Year 4, Month 10, Day 11: The Words In My Heart Reveal How I Feel About You

USA Today, on the divestiture movement:

Students also express their concern for the planet through green majors such as environmental science, sustainability and environmental policy.

Colin Nackerman, a sophomore at George Mason University, was inspired to major in environmental policy after growing up in a small town in Southern California that was affected by environmental issues.

“I kinda wanted to get into the regulation side of policy to hopefully save places like my hometown from being devastated by environmental disasters,” Nackerman says.

At George Mason, he is also involved with the Environmental Action Group, whose goal this year is to fight for more transparency on funding the school receives from the Koch brothers, opponents of climate-change regulations.

Students cite their future as the reason for getting involved with climate change activism on campus.

“We’re the ones inheriting these issues and we’re going to have to be dealing with them in the future, so it behooves us to act now,” Bruck says.

Good luck, kids. You’ll need it, I’m afraid. October 3:

350.org’s founder Bill McKibben and many other environmentalists have frequently likened the movement to divest from the fossil fuel industry with student-propelled social initiatives to end financial ties to apartheid South Africa in business, government, and academia. In the 1980s, young people felt the moral imperative to end the injustices of institutionalized racism, and translated their outrage into action. Today’s environmental activists are likewise driven by a deep sense of social responsibility and the need to disassociate from the wrongdoing of a group of highly irresponsible and extremely powerful economic actors. The similarities are profound. But there is one important set of differences.

Apartheid’s victims lived in a single state on a single continent — and at a single pivotal point in time. That the burgeoning climate crisis will claim its casualties everywhere on Earth for centuries to come is a fact which dramatically strengthens the ethical necessity of divestiture.

Warren Senders