The Bowdoin Orient

Hillary Clinton has, in my lifetime, been many things. From First Lady to Senator to Secretary of State (and email aficionado), she has been a constant presence in the public eye, and though perhaps more tangentially, my life overall. Several Christmases ago, my conservative grandfather ironically bought me a Ready for Hillary t-shirt, and I once mused as a naive first year in the Bowdoin Democrats that I would work for “whatever campaign Hillary was running” upon my 2016 graduation. In all of that time, I never really imagined I’d ever meet her—much less personally confront her. 

One week ago today, that scenario became reality, as I and seven other members of Bowdoin Climate Action disrupted Clinton’s campaign stop in Portland over her wavering and unclear position on the Keystone XL pipeline. When her speech mentioned climate change, we rose from our seats and held our folded signs, calling on Clinton to “say no to KXL.” As she exasperatedly asked us to sit down, I interrupted her to ask her position on the pipeline. The rest of the scene is well-documented, both in video and print. 

There are myriad reasons why we interrupted her, and why students and organizers around the country have been confronting her about the pipeline for months. Because her climate plan doesn’t address fossil fuel extraction as the root of the crisis. Because in a demonstrated lack of leadership, she was the only presidential candidate not to make her stance on the pipeline clear. Because Keystone, a shoddily-made tar sands export pipeline, comes to an end only a short drive away from my family’s home on the southeast side of Houston. That home is what has spurred me into action, both on campus and off, for climate justice in the campaign for fossil fuel divestment. Keystone does not directly relate to Bowdoin’s endowment, and Clinton has no say on the removal of our investments from the fossil fuel industry. However, the intentions behind the political pressure leveraged on both the pipeline and the candidate also correspond with the very point of divestment. To target the fossil fuel industry on all levels is to build a powerful movement contesting its longevity. 

Though many may get caught up in the specifics of the tactic itself, divestment is just that—a tactic—and its meaning stretches far beyond the actual movement of money. The goal behind it is to build popular support against the fossil fuel industry. That means challenging extraction projects on the ground, pushing our institutions to cease monetary support and even, on occasion, directly interfering in the speeches of politicians with less than stellar climate policy. Our work on campus is one subset of a much larger push to shift public opinion on what it means to take climate action. From the President of the College, to the potential POTUS, I expect those who hold power to wield it in favor of a just and stable future. We must do more than just convincing them of our position. In the end, we must put social pressure on them. This Tuesday, it was announced that endowments representing $2.6 trillion have been divested from the fossil fuel industry since 2011. Later that afternoon, Clinton announced in Iowa that she was, in fact, in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline. The fight may not be over, but there’s proof that this movement is powerful. Thanks to thousands of organizers across the country, Clinton may still be many things, but after this week, a supporter of Keystone XL she is no longer.

Editor's note: This article was inadvertantly published twice. Please see the original version of the story. 

Growing up just outside of Houston, in a suburb containing the sixth-largest refinery in the United States, the fossil fuel industry was omnipresent in my childhood. 

From confusing the refineries’ smoke stacks for “cloud makers,” to knowing far too many family members—beside myself—who developed asthma, I was always peripherally aware of the fossil fuel industry, without considering what it meant to be raised in the center of an extractive economy. Fish, as they say, do not know they are in water, and growing up less than a mile from seven different major oil refineries, I was too close to really think critically of their effects.

As a first year I became sick and found it hard to breathe every time I returned to Houston. I realized that I was safer away from home than in it. 

In the process, I learned how my hometown of Deer Park, Texas, is in the first percentile of worst air toxicity in America. The Shell refinery that employs so many of my family friends had recently settled a lawsuit with the Environmental Protection Agency for years of Clean Air Act violations to the tune of over $117 million. 

Living within two miles of the refineries down my own street increased my chances of developing leukemia by 56 percent. 

What had for so long been merely background scenery for me—cloud makers and perpetual copper skies—now sharpened viscerally into a menacing industrial reality. While I’ve enjoyed the comforts of my new life in Maine, I felt guilty and helpless that my family remained exposed, and my community remained unaware. 

Overnight, my ideological support for the Bowdoin Climate Action’s (BCA) fossil fuel divestment campaign transformed into active participation. The dangerous realities of the fossil fuel industry lived too close to home—literally. 

To remain silent was no longer an option. That the College to which I had chosen to dedicate four years of my life continues to invest in and profit from the industry that is polluting my home is more than antithetical to my own personal values—it is antithetical to Bowdoin’s own. An extractive economy does not aid the common good. 

By investing in the fossil fuel industry, Bowdoin is consenting to the practices of the fossil fuel industry and tacitly approving of communities like mine remaining financially dependent upon an industry that is polluting our air and poisoning our health. That my Bowdoin tuition is indirectly funding the industry that is destroying my home is about more than carbon budgets, two degrees Celsius or investment portfolios—it’s about my family.

Divestment is the tactic, and climate justice is the goal. Fossil fuel pollution disproportionately affects low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. The disastrous impacts of climate change will only exacerbate already existing inequalities. This is a justice issue harming real people in America in 2015.

Climate justice isn’t just about climate change, however. It’s about what we value—life, land, resources and people. The same systems that perpetuate other social injustices fuel the climate crisis. In believing we can somehow recycle ourselves out of a climate catastrophe, Bowdoin is turning a blind eye to larger systems of oppression. 

Lessening the influence of the fossil fuel industry and seeking justice for those harmed by its violent business model are at the very heart of the movement for fossil fuel divestment. It’s for all of these reasons and many more that I joined BCA’s divestment campaign this time last year. While the College has had the opportunity to lead, it is quickly falling behind our peer institutions and ignoring the calls of student and faculty voices to disentangle ourselves from our ties to the fossil fuel industry.

Since the movement’s inception, 25 colleges and hundreds of institutions, whose endowments total over $50 billion, have divested worldwide. From Stanford, which divested from coal companies last May, to the New School and the University of Maine system last week, divestment is winning and reaching far beyond the Bowdoin bubble. 

After two years of building support on campus, myself and three other members of BCA met with the Board of Trustees last October to formally propose divestment at the College.Since our meeting, there have been 112 days of silence from the Board of Trustees. We have proceeded through the proper channels of engagement and have been repeatedly ignored. We petitioned. We rallied. We presented our case. 

As the Trustees meet this weekend, I want them to keep in mind what the fossil fuel industry is doing to my hometown. Academic institutions are endowed for the common good, and the Trustees have a choice to make. Do they stand with me and my hometown, or the fossil fuel industry? Bowdoin, whose side are you on?

Allyson Gross is a member of the Class of 2016.