I sent my annual donation off to my college alma mater the other day. It was not a lot, but I wanted to help keep our class donor percentage up. I gave more last year, our fiftieth reunion. But when I slipped the envelope into the mailbox, the light dawned. This would be my last contribution for a while.
It is no longer a matter of serious debate that global warming is real and happening right now. The scientific evidence that we must stop loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide is clear. The tsunami of manmade climate change is headed our way. But the fossil fuel industry, committed to extract enough oil and gas to overheat the planet several times over, lobbies to continue extracting and burning despite overwhelming proof that doing so will mean the end of life on Earth as we know it.
Inspired and energized by 350.org’s “Do the Math” tour, committed young people are demanding that colleges and universities across the country get rid of their investments in the fossil fuel industry. While the financial impact of such South Africa-style divestment campaigns may be debated, they undeniably make a powerful statement, raise awareness, and demonstrate that there is an alternative.
Not surprisingly, small colleges with progressive values and limited portfolios have been the first to divest—Hampshire, Green Mountain, College of the Atlantic—and the movement is rapidly gaining momentum at Williams, Harvard, Stanford, and other prestigious institutions. But why should students be left to make their case alone?
I have grandchildren. They have every right to a secure and hopeful future. Isn’t it the responsibility of every generation to care for the next? Yet it is brutally clear that, unless we act very soon, the health, hope, and lives of our children and grandchildren will be significantly diminished. We owe them our love and our protection. We are obliged to “pay it forward.”
So I’ve respectfully informed my alma mater that, until it divests its holdings in the fossil fuel industry—coal, oil, tar sands, and fracked natural gas—I will not donate another cent.
This may sound naive. After all, most college endowments are made up of large gifts from wealthy donors. What difference will ordinary folk like me make? But in fact, colleges care a great deal about the percentage of their alumni who give—their public ratings rest, in part, on that criterion. Moreover, a recent report in The Wall Street Journal noted that the cost of renewable energy like wind and solar is plummeting and that the oil-dependent utilities are growing anxious. And a careful Stanford study has demonstrated how New York state could be completely sustainable by 2030 by relying on wind and solar energy. It is quite possible that moving to a more sustainable portfolio now would be wise.
The intellectual communities of colleges should be expected to grasp the implications of climate change, but how any of us respond is ultimately a moral challenge.
In the end, what message do we choose to give the next generation? What will we say to them as the storms grow fiercer, the droughts longer, the waters higher? That “we just didn’t know?” Or that we woke up too late? We know what to do right now. There are many actions we can take to make a difference. This is one. Take it now. Tell your alumni organization, your development director, and your college president that you will resume giving when they divest of all holdings in fossil fuel extraction and production.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
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