Some of us have firsthand memories of World War II’s concentration camps, and the Japanese internment camps in this country; none of us are more than a generation removed from that history. It sends shivers down our spines to hear the president order the construction of a 30,000 bed prison in Guantanamo, and to see endless raids by state agents on the homes of immigrants. It is long past time for leaders in Washington to hammer out a humane immigration policy that recognizes how much of America’s strength comes from its diversity.

It also chills us to see the president’s declaration that schools must now teach only ‘patriotic education’ or lose funding. The curriculum he outlines insists that America’s history is only noble. Some of it—helping liberate those German camps—surely is; some—building those camps for Japanese-Americans—surely isn’t. We believe we need to understand all our history, and as long as we’re alive we’ll share what we know with the next generations. 

Third Actors will continue to stand up for oppressed families and communities, even if these families and communities are not their own. It’s the right thing to do. Below, you can find some organizations devoted to immigrant rights and safety; we encourage you to support them.

“[President Carter] declared May 3, 1978, to be Sun Day, and delivered a speech (in a driving rain—he was characteristically unlucky) from a federal solar-research facility in Golden, Colorado. ‘The question is no longer whether solar energy works,’ he said. ‘We know it works. The only question is how to cut costs so that solar power can be used more widely and so that it will set a cap on rising oil prices.’ He continued, ‘Nobody can embargo sunlight. No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out. It will not pollute the air. It will not poison our waters. It’s free from stench and smog. The sun’s power needs only to be collected, stored, and used.’

Carter was correct. Had we embarked on an enormous project of solar research then and there, we could have cut the costs of renewable energy far faster than we did.”

The troubles aren’t over for many of America’s indigenous peoples. For instance, NPR featured a story this year in Minnesota where many more Native American children are put into foster care relative to being only a small percentage of the population. Social workers doing family welfare checks don’t understand the dynamics and culture of some native families as they’re different from the area’s white middle class. This is very traumatic for Natives who were constantly told growing up about the generations who were taken away to boarding schools. Those children were forced to speak English only and adopt the “civilized” ways of the dominant culture. Later generations were warned to prevent their children being taken away at all costs. Now current generations share in that pain and trauma.

The erasure of Native people has resulted in almost 100% of Native youth feeling invisible in their classrooms, a factor directly linked to the devastating rate in which we are losing Native youth to death by suicide. (Redbud Resource Group)

Recently I attended a workshop by this nonprofit, Redbud Resource Group (Redbud). Entitled “Going Beyond Land Acknowledgements,” these California natives recounted the history of some of their tribes. When gold was discovered in their lands there were attempts to totally exterminate them so as to have unfettered access to the riches of their land. Although they tried to hide in the caves of their hills, 90 percent of them were killed. Now a regional nonprofit is helping Native peoples to increase tribal visibility, sovereignty, economic outlook, and to find new ways to preserve and strengthen cultural ties.

Redbud showed an old photo of what their land looked like when managed by their ancestors, an interim picture filled with pine trees, and what the charred remains look like now having been swept by wildfires. Their ancestors had known to remove the pines which so easily caught fire in the dry California landscape.

Yet there’s bright spots too. Redbud shared a case study of a state park in the Sonoma Valley where the staff has developed a working relationship with the Wappo community. Now the park staff grants unlimited free passes to these original inhabitants, allows them to gather traditional plants on the land for their medicinal needs, includes Wappo language and perspectives in their educational materials, and incorporates their knowledge in sustainably maintaining the land. They plan to share the stewardship of the land with the Wappo people.

There are other examples of government entities sharing forestry fire fighting work with local natives, and philanthropic endeavors that are helping local tribes to buy back and sustainably preserve their lands and culture. However many more Natives have struggles of which we’re often unaware.

Despite living in Virginia for 30 years, I only recently connected with a regional nonprofit organization dedicated to sharing tribal cultural knowledge and advocating for fair and equal conditions for indigenous people. Eastern Woodlands Revitalization alerted me to one of their fights –  to maintain the purity of Virginia’s waterways upon which local tribes have depended for centuries. Apparently there is a plan to dump waste products into their river from a nearby water processing plant. Why have I never heard of this? Why aren’t more people involved with helping them in this fight to preserve the life blood of our world?

