Since Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg emerged on the scene in 2018, protests against climate change have been seen as a playground for young people. After all, by 2050 — the global deadline for the planet to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere and the time when warming is expected to reach 2°C — many baby boomers will be out of the picture. Millennials will be reaching their own golden years, while today’s teenagers will be in their prime. It’s common to hear that the next generation will solve problems that today’s leaders couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tackle.
But not only teenagers and young adults have the audacity to invade public spaces and fight with the police, even though they are the group most impacted by systems they did not help create.
A growing group of retirees is countering that narrative. After decades of contributing to the economy and raising their families, they are now uniting to protest the expansion of fossil fuels, urging their contemporaries to vote with the climate in mind and even participating in the most varied types of protests.
At age 67 and recently retired after a career in higher education, Cathy Fulkerson walked into her bank in Reno, Nevada, ready to cancel her credit card. Carrying a letter that expressed his concerns, Fulkerson explained to the manager why he wanted to cut ties: the bank’s investments in fossil fuels.
“The manager was very nervous and very confrontational. And I was a customer, I was shocked,” says Fulkerson — although I was also quite excited. “It was obviously very uncomfortable for him and of course I made a point.”
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The third act
Cathy has never thrown soup on a painting or glued her body to a highway. But she is part of Third Act, a US group that involves older people in climate activism.
“There is no known way to stop seniors from voting, and we have wiped out a terrible amount of the country’s resources, (including) most of the money,” says Bill McKibben, 63, a longtime environmental lawyer who founded the Third Act. and who published his first book, The End of Nature, when he was still young.
“If you want to put pressure on Washington or Wall Street or your city, having a few people with receding hairlines like me is not the worst plan in the world.”
Bill McKibben, founder of third act
Mark Coleman, a Church of England priest based in northwest England, managed to reach 60 before his first arrest. A father of two and grandfather of one, he marched against nuclear missiles in the 1980s; but it wasn’t until 2019, when he joined street protests led by Extinction Rebellion, that Coleman ended up in a prison cell. He was arrested again two years later for taking part in Insulate Britain protests, when participants blocked traffic to demand better energy efficiency ahead of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow.
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Rebellion after retirement
Coleman found that retirement creates “space just to think about (climate change)” that young families don’t always have. His own family supports his activism, although it has forced him to rethink some of the dictatorships he imposed on his children. Among them: Don’t break the law.
“The new edition says that sometimes it’s OK to break the law when the law is wrong or when the law is protecting those who are doing it wrong,” he says.
Coleman’s fellow cleric Sue Parfitt was also arrested at the Insulate Britain protests. Parfitt was 79 at the time — she brought a camping chair to sit on the road — and has since become one of the UK’s most prominent climate activists. In 2024, she broke the glass in the display case protecting the Magna Carta at the British Library in London and is facing charges of criminal damage.
Many modern climate movements have wider age diversity than people might think, says Graeme Hayes, a sociologist at Aston University in Birmingham, UK, who has co-written demographic analyzes of UK climate activism.
Motivated by family
“One thing that really stood out to us was the idea of being a parent, or the idea of being a grandparent, and that being a really important motivating force for why they were taking action.”
Graeme Hayes, sociologist
In court, arrested protesters talk about their responsibility to do something because of their age. “As part of the generation whose complacency led to this emergency, I should prepare to be arrested,” said a woman born in 1942 and quoted in the study.
Climate activism is evolving as the threat of warming grows, but there is abundant evidence of older people — and in particular, older women — participating in other direct action protests. In the 1980s, women of all ages set up a camp on Greenham Common in Berkshire to protest against nuclear weapons. In 2014, groups of women calling themselves “nanas” led anti-fracking protests in Lancashire. In China, crowds of retirees led protests against cuts to their medical benefits last year, and seniors have long participated in protests against cuts to Medicaid and Medicare in the US.
This age group is “hyper-legitimate,” says Hayes. “They are irrefutable, because how can you turn around and say that grandmothers have no stake in the future and are somehow provocative? It’s an identity around which you can organize a mobilization.”
Third Act is playful with the maturity of its members. One style of protest is the Rocking Chair Rebellion, in which members sit in rocking chairs outside banks to pressure them to divest from oil and gas. The group does not opt for physical protest — its efforts to block the expansion of LNG exports from the Gulf of Mexico began with letter writing — but they are sanguine about arrests when necessary. (McKibben says he has been arrested at least a dozen times.)
Although an arrest can make life and work significantly more difficult for young people, Third Act members often discuss how much they have to lose from it, says Lani Ritter Hall, 78, a retired teacher from Ohio who joined the group in 2022.
“We talk about (how) we have the time and we have the finances,” Ritter Hall says. “We have some wisdom beneath us.”
Insulate Britain, which wanted its members arrested as a means of embarrassing the government, seemed to actively cultivate an older demographic, says Hayes. The group held recruitment and organizational meetings in church halls. Extinction Rebellion had an even age split during its peak in 2019, but Hayes says older people were disproportionately represented among those arrested.
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Victims of climate change
Retirees also have a self-interested case for fighting global warming: They are especially vulnerable to its effects. Older people are at greater risk of experiencing dangerous health impacts from intense heat, and most deaths from excess heat occur among the elderly.
This vulnerability came to light in April, when a group of elderly Swiss women dubbed KlimaSeniorinnen (Elderly for Climate) won a historic victory at the European Court of Human Rights. The court ruled that Switzerland “failed to fulfill its duties” regarding climate change in a case that highlighted women’s susceptibility to the dangerous effects of heat. The decision forced an important concession: that the government’s failure to make effective climate policy violated fundamental human rights.
“The more serious and severe the harm, the more compelling it is to a court,” Kelly Matheson, deputy director of climate litigation at Our Children’s Trust, said at the time.
A few weeks after the Swiss decision, protesters affiliated with European Grandparents for Climate gathered before the EU election to sing, sing and hand out leaflets outside the European Parliament in Brussels. The group was created last year, and its thousands of members are quick to point out that people over 65 make up more than 20% of Europe’s population.
On a May afternoon, protesters in many European cities braved rainy weather. From Vienna to Stockholm, they whistled and sang “Ode to Joy” and “Sing for the Climate,” a Belgian song set to the rhythm of the Italian resistance anthem “Bella Ciao.” Among the flyers was a bookmark with an illustration of a voting booth and two children outside. The caption reads: “Grandma, could you please think of our grandchildren too?”
The square outside the European Parliament is off-limits to protesters, says Axel Vande Veegaete, 68, an organizer with the Grandparents. But the police made an exception to let the group take a photo.
“You get more respect,” says Vande Veegaete. “And people are open to seniors protesting.”
