Bill McKibben

Point a sheet of glass towards the sun and out comes heat and light and information and everything else that, you know, modernity consists of.

The solar panels on my roof are powering our congregation here today.

If you're working on these issues, one of the first things you figure out is that an extraordinary amount of the leadership for the climate and environmental movement comes from Indigenous people on this continent and all over the world.

And one reason for that is that they're often in the firing line, you know, on top of land that people want to steal to get fossil fuel or on low-lying island nations that are about to get overrun by the sea and whatever.

But it also has to do with what you're saying.

And I find power in the fact that the oldest, most ancient wisdom traditions on this planet, indigenous wisdom traditions, are old.

find themselves very much in sync with the newest wisdom traditions on the planet.

And what they have in common is a sense that the conventional wisdom that most of the rest of us hold, that we're just going to keep on growing the size of things forever and so on, is not true.

And I think that convergence is a very powerful moment or could be.

And it's one of the reasons why it's so important that those are the people who are at the absolute forefront of this work.

Young people are doing all the work, man.

When I founded 350.org, it was with seven college students.

We started this vast divestment campaign now at $40 trillion in endowments and portfolios that have sold their fossil fuel stock.

That was mostly done on college campuses.

And the kids who did it when they graduated went on to form this Sunrise Movement that brought us the Green New Deal and hence the Inflation Reduction Act.

Meanwhile, the really young kids were all rallying behind Greta Thunberg and the 10,000 other Greta Thunbergs across the planet.

So they've done their job.

Now they need the rest of us to back them up.

For all their intelligence and energy and idealism, they lack the structural power to make the changes we need in the time that we have.

The reason I'm organizing people with hairlines like mine is because people over 60 have structural power coming out their ears.