Swarthmore Mountain Justice (MJ) made the front page of The New York Times’ website as the group’s campaign to to divest Swarthmore’s endowment from fossil fuels continues to gather momentum.

“I definitely think we’re part of a huge movement,” said Ali Roseberry-Polier ‘14, a member of MJ, in a late-night Skype conversation.

“We’re just starting to see the sort of mass action that we know is going to first win divestment campaigns and then force strong action for climate justice,” said MJ member Will Lawrence ‘13, also present in the Skype interview. “This needs to get enormous, so much bigger than where it is now. So I think we’re just at the beginning of it. It is really taking off right now.”

The reporter who wrote the story covers environmental issues for the Times and was put in touch with MJ by the Responsible Endowments Coalition, a non-profit that was co-founded by Morgan Simon ’04.

The article outlines the mission of MJ and the efforts of 350.org, a non-profit led by national environmental advocate Bill McKibben that urges institutions to divest from the fossil fuel industry.

“We hope that that can be the beginning of a process that will lead to divestment for Swarthmore,” Lawrence said. “The administration has expressed to us that they share our concerns about environmental injustice.”

Fueled by the success of countries and colleges that divested from apartheid in South Africa, MJ and other groups are hoping to use the same strategy to make a meaningful change in the way students view their environment.

“I think that the Administration genuinely is concerned about the crisis that we’re facing right now,” Roseberry-Polier said. “I think that it’s hard not to be.”

MJ is well aware, however, that the Administration doesn’t yet share their belief that divestment is the proper means to achieve climate justice.

In the Times article, Treasurer and Vice President for Finance Suzanne Welsh is quoted as saying “To use the endowment in support of [social] missions is not appropriate. It’s not what our donors have given money for.” This response is echoed by numerous colleges across the US, especially those with multi-billion-dollar endowments, according to the article.

MJ is unwavering in its faith that the Swarthmore administration may someday join their side.

“The message that this community as a whole needs to communicate to them is, if they want to do something, divestment is where the movement is right now,” Lawrence said.

In that vein, MJ is staging a what Lawrence calls a “mini-rally” in front of Parrish at 12:30 on Friday, setting up a line of dominoes as a visual representation of the political momentum behind the divestment movement.

Also Friday is The Board of Managers Luncheon. Representatives of MJ will be meeting with members of the Board to begin what Lawrence hopes will be the beginning of a serious conversation about divesting.

Yesterday, Middlebury College announced an exploratory process on the issue of divestment, according to Roseberry-Polier. Unity College in Maine and Hampshire College in Massachusetts have already committed to divest, and a Harvard University student government referendum has also supported divestment.

“Bryn Mawr does have a campaign right now, and we’ve been working with them a fair amount,”  Roseberry-Polier said. “Swarthmore’s really in a position to be a leader on this. A few months ago there were six schools doing divestment. Two years ago we were the only school with a divestment campaign. And now there are well over a hundred.”

By KATHLEEN E. CAREY

Originally published December 4, 2012

SWARTHMORE, Pa. — A group of Swarthmore College students is asking the school administration to take a seemingly simple step to combat pollution and climate change: sell off the endowment’s holdings in large fossil fuel companies. For months, they have been getting a simple answer: no.

As they consider how to ratchet up their campaign, the students suddenly find themselves at the vanguard of a national movement.

In recent weeks, college students on dozens of campuses have demanded that university endowment funds rid themselves of coal, oil and gas stocks. The students see it as a tactic that could force climate change, barely discussed in the presidential campaign, back onto the national political agenda.

“We’ve reached this point of intense urgency that we need to act on climate change now, but the situation is bleaker than it’s ever been from a political perspective,” said William Lawrence, a Swarthmore senior from East Lansing, Mich.

Students who have signed on see it as a conscious imitation of the successful effort in the 1980s to pressure colleges and other institutions to divest themselves of the stocks of companies doing business in South Africa under apartheid.

A small institution in Maine, Unity College, has already voted to get out of fossil fuels. Another, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, has adopted a broad investment policy that is ridding its portfolio of fossil fuel stocks.

“In the near future, the political tide will turn and the public will demand action on climate change,” Stephen Mulkey, the Unity College president, wrote in a letter to other college administrators. “Our students are already demanding action, and we must not ignore them.”

But at colleges with large endowments, many administrators are viewing the demand skeptically, saying it would undermine their goal of maximum returns in support of education. Fossil fuel companies represent a significant portion of the stock market, comprising nearly 10 percent of the value of the Russell 3000, a broad index of 3,000 American companies.

