More than Pleasure:

Really?

Bill McKibben, Climate Activist

By now I have surely established myself as a committed hedonist. I write sexy fiction. I make gourmet meals. I buy ultrasmooth sheets. And once a week I write here about pleasure, with posts about fire and water and making out and pedicures.  

But pleasure is not my highest priority. I don’t want to get all corny and talk about the happiness of others or the thrill of creation (playing with my granddaughters! writing fiction!)—but I don’t want to misrepresent myself either. Some days it’s hard to focus on pleasure while our country is wobbling toward autocracy and our planet is hurtling toward climate disaster.

Today, on the hottest day of the year, my husband and I went to a demonstration at Citibank headquarters in New York City, protesting its funding of fossil fuel projects: some $396 billion since the Paris Agreements of 2016. Climate change threatens humanity, and unless we stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere, the future is grim.

I’ve been to many climate actions, but this was the first one I’ve attended that was dominated by elders.  It was put together by The Third Act, an organization for climate activists over 60. The Third Act was started by Bill McKibben. It’s a brilliant idea: I’m surprised no one else has thought to organize older activists, who have the time, experience, and resources to form an effective advocacy group.  

Back in 1989, McKibben wrote the very first book on climate change, The End of Nature, and ever since, he has warned the world about global warming in the pages of the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Nation, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and Rolling Stone (he’s an excellent writer and very prolific). As a Middlebury professor, in 2007, he and five of his students started 350.org, a grassroots climate change organization that now has staff in many countries around the world and alliances with some 300 similar organizations.

Today’s was a somber demonstration, without chants and without songs. In 90-degree heat, a bagpiper led the demonstrators around the block. Some carried a coffin. Many carried cardboard tombstones, commemorating people who’ve died from the heat.

A singer hurled a long lamentation about our damaged planet. Some people (not I this time) lay down on the concrete at Citibank plaza, in a kind of die-in, prepared to be arrested. As he lay on the ground with the others, McKibben, himself 63, readied himself for his fourteenth or fifteenth arrest—he can’t quite be sure.

It’s a pleasure to tell you that he is my hero.

After all this save the earth content, perhaps I owe the readers of the Pleasure Principle something just a tad salacious.  The Third Act’s motto is “Old and bold”—and maybe it should be mine as well! In what follows, about going to a cuddle party (recently published in HuffPost), I am once again leaving my comfort zone.  

bit.ly/3zvHnP4