What would Van and Ernie say to our President? Well, Van might say that the real meaning of "True Blue" (and red and white), a patriotism and school spirit that's deep and not cheap, involves acknowledging that we as a society cannot afford not to do the right thing. We must remove our school's endowments from fossil fuel investments. Divestment worked in South Africa, it can work here. As the Williams Record said recently,
As a campus and individually, it is our responsibility as students to extricate ourselves from the industries that jeopardize our future. It is not enough to act as individuals: We are also obligated to examine the impact of our institution. The College has already made significant commitments to campus sustainability, but we must also simultaneously examine the impact of our endowment. Divestment is not just a chance to remove our endowment from unsustainable investments – it also provides an opportunity to reinvest in the green economy of the future. The Williams RecordIt's not just students making this case. Unity College president Stephen Mulkey recently called on his colleagues everywhere to divest. That's not utopian or even ecotopian thinking, it's simply the right thing to do.
Nor is it "magical," as David Remnick recently wrote in The New Yorker.
As the writer and activist Bill McKibben writes in The New York Review of Books, “Global warming happens just slowly enough that political systems have been able to ignore it. The distress signal is emitted at a frequency that scientists can hear quite clearly, but is seemingly just beyond the reach of most politicians.”==
Take a look at
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Tom Zeller Jr. gives one of the best accounts yet of
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