No school with an endowment exceeding $1 billion has agreed to divest itself of fossil fuel stocks. At Harvard, which holds the largest endowment in the country at $31 billion, the student body recently voted to ask the school to do so. With roughly half the undergraduates voting, 72 percent of them supported the demand.

“We always appreciate hearing from students about their viewpoints, but Harvard is not considering divesting from companies related to fossil fuels,” Kevin Galvin, a university spokesman, said by e-mail.

Several organizations have been working on some version of a divestment campaign, initially focusing on coal, for more than a year. But the recent escalation has largely been the handiwork of a grass-roots organization, 350.org, that focuses on climate change, and its leader, Bill McKibben, a writer turned advocate. The group’s name is a reference to what some scientists see as a maximum safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 350 parts per million. The level is now about 390, an increase of 41 percent since before the Industrial Revolution.

Mr. McKibben is touring the country by bus, speaking at sold-out halls and urging students to begin local divestment initiatives focusing on 200 energy companies. Many of the students attending said they were inspired to do so by an article he wrote over the summer in Rolling Stone magazine, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.”

Speaking recently to an audience at the University of Vermont, Mr. McKibben painted the fossil fuel industry as an enemy that must be defeated, arguing that it had used money and political influence to block climate action in Washington. “This is no different than the tobacco industry — for years, they lied about the dangers of their industry,” Mr. McKibben said.

Eric Wohlschlegel, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, said that continued use of fossil fuels was essential for the country’s economy, but that energy companies were investing heavily in ways to emit less carbon dioxide.

In an interview, Mr. McKibben said he recognized that a rapid transition away from fossil fuels would be exceedingly difficult. But he said strong government policies to limit emissions were long overdue, and were being blocked in part by the political power of the incumbent industry.

Mr. McKibben’s goal is to make owning the stocks of these companies disreputable, in the way that owning tobacco stocks has become disreputable in many quarters. Many colleges will not buy them, for instance.

Mr. McKibben has laid out a series of demands that would get the fuel companies off 350.org’s blacklist. He wants them to stop exploring for new fossil fuels, given that they have already booked reserves about five times as large as scientists say society can afford to burn. He wants them to stop lobbying against emission policies in Washington. And he wants them to help devise a transition plan that will leave most of their reserves in the ground while encouraging lower-carbon energy sources.

“They need more incentive to make the transition that they must know they need to make, from fossil fuel companies to energy companies,” Mr. McKibben said.

Most college administrations, at the urging of their students, have been taking global warming seriously for years, spending money on steps like cutting energy consumption and installing solar panels.

The divestment demand is so new that most administrators are just beginning to grapple with it. Several of them, in interviews, said that even though they tended to agree with students on the seriousness of the problem, they feared divisive boardroom debates on divestment.

That was certainly the case in the 1980s, when the South African divestment campaign caused bitter arguments across the nation.

The issue then was whether divestment, potentially costly, would have much real effect on companies doing business in South Africa. Even today, historians differ on whether it did. But the campaign required prominent people to grapple with the morality of apartheid, altering the politics of the issue. Economic pressure from many countries ultimately helped to force the whites-only South African government to the bargaining table.

Mr. Lawrence, the Swarthmore senior, said that many of today’s students found that campaign inspirational because it “transformed what was seemingly an intractable problem.”

Swarthmore, a liberal arts college southwest of Philadelphia, is a small school with a substantial endowment, about $1.5 billion. The trustees acceded to divestment demands during that campaign, in 1986, but only after a series of confrontational tactics by students, including brief occupations of the president’s office.

The board later adopted a policy stating that it would be unlikely to take such a step again.

“The college’s policy is that the endowment is not to be invested for social purposes” beyond the obvious one of educating students, said Suzanne P. Welsh, vice president for finance at the school. “To use the endowment in support of other missions is not appropriate. It’s not what our donors have given money for.”

About a dozen Swarthmore students came up with the divestment tactic two years ago after working against the strip mining of coal atop mountains in Appalachia, asking the school to divest itself of investments in a short list of energy companies nicknamed the Sordid 16.

So far, the students have avoided confrontation. The campaign has featured a petition signed by nearly half the student body, small demonstrations and quirky art installations. The college president, a theologian named Rebecca Chopp, has expressed support for their goals but not their means.

Matters could escalate in coming months, with Swarthmore scheduled to host a February meeting — the students call it a “convergence” — of 150 students from other colleges who are working on divestment.

Students said they were well aware that the South Africa campaign succeeded only after on-campus actions like hunger strikes, sit-ins and the seizure of buildings. Some of them are already having talks with their parents about how far to go.

