Climate activism is no longer a young person’s game

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 the law is protecting those who are doing wrong,” he says.

Sue Parfitt, Coleman’s fellow cleric, was also arrested at the Insulate Britain protests. Parfitt was 79 at the time — she brought a camping chair to sit on the road — 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 in the British Library in London, and is facing charges of criminal damage.

Many modern climate movements have far more age variety than people might think, says Graeme Hayes, a sociologist at Aston University in Birmingham, UK, who has co-authored demographic analyses of Britain’s climate activism. “One thing that really came across to us was the idea of being a parent, or the idea of being a grandparent, and that being a really important motivating force in why they were 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 has led to this emergency, I should prepare to be arrested,” said one woman, born in 1942, quoted in the study.

Climate activism is evolving as the threat of warming grows, but there’s ample evidence of older people — and in particular, older women — taking part in other direct action protests. In the 1980s, women of all ages set up a camp at Greenham Common in Berkshire to protest against nuclear weapons. In 2014, groups of women calling themselves “nanas” led anti-fracking protests in Lancashire. In China, crowds of retirees led protests against cuts to their medical benefits last year, and elderly people have long participated in protests against cuts to Medicaid and Medicare in the U.S.

The demographic is “hyper-legitimate,” Hayes says. “They’re unimpeachable, because how can you possibly turn around and say the grandmothers have no stake in the future and are somehow troublemakers? It’s an identity that you can organize around.”

Third Act is playful with its members’ maturity. One protest style is the Rocking Chair Rebellion, in which members sit in rocking chairs outside of banks to pressure them to divest from oil and gas. The group doesn’t default to physical protest — its efforts to block the expansion of LNG exports from the Gulf of Mexico started with letter-writing — but they’re sanguine about arrests when necessary. (McKibben says he’s been arrested at least a dozen times.)

While an arrest can make life and work significantly harder for young people, members of Third Act 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’ve got time and we’ve got the finances,” Ritter Hall says. “We’ve got a little bit of wisdom underneath us.”

Insulate Britain, which wanted its members to get arrested as a means of embarrassing the government, seemed to actively cultivate an older demographic, Hayes says. The group held recruitment and organizing meetings in church halls. Extinction Rebellion had an even age split during its 2019 heyday, but Hayes says older people were disproportionately represented among those arrested.

Retirees also have a self-interested case for objecting to a warming world: They are particularly vulnerable to its effects. Older people are at greater risk of experiencing dangerous health impacts from intense heat, and most excess heat deaths occur among the elderly.

That vulnerability came to bear in April, when a group of older Swiss women dubbed the KlimaSeniorinnen won a landmark victory in the European Court of Human Rights. The court ruled that Switzerland had “failed to comply with its duties” concerning climate change in a case that emphasized the women’s susceptibility to the dangerous effects of heat. The verdict forced an important concession: that governmental failure to make effective climate policy violated fundamental human rights.

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

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

The square outside the European Parliament is off-limits to protesters, says Axel Vande veegaete, 68, a Grandparents organizer. But the police made an exception to let the group take a picture.

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

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