Organization Empowers Older Adults To Step Up For The Climate

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: This is Science Friday. I’m Anna Rothschild.

IRA FLATOW: And I’m Ira Flatow.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: For climate week, we were out and about in New York City, where we spoke with folks who are amped up about the climate movement, including 58-year-old Sigi Koko from Fawn Grove, Pennsylvania.

SIGI KOKO: I’ve been waiting my whole life for people to talk about climate change. I grew up in the ’70s and had the big oil crisis, and that was sort of the big whoa! And everything that was climate-oriented was sort of subversive and underground, and you were the weirdo, and you were going to chain yourself to a tree. And now it’s everybody talks about it.

IRA FLATOW: If you’re a baby boomer like myself, you may remember the first Earth Day, the Civil Rights Movement, the antiwar protests, the first pride parade. The list goes on because the ’60s and ’70s were packed with social revolutions. But the organization Third Act says that, boomers, your work isn’t quite done yet.

[CHANTING]

ACTIVIST: What do we want?

CROWD: Climate justice!

ACTIVIST: When do we want it?

CROWD: Now!

ACTIVIST: If we don’t get it–

CROWD: Shut it down!

ACTIVIST: If we don’t get it–

CROWD: Shut it down!

IRA FLATOW: Third Act empowers folks over the age of 60 to get involved in the current crisis– and I’m talking about the climate movement– by leveraging older generations’ access to power, money, and life experiences to create change. Here to discuss that with me are my guests, Akaya Windwood, activist and lead advisor for Third Act based in Oakland, California. Welcome to Science Friday.

AKAYA WINDWOOD: Thank you.

IRA FLATOW: And Bill McKibben, climate activist and founder of Third Act based in Middlebury, Vermont. Welcome back, Bill.

BILL MCKIBBEN: Well, Ira, it’s always so good to be with you.

IRA FLATOW: Let me ask you first, Bill, give us the idea of how Third Act came about. What happened?

BILL MCKIBBEN: You know, Ira, that I’ve been working on climate change pretty much my whole life. I wrote the first book about what we now call climate change back in the late 1980s when I was in my 20s. But somehow along the way I became older. And, though I’ve always loved working with young people and though young people have been in the lead of the climate fight from the beginning, right through Greta Thunberg, at a certain point I began to hear a few too many people our age say, oh, it’s up to the next generation to solve this problem, which seemed both unfair and also impractical. Young people, for all their energy and intelligence and idealism, lack the structural power to make change on the scale we need and the limited time we still have by themselves.

So I wondered if maybe we could get together some people my age. If you’ve reached the time in life when you’ve got hair coming out your ears, then you’ve got structural power coming out your ears too. There are 70 million of us over the age of 60. We punch above our weight politically because we all vote. There’s no known way to stop old people from voting. We’ve got most of the country’s financial assets. So the hope was that we could start this thing that would get people really engaged in this work for climate and for democracy.

People said it won’t work because people become more conservative as they age. But I think that if that was true once, it isn’t anymore for precisely the reason that you say. If you’re in your 60s or 70s or 80s now, your first act was back precisely in that period. Just thinking about the environment, in April of 1970, 20 million Americans, 10% of the then population, most of them young, were marching in the streets. And within two years we had the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and the EPA. And indeed, the air and the water got cleaner.

Now that we face this even graver crisis, it really seems time to call on those same people again. And so it hasn’t surprised me that in the two plus years we’ve been going this thing has grown like topsy. We’ve got chapters in almost every state. We’ve got 100,000 people deeply engaged in the climate fight, going to jail, writing 100 of thousands of postcards and phone calls ahead of this year’s election, on and on and on.

IRA FLATOW: So it’s like asking retired soldiers to come out of retirement.

BILL MCKIBBEN: There’s something like that, nonviolent soldiers, to be sure. And the spirit with which people have done it is just right, I think, because they’re– I remember the very first– one of the very first protests we did a couple of years ago, young people, they’d asked us to help with this demonstration they were doing against the big banks, like Citi and Chase and Wells Fargo and Bank of America that are the biggest funders of the fossil fuel industry. And I can remember showing up at that demonstration, and there were a couple of 100 high school kids there because there’s always– high school kids know just what they’re staring down the barrel of. And they’re somewhat sprier, so they were out in front.