Although Natives are all around us, most are invisible to us. Few are in positions of power. Their stories, their needs, and their ability to help in our mutual goals of preserving Turtle Island are unknown to many.

As Third Actors, we advocate for racial justice and preserving the environment. We should go beyond land acknowledgements. It’s incumbent on us to seek out and find the Indians around us, to form relationships wherein we can work together on creating a just and sustainable future. We need to humbly ask them, “How can we help?”

And along the way it will hurt not only the people who have to live and breathe near these monstrosities, but also all American consumers—because exporting gas abroad drives up the price at home.

If you want a short primer, here is something I wrote this week, and another piece I wrote for the New Yorker.

Happily, we have a realistic chance at stopping this. Which is why I hope you’ll break out your stationery box and roll of stamps. The final decision will be made by the Department of Energy, which can grant or deny export licenses to these companies depending on whether they’re in the public interest. Please please please write a letter this week to:

The Honorable Jennifer Granholm
Secretary
U.S. Department of Energy
1000 Independence Ave. SW
Washington DC 20585

Here are some key points you can include in your letter:

1. These plants are carbon and methane bombs. In the hottest year of human history it’s obscene to be putting up more of them
2. We’re already the biggest gas exporter on earth, and have more than enough capacity to meet the needs of the Europeans in the wake of the Ukrainian war
3. When we export all this gas, we drive up the price for those Americans who still rely on it for cooking and heating. Rejecting this project will fight inflation, which will help get the president re-elected.
4. It’s an environmental justice travesty—as usual, these projects are set for poor communities of color
5. They’re planned for smack in the middle of the worst hurricane belt in the hemisphere
6. So rewrite the criteria (they’re currently using a Trump-era formula) for figuring out if such plans are in the national interest.

If you thought you were getting off without one high-tech task, though, you’re wrong. Could you also take a picture of the letter on your smartphone and email it to takingaction@thirdact.org, so we can keep track of what’s happening.

Remember, the penmanship you learned long ago is a secret weapon. Bureaucrats are used to getting email petitions; they’re not used to getting old-school letters. They know it takes effort, and they pay attention.

I think we can win this fight, and if we do it will be the biggest win on the climate front since we sunk the Keystone pipeline. But we can only do it if we act right now.

Thank you,

Bill McKibben

Founder, Third Act

P.S. As I was writing this, the first snow of the season started to fall in Vermont. That’s got to be a good sign!

The most important election in the U. S. this year occurred on May 12 in Fort Valley, Georgia, where workers at the Blue Bird school bus company voted 697-435 in a National Labor Relations Board election to join the Steelworkers Union. (Badgers may disagree.)

At Third Act, we fight to save democracy and our planet; at the intersection of these two existential issues are workers and unions.  We can’t have democracy unless workers have their own organized voice to counter the organized voice of employers, and we can’t save this planet unless workers are involved in that struggle.

That’s why the union election in Fort Valley is so important.

We can be proud that Third Act  got the September 17  NYC Climate March coalition to include in its three demands that we must “provide a just transition to a sustainable clean energy economy that supports workers and community rights, job security, and employment equity.”

But using the words “just transition” isn’t enough. Creating millions of jobs in the new sustainable economy isn’t good enough. Even creating good jobs isn’t enough.  We have to make sure workers get the chance to make them good union jobs.

That’s what happened in Fort Valley.  Blue Bird, Peach county’s largest employer, didn’t engage in union busting, so workers actually had a fair election. Why?  Because Blue Bird gets tens of millions of dollars in federal funds from both the infrastructure and Inflation Reduction Acts to build electric school buses.  Those funds come with a requirement that the recipient “have committed to remain neutral in any organizing campaign ….”  In other words, no union busting.

If workers can actually organize and grow unions in the new economy, they will both help to save democracy and support the climate justice movement.

