A few days before Earth Day, a crowd of about 100 people gathered in front of Los Angeles City Hall to protest global warming and call for climate justice. They marched and chanted slogans, many of them holding signs calling for an end to fossil fuels.
But one of them, 70-year-old Jeff Olmstead, was sitting in a rocking chair.
“Global warming is a fact,” said Olmstead, who attended the protest with a group called People Over 60 Committed to Preserving Democracy and Fighting Climate Change, wearing a rocking chair that symbolized his age.
“Young people here can learn from our mistakes,” Olmstead said. “We were responsible, but we didn’t do the right thing then. Maybe we can do the right thing now.”
He and other activists say climate change is too often seen as a “youth issue” — after all, today’s young people are the ones most likely to bear the brunt of scorching heat, scorching droughts, explosive wildfires, species extinctions, and other rapidly worsening impacts.
But Third Act members say it’s “everyone’s problem,” and its growing membership indicates others agree: The organization has about 100,000 members nationwide, including about 8,000 in Southern California.
Among them is Phil Glosserman, co-chair of Third Act’s Southern California chapter, who vividly recalls the moment that sparked his involvement in climate activism.
In August 2020, the skies over Los Angeles were an apocalyptic mix of black, gray, and orange as dozens of wildfires burned across the city and state.
Ash was raining down on Glosserman’s car as she turned onto Pacific Coast Highway. She was visiting her daughter in Humboldt County when she got a call from her daughter telling her to turn back. The rapidly expanding August Complex was encroaching on her neighborhood, and she needed to prepare to evacuate.
“That was my ‘aha!’ moment, my awakening moment,” said Glosserman, 72. “That’s when I realized this was becoming personal. It was going to affect my daughter and it was going to affect my children for the rest of their lives.”
He began looking for a way to get involved, and Third Act felt like a revelation: “It just made perfect sense to me to come together with people my age who had the knowledge, wisdom, and time to understand what was going on and be able to fight this,” Glosserman said.
The movement continues to gain momentum, with prominent climate change leaders and activists such as Al Gore lending their support to the group.
The journalist and environmental activist is Third Act’s founder and one of its most outspoken voices. “We risk being the first generation to leave the world in a significantly worse state than we inherited it, and I think that’s one of the reasons people are so active in this movement,” he said in a recent phone call.
McKibben said he was inspired to found Third Act after hearing so many people his age say it was up to the next generation to fix these problems, which he found “meaningful and unrealistic.”
“Young people are leading these fights, but they alone lack the assets, the power to wield authority and the structural power to make change on the scale and in the time frame that’s needed,” McKibben said. “Older people have so much structural power. If you’re old enough to have hair growing out of your ears, you have the structural power to have hair growing out of your ears.”
Many of California’s Third Act members shared a similar motivation: Their generation is known, after all, for its organizing prowess during the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the birth of the modern environmental movement. They knew how to make change happen, and some were eager to share that knowledge with younger people.
“Many of us started working to make the world a better place at a young age, and we’ve never let up for a second,” said Third Act member Ann Bartz, 73, of Long Beach, who recalled enrolling at the University of California, Berkeley, shortly after the bloody People’s Park protests of 1969. The Vietnam War was still raging, and Bartz soon began attending demonstrations on campus.
“There’s a lot of experience there,” Bartz said of her generation, “but it’s also very satisfying to watch younger people develop their organizations and support them and say, ‘If there’s anything you’d like to know, we’re here to help you. If you want us to show up in your congressman’s office or on the street and help grow your numbers, we’d love to do that.'”
Third Act members come from backgrounds in law, science and communications, as well as decades of work experience they can apply to climate issues, she said. Plus, while some young people worry that acts of civil disobedience will hurt their future job opportunities, that’s not a concern for retired people.
The effort has been well-received. At a protest in Downtown Los Angeles, 22-year-old Joanna Speiser said climate change is always on her mind. She noted that 2023 is her last year, and said she’s grateful for the support of Third Act members.
“Climate change affects everyone,” Speiser said, holding up a sign that read “Climate Emergency.” “It takes generations to come together. Young people are the future, but older people suffer more from extreme heat.”
Nearby, Frank Granda, 20, a member of a climate change group, nodded in agreement. “When I see older people here, I feel a sense of solidarity,” he said.
But it’s not just about looking to the future: According to Third Act member Bruce Hamilton, 73, a Berkeley resident, it’s also about acknowledging responsibility for previous generations’ role in the climate crisis.