But at the back there were a bunch of us from this nascent Third Act with a big banner that said fossils against fossil fuels. That’s been the spirit we’ve been operating in from the beginning. We shut down in 100 cities spring before last. We shut down those banks for the afternoon with people our age sitting in, not sprawled on the sidewalk because our joints are past that point. But we’d gone to the goodwill and gotten every rocking chair we could find, and that’s what we used for the most comfortable sit-in ever. The Times the next day called it the Rocking Chair Rebellion.

IRA FLATOW: Interesting. Akaya, do you find that young people look up to seniors when you’re activating and being active together? Or do they say, it’s our turn, get out of the way?

AKAYA WINDWOOD: It’s somewhere in between, actually, Ira. In talking with younger people, what I hear is it’s time for people over 60 to not step aside but to step beside them, to be in support of what they’re up to and, in many ways, get out from in front of the room and trying to run everything, but not go away, right? So this is an opportunity, and we’re finding it’s happening all over the country, as Bill just mentioned, for the older people to have a new role in the world. And there are a lot of younger folks who are trying to make amazing things happen and who could lean back on some of the things that we elders know. So to be available to them as we just reorganize what our role in the world is has been very satisfying.

IRA FLATOW: That’s interesting. Bill, what kind of actions can older folks take for the climate? What advantage do we have that maybe younger people don’t have?

BILL MCKIBBEN: Let me tell you a story about where this idea originally came from in my mind. You may recall, because we talked about it at the time, the sprawling campaign against the Keystone Pipeline in the last decade, which was the big environmental fight of that decade. And I wrote the letter that asked people to come to Washington at the beginning of that in 2011 to do civil disobedience outside the white house. It turned into the biggest civil disobedience action of recent times, at least in the environmental movement. And on the last day, there was a guy arrested with a sign around his neck that said, World War II vet. Handle with care. He was old enough that he’d been born in the Warren Harding administration–

IRA FLATOW: Wow.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Wow.

BILL MCKIBBEN: –which was long enough ago that I, frankly, almost forgotten there was a Warren Harding administration.

[LAUGHTER]

It was remarkable for the young people who were there to see their elders outside their comfort zones, willing to set aside some of the comforts and privileges of older age in order to really look to the future. If you’re young right now and looking at the climate crisis, you’re quite rightly thinking about your future because by the time you’re in middle age, this will be the only thing happening on earth if we don’t get a handle on it very soon.

But if you’re somewhat nearer the exit than the entrance, you have a perspective on the world that just– this world that we’ve loved and that we’ve been so privileged to get to live in and love, you want to leave it in shape for all that come behind. Legacy is a very abstract word until you’re a certain age, at which point it becomes– your legacy is what you leave behind for those that you love the most. Right now, we’re in grave danger of being the first generation that leaves behind a planet worse than the one we found. We don’t want that.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, but we also, as boomers, we’ve also accumulated wealth. We’re big spenders. We also have our money in banks that invest our money. Isn’t that a leverage we have?

BILL MCKIBBEN: It’s exciting to see people beginning to, in fact, more than beginning to, reach out and demand if they have an investment advisor or a banker or someone that they take seriously the future of the planet. That’s enormously valuable pressure on those institutions. All the banks have been hearing from the red state treasurers for the last couple of years about whether or not they’re becoming too woke. And they’re backing away from their climate commitments that they’ve made in recent years. It’s very good to be able to apply counter pressure from people saying, I don’t want my life savings used for the wreckage of the planet that I made that money on.

IRA FLATOW: Right, the boomer generation being one of them, we’re aging out and dying, to be to be blunt about it. What about the next generation who’s behind us, the next generation of seniors that follows? What happens to the Third Act movement there? Does it move to those people, and how do you motivate them? Or are they naturally moving up and understanding the situation, Bill?

BILL MCKIBBEN: First of all, it really is going to be a while before the boomers disappear from the scene. We’ve still got members of the baby boom generation who are just about to turn 60. It remains the biggest slug of voters in the system, and it will for a while. But yes, you’re right. As we understand our mortality a little more directly, that’s one of the reasons we take action. Our one of our slogans is, no time to waste. And we mean it two ways.

