Judy: Bill Mckibben is an
environmentalist and founder of
third act, an organization that
encourages people over 60 to
take action on climate change.
Tonight, Mckibben shares his
"Brief but spectacular" take on
working together on climate
action.
♪♪
bill: I went to Greenland
because I wanted to take a young
poet from the Marshall Islands,
a woman named Cathy Jina.
I wanted her reciting one of her
poems up on the ice shelf that
when it melted, would drown the
country that she'd been born on.
And while we were hovering
around in a helicopter on the
way home, a 20 story high chunk
of this ice shelf just broke off
and fell into the ocean.
I was, you know, dangling up the
side of the helicopter with my
stupid cell phone.
Just trying somehow to capture
some sense of, of what this was
like.
On the one hand, it's dreadful,
because you know what it means.
The sea has just risen another
fraction of a millimeter, and
somebody's life has been made
much harder.
But it's also a reminder of what
an insanely beautiful planet we
were born onto.
Even as you look on in a certain
kind of horror, you also look on
in a certain kind of awe.
We're used to thinking of change
on the planet happening in
geologic time, that it takes a
very long time for glaciers to
move or oceans to shift.
Right now, it's happening very
much in real time.
Everybody's seen those pictures
that came back from the first
Apollo missions out to space in
the 1960s.
Those pictures are as out of
date as my high school yearbook
picture.
We've melted half the sea ice in
the summer arctic in my
lifetime.
In 1970, there were 70% more
wild animals wandering around
this Earth than there are now.
It must be said kids are doing
extraordinary work organizing
around climate change.
But there is something a little
undignified about taking the
biggest problem that the world's
ever gotten into and asking
junior high school students to
solve it for you.
Third act is a new organization
who designed to get people over
the age of 60 working to defend
our climate and to defend our
democracy.
We started organizing third act
because we started to understand
how much power.
-- How much power those of us
over the age of 60 possess.
A, there's a lot of us, 70
million people over the age of
60.
B, we punch way above our
numbers politically because we
all vote.
And C, fair or not, we ended up
with most of the money.
Baby boomers and the silent
generation have about 70% of
America's financial assets.
So if you wanted to move
Washington or you wanted to move
Wall Street, it helps to have
some people with hairlines like
mine engaged in this work.
If you're in your sixties or
seventies or eighties, your
first act was in that period of
rapid social, cultural,
political transformation of the
sixties and seventies.
Our second act was a little more
about consumerism than it was
about citizenship.
That's water under the bridge.
Now, people emerge in their
third act with skills,
resources, with time, which they
may not have had before, and
with kids or grandkids, I mean,
your legacy is the planet you
leave behind for the people you
love the most.
And the planet we're gonna leave
behind and the democracy we're
going to leave behind at the
moment seem likely to be much
shabbier than the ones we were
born into.
Most older people realize that
and that there's real meaning in
continuing to try the project of
building a better society.
My name is bill Mckibben, and
this is my "Brief but
spectacular" take on working
together.
Judy: You can watch more "Brief