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Four months later, McKibben joined like-minded contemporaries to launch a movement called Third Act. It aims to mobilize Americans over 60 — mostly baby boomers and the so-called silent generation that preceded them — as advocates for the climate and voting rights, which the organizers see as deeply intertwined.
“They’re unfinished business for this generation, and they’re existential,” McKibben said. “I don’t think we can solve the climate crisis without a functioning democracy.”
Social justice and environmental champions seek to activate or reactivate older people as a powerful force for change. Many seniors find themselves at a crossroads after decades of following their dreams and finding their way. They have more time, more contacts, and, with luck, wealth.
Third Act has amassed a large e-mail database with tens to thousands of names. These “Third Actors” are marshaling a “democracy force” to promote fair elections in the midterms and beyond, while putting pressure on lenders and investors that bankroll coal, gas, and oil companies.
Some recruits are newbies to political engagement, attracted by attempts to limit voting in multiple states and to address environmental threats that seem more serious. Others are veterans of civil rights and antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s & 1970s, who have spent many years pursuing careers and raising families and are now ready to return. The fight.
“I need to make up for time lost,” said Jody Woos, 67, who retired last summer as director of the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival in Burlington, Vt. Woos was a stalwart at Vietnam and civil rights protests in her youth but was politically dormant for years. Then, after George Floyd’s She was murdered in 2020.
Third Actors seek “to draw on that generational DNA,” said McKibben, who wrote a seminal 1989 book on climate change called “The End of Nature” and leads the climate campaign group 350.org. McKibben’s father, Gordon, was a Globe foreign correspondent and Globe business editor. He grew up in Lexington. McKibben is now a scholar-in-residence. Middlebury College, Vermont offers environmental studies.
McKibben spoke out recalling the excitement of the March against Washington in 1963 and the first Earth Day of 1970. He said that many of the gains from voting rights to clean-energy legislation were being lost, which could lead to a loss of a generational legacy.
“There is a reasonable chance we will be the first people who are going to leave the world way worse than we found it,” McKibben said.
Vanessa Arcara, cofounder of Third Act, and president of the organization, is only 36. but describes herself as an “aspiring elder.” Noting that young people have flocked to the climate and racial justice movements, Arcara said their parents and grandparents have a responsibility to support those efforts. “The most important work of our time should not be left to 17-year-olds as their homework,” she said.
Although the movement is national, a strong core of environmentalists like McKibben from the Boston area or northern New England are part of the movement.
Kathleen Sullivan, 77, of Freeport, Maine, an early Third Actor, has experienced all three of the life phases alluded to in the organization’s name. In her youth, she was involved with nuclear power protests. She then became a therapist, raising her two children. She also bought a second house in Addison further up the coast.
“I haven’t been involved for years,” Sullivan said. “I’ve been living the good life.”
Last summer, however, she noticed that Eastern Bay in Addison’s rising sun had changed to a horrendous shade of scarlet. “It was like a call from the gods,” she said. “It was so troubling. . . . I got really depressed for about three weeks.” Then she decided to sell her vacation home, return to Freeport, and rededicate herself to activism with Third Act.
Cambridge resident Fred Hewett, 65, a retired software developer, described himself as a “science-math kid” who wasn’t active in politics growing up. Hewett, a Cambridge resident and retired software developer, spent a lot time outdoors and is now a keen birder and rower along the Charles River. Hewett was a coder and organizer for climate groups since he quit his job.
“If when I die, the world is seeing the fossil fuel era fade into the sunset, then I’ll feel that my generation has not failed,” he said.
Dan Quinlan (64), a boomer who was a physicist at Bell Labs in the 1980s, is another member of the group. He is now employed by a Burlington, Vt. nonprofit that promotes renewable energy, and helps hospitals reduce greenhouse gases.
Quinlan stated that Third Act is a response to many seniors who feel a sense o duty. “Older people are worried and frustrated by the two big issues — what’s going on with the democracy and the climate,” he said.
The group draws Inspiration came from Black civil rights activists who organized civil resistance protests and successfully pushed to have the Voting Right Act of 1965 passed. Bayard is the name of the typeface used in the Third Act logo. It is named after Bayard Rustin who organized the March on Washington in 1993 and was based on banners from that march.
However, the US environmental movement is still at the forefront of its efforts. It is mainly white. One goal of Third Act is to create a multiracial campaign that connects environmentalists to advocates for voting rights — and, potentially, a range of other issues, said lead adviser Akaya Windwood, 65, of Oakland, Calif., who retired in 2018 as president of the Rockwood Leadership Institute, which trains leaders for social change.
Windwood People who are black and brown In many places, people are more vulnerable to environmental hazards. A longtime economic justice activist who marched with farm workers in her youth over poor pay and work conditions, she takes a holistic view of Third Act’s direction.
“I’m very interested in a cross-movement movement,” she said. “Back in the day, it was the gay movement or the women’s movement or the antiwar movement. They were all separate and you kind of had to choose.” But many now see “it’s all needed and it’s all welcome,” she said.
Many Third Actors who have left the workforce in recent times now have the time and the motivation.
Sue Donaldson, 72 years old, retired in 2014 as a psychiatrist and moved from Cambridge to Northampton last January. She is now a full-time climate activist. Boomers like herself, who’ve led comfortable lives as the planet has warmed, have an obligation now to change its course, she said.
“We have done more damage to the planet than any other generation,” Donaldson said. “I’m a poster child for white privilege and I just feel like I should be paying back.”
Organizers know that older people are just as divided politically as the nation as a whole. This is due to fissures that date back to the Vietnam War. According to Pew Research Center, data from surveys shows that Donald Trump won the vote among voters over 65, while Joe Biden won the vote among those under 40.
Third Act is still home to a significant number of seniors, who are mostly older and more progressive. But given that they are outnumbered in their age bracket, they’ll have to find ways to extend their outreach.
Third Act has the chance to attract independents and ordinary people in both political parties who are alarmed about climate change but lack nonpartisan “safe spaces” to address it, said the Rev. Jim Antal (72), from Norwich, Vt., was 12 years ago the Framingham-based minister for the United Church of Christ, Massachusetts.
Despite the political divide, Antal thinks outright climate deniers have shrunk to a “squishy little minority.” He’s now mobilizing a Third Act “faith cohort” that can appeal to others through houses of worship.
“The continuity of creation has been broken” by climate change, Antal said. “Our generation doesn’t have a choice. We have a universal calling to engage this challenge.”
Robert Weisman can reached at [email protected]. Follow him on twitter @GlobeRobW.
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