One of the reasons the attention on this election is so fierce is because everyone’s come to understand that climate change is the ultimate timed test. You know that the IPCC has told us, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that we need to cut emissions in half by 2030, which by my watch is five years and four months away. This may be the last presidency that really is able to make huge change in the time that we have. But we also mean no time to waste because we know that our own time is limited.

IRA FLATOW: I think the thing that Akaya has done so beautifully is really lay out a concept of elderhood. That’s not something that America, always a youth-focused society, has spent much time thinking about. But we’re thinking about it. That’s a gift we want to pass on to all the generations of elders that hopefully will be coming after us. And how successful have you both been in motivating the seniors to come out and be active?

AKAYA WINDWOOD: Oh, so the best part about it is it takes almost no motivation because people are really excited about it, right? Our dear beloved staff has been overwhelmed by how much interest, and how can I help? And what can I do? To go from 0 to 100,000 people in a little more than 2 and 1/2 years, we were stunned. We were not anticipating that. It’s been very exciting. And everybody I talk to, well, how can I get involved?

IRA FLATOW: Well, that’s what I’m going to ask you because I’m sure we have just a few seniors in our audience. How could they get involved in Third Act?

BILL MCKIBBEN: This couldn’t be easier. You go to ThirdAct.org, T-H-I-R-D-A-C-T dot O-R-G, and sign up. The pleasure of doing this in part has been this incredible sense of companionship that sprung up in one place after another. Sometimes aging can be an isolating and lonely time. That may be one reason that people have grabbed onto this with both hands and built already a kind of sense of camaraderie and fellowship that’s getting the work done.

We’re putting out 100 of thousands of postcards a week now. Older people are jumping on buses to head to the swing states to knock on doors because it turns out that America will still open its front door if there’s a 75-year-old lady on the other side. This is a remarkable chance for a new kind of activism, and it really is working.

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday from WNYC studios. Bill, you’ve been doing this for a long time. You mentioned that your book, The End of Nature from 1989 was the first popular science book on climate change. Tell us what it has been like to grow older with the topic of climate change and what you’ve noticed in all those years.

BILL MCKIBBEN: Well, look, it’s possible at this point, Ira, that I’ve written more words about climate change than anyone else in the English language, which would make me, given the temperature of the Earth, the least successful writer and activist that we’ve ever produced. But finally, we see this great coalescing of people now finally demanding action. And we see the possibility of that action.

Right now, we finally live on a planet where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That means we might really be able to make progress fast. And I keep telling people as we gather, we may be old, but we’re going to be alive long enough to see the outcome of this fight because the next 4 or 5 years are going to be the decisive ones.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, and Akaya, from all of your years of organizing, speaking of passing down wisdom from one generation to another, what advice do you have for the younger generations when it comes to the climate movement?

AKAYA WINDWOOD: I would say trust yourselves. The world is precarious. It can feel very, oh, my gosh, what’s going to happen here? But what I’m finding in my conversations with the younger generations is they’re brilliant, and they care deeply. And yes, some are hesitant, and some feel like this is going to all fall apart. There’s that. And I can absolutely understand why they would feel that way.

But I firmly believe that the solutions that our generation can’t think about or won’t come from us are there. And the next ones will do an amazing job. And I’m frankly completely optimistic about what may happen in the next 30 to 40 years. And I just because I want to go on record, not all of us have hair coming out of our ears. I just want to– I just want to say that.

[LAUGHTER]

BILL MCKIBBEN: Only your barber knows for sure.

[LAUGHTER]

IRA FLATOW: All right, well, I’m glad both of you are still working at this and we’re still all around to talk about it. And I want to thank both of you for your work and for taking time to be with us today.

BILL MCKIBBEN: What a pleasure, Ira. Many thanks.

AKAYA WINDWOOD: Yes, I love this conversation. Thanks for inviting us.

IRA FLATOW: You’re welcome. Akaya Windwood is an activist and lead advisor for the Third Act based in Oakland, California. And Bill McKibben is a climate activist and founder of Third Act, and he’s based in Middlebury, Vermont. And listeners, we want to hear from you. Are you a fellow boomer concerned about the climate? What actions are you taking? Let us know at sciencefriday.com/climate, sciencefriday.com/climate. And we may feature your answers on our web site.

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