“When it comes down to it, the members of the board are not the ones who are inheriting the climate problem,” said Sachie Hopkins-Hayakawa, a Swarthmore senior from Portland, Ore. “We are.”

By Lily Jamison-Cash
November 19, 2012

Swarthmore’s Mountain Justice has officially stepped into the big leagues. Sara Blazevic ’15 of Mountain Justice was invited to speak about divesting from the fossil fuel industry at a Saturday night gathering in Philadelphia that featured high-profile climate activist Bill McKibben as the keynote speaker.

The event, part of the national Do the Math tour spearheaded by McKibben and his Project 350, also included Josh Fox, director of the anti-fracking filmGasland, and a speaker from New Yorkers Against Fracking. Approximately 30 Swarthmore students were present in an audience that included Vice President for College and Community Relations Maurice Eldridge ’61.

“Do the Math” aims to raise awareness about the role fossil fuels play in climate change. The campaign, which has taken a strong stand in favor of divestment from the fossil fuel industry, began with a Rolling Stone article by McKibben this August.

The divestment solution would “require asking often-good institutions to change their ways,” McKibben said in his talk. He proposes they wind down their investments in the fossil fuel industry over the next five years.

Blazevic said that Swarthmore should be able to “leverage its financial weight to mobilize influence,” and that it would be “financially feasible” to do so. She also pointed out the need for a larger backbone of support. “We alone can’t convince Swarthmore to divest,” she said. “We need a mass movement, faculty, churches, and banks giving back.”

“Swarthmore’s in the lead,” McKibben said in an interview with The Daily Gazette. “It’s one of the places in the country where the argument’s more advanced, going further down that road.” He said that “Do the Math” had reached 70 college campuses thus far, and he anticipated as many as 200 by Christmas.

“Swarthmore’s one of my favorite colleges in the country,” he said. “I admire it and its students immensely partly because it comes from a deeply moral tradition. That Quaker background means it should be more reflective than most places.”

“[Swarthmore Mountain Justice] have discovered what a hard argument it is,” McKibben said. “Especially in a place like Swarthmore that should be more receptive. It’s hard to buck it, but we’re so proud of the work they’re doing.”

Although Project 350 started by “going after politicians” and making big political statements, such as a march on Washington to protest the Keystone-XL pipeline, the movement turned to the fossil fuel industry after the Rolling Stone article, according to McKibben. He said that his argument in that article “made it clearer that we needed to go after the industry above all, that’s where the real power lay, that’s why we’re getting nowhere in almost any capital on earth.”

Mountain Justice was first inspired to get involved in divestment by activists on the frontlines who they had encountered through their work in rural West Virginia and in Texas at the Keystone-XL pipeline, said Blazevic. McKibben’s invitation to speak at Saturday’s event enabled Mountain Justice to tell that message to a much larger audience.

“We’ve been working on it for a while, so it makes sense to connect with the national energy around it,” said Mountain Justice Member Ali Roseberry-Polier ’14.

“We made an alliance [with Project 350] because of their clout in the political and social movement world,” Blazevic said. “Us being backed by 350 will give the message more force on campus.”

McKibben noted that the divestment movement was not limited to students but instead should involve the entire college community. He also encouraged faculty to step in. “This is what tenure was made for,” he said in his speech.

Hi!

For alumni who are just joining us, we’d like to introduce ourselves. We’re current students at Swarthmore College. We’re all members of Mountain Justice, a student group dedicated to ending mountaintop removal coal mining as well as other forms of fossil fuel extraction. For the past year and a half, we’ve been busy with an activist campaign based on Swarthmore’s campus.

We oppose fossil fuel industries for several, overlapping reasons: The extraction and burning of fossil fuels pollutes the environment and propagates climate change. Extraction poisons drinking water, harms local economies, and generally creates unsafe living conditions for people who live nearby. Furthermore, the people most affected by fossil fuel extraction are predominantly people of color and the economically disadvantaged. The extraction and burning of fossil fuels are clearly social justice issues.

Across the country, communities that face fossil fuel companies have been working to educate themselves and resist these injustices. At Swarthmore, however, we aren’t physically confronted with the noise, pollution, and destruction of extraction. In an effort to work with those local communities that fight back, we decided to leverage the power of Swarthmore’s endowment against the fossil fuel industry. After inquiring about the specifics of Swarthmore’s investments and being denied that answer, we publicly launched our divestment campaign.

We researched divestment, its feasibility, and previous uses of divestment in social justice movements. We communicated with organizations like the Responsible Endowments Coalition, which provide advice and guidance to students working with their schools for more socially responsible endowments. We contacted other schools that have similar fossil fuel divestment campaigns currently happening. We motivated students on our campus with rallies, information, speakers, and a petition that received 700 student signatures.

