that sometimes it is okay to break the law when the law is wrong or when the law protects those who do wrong,” he says.

Coleman’s colleague Sue Parfitt was also arrested at Britain’s isolation protests. Parfitt, who was 79 at the time, brought a camping chair to sit on the trail, and has since become one of the UK’s most prominent climate protesters. Earlier this year, she broke the glass on the display case protecting the Magna Carta at the British Library in London, and faces criminal charges of damage.

Many recent climate movements feature much greater age diversity than people might think, says Graeme Hayes, a sociologist at Aston University in Birmingham, UK, who has co-authored demographic analyzes of climate activism in Britain. “One of the things that really came to mind was the idea of ​​being a parent, or the idea of ​​being a grandparent, and that was a really important driving force behind them taking action,” Hayes says.

In court, arrested protesters talk about their responsibility to do something because of their age. “As part of the generation whose complacency led to this emergency, I should prepare for arrest,” said a woman born in 1942, according to the study.

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Climate activism is evolving as the threat of global warming increases, but there is ample evidence of the participation of older people – especially older women – 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, groups of women calling themselves “Nana” led anti-fracking protests in Lancashire. In China, crowds of retirees led protests against cuts to their Medicaid benefits last year, and seniors have long participated in protests against cuts to Medicaid and Medicare in the United States.

The demographics are “very legitimate,” says Hayes. “They’re unimpeachable, because how can you turn around and say that grandmothers have no interest in the future and are somehow problematic? It’s an identity you can organize around.”

The third act is fun with the maturity of its members. One method of protest is the rocking chair rebellion, where members sit in rocking chairs outside banks to pressure them to give up oil and gas. The group does not resort to physical protest — its efforts to prevent the expansion of liquefied natural gas exports from the Gulf of Mexico began with letter writing — but it is optimistic about arrests when necessary. (McKibben says he has been arrested at least a dozen times.)

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While arrest can make life and work more difficult for young people, members of the third class often discuss how little they have to lose from it, says Lani Ritter-Hall, 78, a retired teacher from Ohio who joined the group in 2022.

“We talk about (how) we got the time and we got the finances,” says Ritter-Hall. “We have a little wisdom under us.”

Insulate Britain, which wanted to arrest its members as a way to embarrass the government, appeared to be actively cultivating an older demographic, Hayes says. The group recruited and organized meetings in church halls. Extinction Rebellion had an even age split during its peak in 2019, but Hayes says older people were disproportionately represented among those arrested.

Pensioners also have a self-interested argument for objecting to global warming: they are particularly vulnerable to its effects. Older adults are more at risk of serious health effects from extreme heat, and most deaths from overheating occur among older adults.

This vulnerability came to light in April, when a group of older Swiss women, called KlimaSeniorinnen, won a historic victory in the European Court of Human Rights. The court ruled that Switzerland had “failed to comply with its duties” regarding climate change, in a case that highlighted women’s vulnerability to the dangerous effects of heat. The ruling imposed an important concession: that the government’s failure to develop effective climate policy constitutes a violation of basic human rights.

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“The more serious and serious the harm, the more pressing it is for the court,” Kelly Matheson, deputy director of climate issues at Our Children’s Trust, said at the time.

Just weeks into Swiss rule, European Grandparents for Climate protesters gathered ahead of the EU elections to chant, sing and distribute leaflets outside the European Parliament in Brussels. The group was created last year, and its thousands of members were quick to point out that people over the age of 65 make up more than 20% of Europe’s population.

On that May afternoon, protesters in many cities across Europe braved the wet weather. From Vienna to Stockholm, they blew whistles and sang “Ode to Joy” and “Sing for the Climate,” a Belgian song set to the Italian resistance anthem “Bella Ciao.” Among the flyers was a bookmark containing an illustration of a voting booth and two children outside. The caption reads: “Grandma, would you please think about our grandchildren too?”

The square outside the European Parliament is off-limits to protesters, says Axel Vande Vijte, 68, one of the organizers of the grandparents’ campaign. But police made an exception to allow the group to take a photo.

“You get more respect,” says Vande Vijte. “And people are open to older people protesting.”

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