Here’s an exciting update from Bill!
My last 24 hours:
1) Do the final show of the #DoTheMath tour — as usual, a sold-out, full-of-power evening, this one in Salt Lake City with my old friend Terry Tempest Williams.
2) Get myself home for the first time in a long while — happily, both my wife and dog seemed to recognize me.
3) Open the computer and find this article about the Do the Math Tour and fosil fuel divestment on the front page of the New York Times — a huge, prominent vindication of everyone’s hard work. Here’s what the website looks like as I type this:
The article in The New York Times tells the story of students, faculty and alumni around the country who are demanding divestment from fossil fuels. On a few campuses, like Swarthmore, they’ve been at it for semesters — but all of a sudden, as the article says, they find themselves “at the vanguard of a national movement. In recent weeks, college students on dozens of campuses have demanded that university endowment funds rid themselves of coal, oil and gas stocks. The students see it as a tactic that could force climate change, barely discussed in the presidential campaign, back onto the national political agenda.”
The picture that accompanies the article comes from our Minneapolis roadshow last Friday night, and the article concisely lays out the demands and the strategy of the campaign. It’s precisely the boost we need. So please, go read it here: www.nyti.ms/SESrfr
We’re quickly getting traction, but we can get more if we have your help.
So, first things first: please email the article by clicking the “E-Mail” button on the New York Times website — if we can get it on the newspaper’s “most emailed list”, we can help make sure it goes as far as possible, as fast as possible.
For full instructions on how to email the article, click here: www.350.org/nyt
After you’ve emailed the article, start thinking about ways you can join in this fight. If you’re a student, you can join in on campus. If you’re an alum, you can help pressure your alma mater. You can also push for divestment at your church or synagogue or mosque, or in the pension system that invests your retirement dollars.
We can make this whole movement go viral fast. Indeed, given the state of the climate science, we’ve got to. So please, share the NYT article by following these instructions.
I’m going off to bed because I’m exhausted. But I’m pretty sure the last month has been entirely worth it.
Onwards,
Bill McKibben for the whole crew at 350.org