We asked that Swarthmore divest its endowment from 16 of the worst fossil fuel companies. In spring of this year, we met with both President Chopp and the Social Responsibility Committee of the Board of Managers to describe our divestment proposal and ask for their support. They listened to our proposal but declined to consider divestment as an option.

In researching divestment campaigns in the past, we’ve realized that successful campaigns don’t happen overnight. We have to build a lot of support and educate more people, including faculty, alumni, and prospective students. We know that fossil fuel extraction and climate change are crises that demand action. It’s our job to convince the Board of Managers that divestment is an action worth taking. Join us in making this happen.

On a steamy New York City morning in July, I took the subway to the airport to catch a flight to North Carolina to catch a layover to Charleston, West Virginia, where my Swarthmore Mountain Justice buddies picked me up for a drive through the winding wooded roads of southwestern West Virginia mountain country.

I was going to WV to participate in the RAMPS Mountain Mobilization action camp, about which I knew basically nothing. I had been a member of Swarthmore Mountain Justice (MJ) for one year and felt that my visit to “the frontlines” was overdue, no matter where or how it should happen. One year with MJ was one year of working to organize and implement our small but feisty battle against mountain top removal (MTR), through a divestment campaign targeting Swarthmore’s investments in fossil fuel extraction companies.

Although the divestment campaign aims to attack the fossil fuel industry in a highly direct way, at times MJ’s work felt far removed from that of people protesting within those Appalachian communities affected most acutely by MTR. This became a stifling thing to reckon with while organizing within the culture and community of a liberal arts school, in the face of injustices which go far deeper than any college’s investment portfolio. It felt immensely useless sometimes. It sucked having MJ members’ hard work, our intellect, our various beliefs, belittled by the institutions and individuals with the supposed insight and influence to make necessary change happen efficiently, while outside our bubble of pacifistic academia frontline activists routinely engage full-force with viciously destructive juggernauts of political and corporate power.

I decided to go to West Virginia because I knew that I could not continue putting energy into MJ until I had at least a glancing firsthand experience of the entrenched forces of oppression we are struggling against. I hoped that this would intensify my understanding of the universality of all oppression, and the necessary connectedness of the fight against it, preparing me to wage MJ’s divestment campaign with a greater depth of knowledge and conviction.

I went to the mobilization knowing that I would be unable to participate in the culminating action, which meant that I was in for a distinctly different experience than that of the activists preparing themselves to walk on to a working strip mine and stop its operations. I attended a nonviolent direct action training, panel talks by local residents, a talk on the history of Appalachian resistance to the coal industry, and an Anti Oppression open discussion.

The RAMPS organizers defined direct action as any action taken without mediation between the individual and the issue. Much of the training and discussion that comprised the week was focused around RAMPS’ intention to facilitate the arrests of as many activists as possible, with a short-term goal of clogging up the West Virginia court system, and the longer-term aim of using these numbers to increase media attention and build support for the movement to end MTR. There were also trainings provided for people working in various supporting roles, from the relatively high-risk role of doing media at the action site, to doing offsite media or jail support.

The discussions I participated in raised many questions that have continuously colored my experience of activism. One frequent refrain concerned how the participants of the mobilization, who were almost all regional outsiders with little firsthand experiences in West Virginia, ought to be situating themselves in relation to the local miners who would be meeting them in counter-protest. The folks from the area who came to speak with us stressed the importance of asking questions of counter-protesters instead of giving answers, which could escalate conflict, and refraining from trying to educate our ideological opponents, as that deviated from the purpose of the action.

There was also a strong emphasis on the idea that any struggle is everyone’s struggle, and that while activists from outside West Virginia should treat with respect the experiences of people living there, they should not automatically defer to local currents of belief as the “right” or “just” perspectives simply because they come from residents of the area. This resonated deeply with my concerns about on-campus activism being too self-contained, too removed, as well as my fear that being a college student from my particular demographic background was inherently limiting of the social justice movements that I could justly ally myself with. I was surprised and encouraged by the seasoned activists and experienced local residents who urged us all to loudly resist that deference, and the timidity that it could lead to.