So, as Third Actors this Labor Day, let’s honor “labor” by continuing to make workers’ rights to organize central to our fight to save democracy and the planet.

Washington DC protest Manchin's Dirty Deal (September 2022).

I understand that producing more oil is a bad idea. I know that region in Virginia is considered the most impoverished and disadvantaged in the state. So, I could sympathize with these people and their inability to stop this invasion onto their lands. Yet, I wasn’t especially distressed since I didn’t know them. It’s not a problem for my home.

Then I learned that women leaders from the Ojibwe and Ottawa tribes, among many others, had recently submitted an emergency request to President Biden. They asked him to decommission the Enbridge Line 5 oil pipeline which traverses Ojibwe territory. The Line 5 pipeline is 70 years old — 20 years past its engineered lifespan — and transports 22 million gallons of crude oil each day through Wisconsin, Michigan, and under the Straits of Mackinac.

The Ojibwe territory riverbanks are eroding at an ever-faster pace due to recent floods. The next rainfall event could cause a vertical break, wherein oil would gush from both sides of the outdated pipeline. An oil spill in the Great Lakes region would poison sacred wild rice beds, threaten Indigenous communities, and harm all people in the region who depend on the local fisheries for food and work. The Great Lakes contain one-fifth of the world’s freshwater and provides drinking water for 40 million people in North America.

Now — now the idea of climate justice was very personal to me.

Elders hold up signs of deceased friends to protest the MVP.

Among other ethnicities, I am Native American. My people, the Potawatomi, were originally one people with the Ojibwe and Ottawa.  As the story was passed down to me, it was in our Council of Three Fires, many centuries ago, that we committed to each other that we each would remain faithful to the others in supporting our way of life. That we would come to help the other tribes should it ever be needed. That pledge we made so long ago still burns in our hearts today. Now this issue was personal to me.

These lands around the Great Lakes were our lands too. Most of the Potawatomi were forcibly removed decades ago but Potawatomi officials have signed the letter asking for Biden’s protection of our ancestral lands.

This is also about racial justice. The pipeline traverses Ojibwe territory against their will. All tribes lost much of their power and resources when they signed treaties with the federal government. However, in exchange, we were all guaranteed sovereignty over the smaller territories our tribes now occupy. And that promise has not been kept.

Activists hold up signs/umbrellas that read "KABOOM!" in DC.

The Bad River Band (one of six Ojibwe bands), has been trying to get Enbridge to cease operating the pipelines crossing their land. In September 2022, a federal court found Enbridge had been trespassing on Bad River Band of Lake Superior lands since 2013, and profiting from Line 5 at the Tribe’s expense. Nothing more happened. Finally on June 16th, 2023, courts ruled that Enbridge had to remove the portion of the pipeline that crosses through tribal territory within three years.

But remember, this pipeline has already been there illegally for 10 years! It is immoral that these people must fight for justice in this issue  — to fight for control over their home lands.

This fight is about racial justice and climate justice, the right for all peoples to have self-determination and to live in a healthy environment. The Enbridge Line 5 pipeline has already spilled over 30 times, dumping more than a million gallons of oil. Yet they were allowed to continue operating on land in which they were trespassing.

Similarly, “Numerous studies have found that the Mountain Valley Pipeline would pose serious risks to endangered species and surrounding ecosystems. The 303-mile long pipeline and accompanying Southgate extension would cut across almost 1,146 streams, creeks, rivers, and wetlands. The MVP would transport over 2 billion cubic feet of fracked gas each day, crossing over steep mountain slopes that are susceptible to landslides and an increased risk of pipeline explosions.” (Evergreen Action) 

A court recently put some of the MVP construction on hold while they consider the environmental impacts and the fact that the exterior coating of the pipeline has been exposed to the elements far longer than is considered safe. The potential for explosions from weakened areas has been enhanced by the exposure. 

A gas pipeline further north in Virginia exploded into a long-lasting ball of fire a few weeks ago. In the Corrective Action Order, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) says the following: “The cause of the failure is currently unknown, but based on initial observations of the failed pipe, environmental cracking is the suspected cause of the Incident.” (Northern Virginia Daily)

News Headline of a gas line exploding in Strasburg, Virginia. 

