Global warming is not a winner-take-all game

Divestment: Panelists criticize resistance to divestment

Bowdoin Climate Action (BCA) hosted a panel of advocates and experts to discuss divestment on Saturday night, after being postponed multiple times due to weather.
The panel was composed of 350.org founder Bill McKibben and Director of the Responsible Endowment Coalition Dan Apfel, who both conferenced in via Skype to join Unity College President Stephen Mulkey, Director of the Sierra Club Maine Glen Brand, and divestment coordinator for 350.org Maine Read Brugger—all panelists spoke critically about Bowdoin’s resistance to divestment.
McKibben said that Bowdoin, by not divesting, is acting in opposition to its values.

Divestment: To fulfill Offer of the College, we should divest

I write to address two issues raised in recent Orient articles: whether environmental literacy should be a distribution requirement, and whether the College should divest from fossil fuels. When David Orr wrote, “All education is environmental education,” he could have had in mind the second line of William DeWitt Hyde’s Offers of the College: “To count Nature a familiar acquaintance.” Bowdoin’s environmental studies program is built on that same ideal; its website emphasizes that “A liberal arts education should promote environmental literacy: an understanding of the world around us… our role in it, and our effects upon it.” Compared to most colleges, Bowdoin has a vibrant ES program and a rich array of courses that address sustainability. We are leaders in terms of campus recycling, reducing our carbon footprint, etc. But is the College actually fulfilling Hyde’s famous offer? Do our students graduate with enough know-how and motivation to address the hugely serious environmental problems they will inherit? Ten years ago, when the Curriculum and Education Policy Committee was working on a new system of distribution requirements, a number of faculty argued that environmental literacy ought to be included. Today, 10 years deeper into an extinction crisis, and with our climate changing right before our eyes, it’s time for our curricular structure to catch up. Given logistical problems such as staffing new courses, adding a distribution requirement in environmental literacy may not be the best answer. But I believe the College needs to show much more urgency and creativity in trying to figure out what the best answer might be.
As for the proposal for Bowdoin to divest from investments in fossil fuels—gradually, responsibly, by targeting the most egregious fossil fuel companies, and without unduly compromising our core programs and commitments—I support it for several reasons. First, the tough questions asked by the student Climate Action group have sparked exactly the sort of debates one would hope to hear on an intellectually engaged college campus. Not just among students, but also among a faculty and administration that seem newly energized by our students to grapple seriously with environmental issues. Witness the packed attendance at the Sustainability Panel two weeks ago, as well as recent film showings and seminars by visiting speakers on the issue of climate change. Second, our curriculum says a lot about what Bowdoin stands for. So does our endowment; it should reflect the same values as our curriculum. If in the classroom we decry the mining and burning of fossil fuels, should the College be enjoying profits from those activities? Third, although divestment won’t solve the problem of our overreliance on fossil fuels, it’s a start. Even symbolic gestures can have an outsized educational impact. Two colleges in Maine have already made the move to divest, leveraging their relatively small endowments to make a nationwide statement about sustainability. Soon, though, to effect change we will need to end public subsidies for oil and gas companies and put a price on fuels that reflects their true environmental and social costs.
Finally, we don’t have to be purists or turn our back on modernity in order to make a difference. After all, safeguarding our environment for future generations is a marathon, not a sprint. But our students should know that the issues are real, complicated, serious, and upon us. So, all hands on deck.

Divestment

Global warming is not a winner-take-all game

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

March 25, 2013

As students and professors prepare for the final push to finish another year at Bowdoin, and administrators led by President Barry Mills tend to the business of running an elite liberal arts college with a centuries-old reputation of excellence, what’s all this fuss being made over divestment? Or rather, given that the independent scientific community globally, including those at NASA, is practically unanimous in concluding that global warming is an extremely urgent planetary emergency, why aren’t people making a bigger fuss?

A review of recent articles in the Orient reveals a paucity of debate—only a handful of people have become involved, all generally in favor of divestment, trading verbal jabs with a cadre of anonymous screen names who may well be on the payroll of Koch Industries or the American Petroleum Institute.

Without repeating in full the cogent analysis of my classmate, Scott Budde ’81, in his February 13 Orient op-ed, I echo his conviction that a transparent discussion needs to occur between the Administration, the members of the Bowdoin Climate Action Committee, and the larger Bowdoin community. So far, the students urging divestment have been politely dismissed, with President Mills sidestepping the moral indefensibility of his position:

“Management of the endowment is squarely situated with our Board of Trustees and, to some extent with the President of the College,” President Mills reportedly told the Orient. “It is not something which at Bowdoin—or frankly any other institution—is subject to a large democratic effort as to how the money is invested.”

Nobody, to my knowledge, is suggesting that student groups should be making daily decisions on the management of the endowment. The divestment movement at Bowdoin is simply pointing out that at present, the College’s endowment investment strategy does not align with the underlying values set forth in the Bowdoin Environmental Mission Statement. Given the urgency of the climate emergency we face, it’s time to close that ethical chasm.

As President Mills has stated: "Global warming is one of the defining challenges of our time...Human activities are responsible for the problem, and working together humans have the ability to help solve the problem. That means taking serious action today to stop adding global warming pollution to the atmosphere. Bowdoin College is committed to helping lead the way."

Serious action? Committed to lead? That remains to be seen. If our children one day ask us what we did to stop the destruction of the planet, we will be left to lament the empty promises we made or let pass unchallenged.

In short, there is no rationale for maintaining Bowdoin’s small percentage of fossil fuel investments. Ethical issues aside, the argument that divestment will result in a $100 million loss to the endowment contains many hidden assumptions. When climate disasters increase in magnitude and frequency, perhaps sooner than we’d like to think, fossil fuel investments will plummet in value as people are forced to reckon with the terrible scientific justice of Mother Nature and ecological tipping points. And as Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org has stated, “If [a student's] college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.”

Those who argue that divestment would be a symbolic gesture with little effect on financial markets or global decision makers are likely not ignorant of history (which would not favor their position), but rather desperately attempt to downplay and marginalize the social capital that the divestment movement is rapidly accruing. As Jay Carmona at 350.org puts it, “divestment is targeting the one thing that those [fossil fuel] companies can’t buy which is their reputation.” Bowdoin can choose to play smart here and stay ahead of the curve, or be dragged to the divestment table kicking and screaming.

During my sophomore year at Bowdoin, I engaged in an exercise with three other classmates in a social psychology lab experiment: we were presented with a mathematical game diagram and instructed to maximize the score. My self-centered, competitive, winner take-all, Wall Street-American world view shifted into gear and I won the game, or at least, I thought I had for about two seconds. The other three students were the rightful winners, as they had acted altruistically under the premise of mutual cooperation to achieve the highest possible cumulative score, which I had decidedly failed to match. That game was perhaps the most important moment of my four years of Bowdoin.

We now face the choice to either work together as a cooperative society to solve the greatest problem in human history, or to be content with lulling ourselves back into our comfort zone, accepting noble statements that espouse such cooperation, but clinging desperately to “me-first” on the inside. Our world is hanging in the balance. What will Bowdoin do?

Jordan Van Voast is a member of the Class of 1981.

Comments are permanently closed.