“We’re the ones who failed to solve the problems under our watch,” Hamilton said. “The problems got worse. I don’t want to just hand it over and say, ‘Okay, I’m going to play golf and you guys solve it.’
Hamilton, who was with the Sierra Club for 44 years before retiring in 2021, said his decades of conservation work motivated him to join Third Act. He realized that simply focusing on conservation was no longer a sufficient strategy to protect precious places. Extreme heat, wildfires, drought and other expanding forces pay no attention to protective fences or other physical boundaries.
He said it’s important to think bigger, and that includes recognizing the power of older generations, who wield great political influence both as a voting group and as the country’s largest asset holders, accounting for about 70 percent of the country’s financial assets.
Third Act has already used some of its influence to organize a campaign urging people to divest from Citibank, Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo over their lending practices related to oil drilling and fossil fuels. More than 36,000 people nationwide have divested since the campaign began last year, with hundreds more cutting up their credit cards on the official action day in 2023, aides said.
Third Act employs a variety of strategies, including letter writing, phone banking, and community organizing. Third Act is organized into small chapters and working groups across more than 24 states. Volunteer-led groups also participate in local and national campaigns, host meetings and events, and meet regularly to share information and ideas.
The group also played a role in persuading the Biden administration earlier this year, members said. Indeed, some Third Act members said they were surprised by the ambition of President Biden’s climate bill, the Defeat Inflation Act, which has been touted as one of the most progressive climate bills in history.
The group primarily supported Biden during his reelection campaign and has continued to do so ever since.
“The best thing we can do about climate change right now is to keep Donald Trump from becoming president,” said Dennis Higgins, 69, a member of Third Act, who joined the protest in downtown Los Angeles.
This is why the group is as committed to political activism as it is to fighting global warming. Many Third Act members believe that preserving democracy is inseparable from environmental activism, and the group regularly organizes “vote” programs where high school students help register other high school students to vote.
“We’re older people so we won’t be the worst affected, but our kids will be,” Higgins said. “It’s very tough. We feel the temperatures rising, we see the weather patterns changing, we know it’s happening. But I think we’re making progress. People I was talking to a year ago would have been in denial about this a lot sooner than they are now.”
Glosserman also said Third Act’s Southern California chapter believes it has a chance to flip the House and elect climate-positive candidates in five districts that include Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties.
Currently, one of their biggest legislative pushes is a bill that would ban some state pension and retirement funds, including the California Public Employees Retirement System and the California Teachers Retirement System, from investing in fossil fuel companies. Third Act members have called and messaged lawmakers about the bill, and then met with the bill’s author, Sen. Lena Gonzales (D-Long Beach). Gonzales said their efforts are having an impact.
“I want to thank you all for being such amazing advocates,” she told about 60 people on a recent Zoom call, “especially as pensioners, now and in the future, keep on hanging in there, keep on fighting, keep on fighting, because we will get through this.”
But despite the energy and optimism throughout the group, many Third Act members also acknowledge that the climate crisis will be difficult for some to accept.
“My father passed away a few years ago, but he could never accept the idea that the world was in climate chaos,” Bartz said. “It was very clear to me that he would have to experience great grief to really confront that, because he was born in California and grew up here too.”
McKibben said that while sadness, guilt, anger and grief are all appropriate responses to the climate crisis, these emotions are only useful to a limited extent. He said he’s more interested in the idea that this is a moment of “adventure and opportunity,” and that necessity can also be a reason for excitement.
“I think we need to recapture the spirit of the lunar exploration era of the 1960s,” he said.
Back at the protest site, people of all ages gathered with a similar sense of solidarity: “We want a future,” one young person held a sign that read, while a Third Act member held another that read, “Stop taking away my granddaughter’s future.”
Shekinah Deocales, a member of the group that helped organize the event, said it was great to see the community come together and that “it’s exciting to see people of all ages here today.”
Lou Lippman, 12, also expressed gratitude for the support from the older generation.
“I know some people don’t believe in this stuff, but there are people of all ages, especially older people and young people my age, who want to take action and want to save the world,” said Lu, who attended the event with her father.
But even Glosserman, a tireless organizer, acknowledges that she sometimes feels torn between optimism and anxiety about the future. Some days she worries that it’s too late to make a change, but she recognizes that such thinking is often an abdication of responsibility.
In fact, doing this job and meeting like-minded people brings him great joy, and it’s a joy he hopes to share with others, even in the darkest moments when the skies turn black and orange and ash rains from above.
He quoted Joan Baez, another activist of his generation.
“Action is the antidote to despair,” he said.