Despite this and other known issues with pipelines, opponents of the Mountain Valley Pipeline still have to fight their way through the courts and they may not ultimately win.

It can be hard for us to be equally concerned about issues to which we don’t have a personal connection. Until we’ve walked a mile in another’s moccasins, we don’t really understand. Yet it’s good to remember––we’re all downstream or downwind from communities that are struggling to survive injustice––environmental or racial. In the future, we could be too.

And it hit home literally on Monday, when epic rain—the kind you can only get on a globally warmed planet—did epic damage to my beloved home state of Vermont. Our capital city is underwater, our bridges are out, too many neighbors have been forced from their homes.

One option is despair, and there are moments, especially at night, when that gets the better of me. But the real option is to fight—not to stop global warming (too late for that) but to stop it short of the place where it cuts our civilization off at the knees.

And that’s what we’re doing at Third Act, so mostly I wanted to say thank you.

Thank you to the Third Actors in Ohio, who are fighting to protect direct democracy rights in an upcoming special election; and in North Carolina, who are lobbying the Public Utility Commission to hold dirty Duke Energy accountable; and in California and Vermont, who are pushing the legislature to divest from fossil fuels. Thank you to everyone who’s taking on the banks that fund the fossil fuel industry, and to everyone who’s helping build a democracy that can’t be so easily dominated by oil companies and private utilities.

The next 18 months are going to be key. The El Nino now in its infancy will continue to warm the planet; we’ll see new records and new havoc. Which will give us nightmares, but also openings: openings we must exploit. Stay tuned for an unfolding series of actions that we’ll be launching in the months ahead. And keep as cool as you can amidst the heatwaves. We are gearing up to do everything—absolutely everything—that we can.

Thank you so much,

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is a founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 to work on climate and racial justice. He founded the first global grassroots climate campaign, 350.org, and serves as the Schumann Distinguished Professor in Residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. In 2014 he was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel,’ in the Swedish Parliament. He’s also won the Gandhi Peace Award, and honorary degrees from 19 colleges and universities. He has written over a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature, published in 1989, and the forthcoming The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.

Here in Vermont the sun is dull orange viewed through the shroud of smoke, and it smells like a campfire; I’ve heard from friends in New York and DC describing emergency rooms filling up with asthmatic kids who can’t breathe. It’s truly terrible, but in one limited way it’s also a gift:  there’s more economic and political power concentrated in the northeast U.S. than perhaps any place on earth.

And today those power centers are experiencing what a huge percentage of the world experiences every day.  We know that one death in five on this earth comes from people breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel; that tightness in your lungs is daily life in Delhi and Lahore and a thousand Chinese cities whose names we barely recognize.

So—a few things for today

1)    Take care of yourself, and your grandkids. Old lungs and young lungs have the very hardest time with this kind of smoke; the same mask that guards against covid may be a help scrubbing out some of the particulates in the air.

2)    Remember what it feels like, so that you’ll have even more empathy for the people in the rest of the world going forward

3)    Double down in the fight against the burning of fossil fuels. It’s a good day to stay inside and write once again to, say, the CEO of Citibank (jane.fraser@citi.com), her chief of staff (margo.pilic@citi.com), and maybe the Chief Sustainability Officer (val.smith@citi.com) for good measure. They are breathing this air too, and it might be a moment for connection. Just say “it’s time to stop funding the expansion of fossil fuel. So that we can all breathe a sigh of relief.”

Oh, and while you’re writing, here’s a little something from the Platters to keep you company

Written by Bill McKibben

About the Author:

Bill McKibben is a founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 to work on climate and racial justice. He founded the first global grassroots climate campaign, 350.org, and serves as the Schumann Distinguished Professor in Residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. In 2014 he was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel,’ in the Swedish Parliament. He’s also won the Gandhi Peace Award, and honorary degrees from 19 colleges and universities. He has written over a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature, published in 1989, and the forthcoming The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.