In witnessing the trainings focused more explicitly on the details of doing direct action in West Virginia, with all the physical risks and legal slipknots entailed, I considered the role of male/cisgender/white/class privilege in preparing protesters to put their bodies on the line, and the possibility that these privileges make direct action an exclusionary tactic and a potentially fragmentary one for a movement. No amount of training can change someone’s ability to pay bail, or their statistical likelihood of being sexually or otherwise assaulted – these are the reasons that I personally am not prepared to participate in actions that risk arrest right now. These trainings nevertheless increased my awareness of the diversity of tactics currently being employed against MTR and other extraction practices – from actions like sit-ins, lock-downs, occupations, and purposeful arrests, to educational methods like trainings, teach-ins, skill-shares, and tours.

The people I had the privilege of talking with intensified my sense of solidarity with Appalachian activists, as well as my analysis of the place of MJ’s divestment campaign in a national (and global) movement against extraction. Being at the RAMPS camp allowed me to engage deeply with folks from a wide variety of experiences in social justice action and organizing, providing me with a firmer belief in the efficacy of MJ’s work. The experience also reinforced what I (and, I feel safe saying, Swat MJ) view as a necessity in our campaign: continuously checking our own ideas and analyses against those of activists and organizers tackling an issue with different strategies and/or perspectives. I hope that the sense of solidarity I felt with these people will carry into MJ’s work this fall – through coordinated actions, skill shares, and ongoing inter-campus/campaign discussions, and through messaging that persistently and passionately reminds the people in power that the students who comprise our particular small group are not the only ones waging this tremendous battle.

Anti-coal activists dropped banners opposing mountaintop removal at Hobet mine in West Virginia on Saturday. Photo by Mark Haller.

For the past two weeks, students from Swarthmore and Earlham Colleges have been traveling around areas of West Virginia and Tennessee that are affected by mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining on a Frontlines Listening Tour. The students, in alliance with other organizations fighting coal mining in Appalachia, are involved in campaigns at their respective colleges to divest their endowments from the coal industry.

Over the course of the tour, students spoke with organizers from local groups engaged in the fight against MTR, such as the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC), Coal River Mountain Watch, Statewide Organizing for Community Empowerment, Radical Action for Mountain People’s Survival (RAMPS) and Blair Community Center and Museum. The tour came to an end at the Mountain Mobilization on July 28, which was a large-scale RAMPS action that shut down Hobet mine, the largest strip mine in West Virginia, for three hours.

The students’ aim was to strengthen connections between their divestment campaign and the organizing that people in Appalachia are doing to fight the coal industry. Divestment is a tactic that the students are using in solidarity with frontline organizations. While the colleges are not located within Appalachia, they have money invested in mountaintop removal, and students hope that by withdrawing funding from these corporations, they can support the campaigns of local organizers who are fighting the same institutions.

“The trip was a valuable opportunity to learn more about the struggles against the coal industry that people have engaged with historically throughout Appalachia,” said student organizer Kate Aronoff.

On the tour, students went to the Whipple Company Store, which is now a museum, where they learned about the relationships between workers and coal companies earlier in the century. Whipple, for instance, was once a coal camp, filled entirely with workers and their families who worked 12-hour days and could only spend their earnings at the company store, creating a cycle of control of the coal industry over local communities.

At the Blair Community Center and Museum, students learned about the historic struggles of workers against the coal industry and their oppressive labor practices. “We realized our connection to decades of activism against big coal,” said Aronoff. “It was comforting to be reminded that we’re not the first ones to fight the coal industry, and that we have a lot to learn.”

The students also directly engaged with the health concerns that local residents are facing. At one point, they traveled with an organizer from OVEC to deliver water-testing results to community members living near an MTR site. While they were there, they spoke to several people who had relatives with Crohn’s disease, an illness rare even in heavy industrial areas. They also spoke to many individuals with various forms of cancer and other illnesses that seemingly resulted from exposure to contaminants. They learned that the drinking water in the area was red in color; the test results only confirmed what had already been obvious to community members.

After much traveling and conversing with community organizers, the students convened at the RAMPS Mountain Mobilization, connecting their education with direct action. The brunt of the Divest Coal campaign organizing has been done hundreds of miles away from the Appalachian region, but the ultimate goals of the campaign and RAMPS Mountain Mobilization are the same. They are both dedicated to sending a message of dissent and letting the coal industry know that people all over the country will no longer stand aside while corporate giants exploit people and the environment.

Divestment and nonviolent direct action seek to address the social and economic power of the coal industry and have become necessary tactics to make known fatal flaws in a system that so many people rely on. This reliance is especially prevalent in areas where coal mining is the most available job and coal is credited with progress and stability, as well as environmental degradation and extortion.

The power of the coal industry in the economy has become obvious to Earlham and Swarthmore students trying to persuade their institutions to divest and support sustainable and ethical energy sources. But the power these corporations hold over surrounding communities was another experience entirely, especially seeing them as the targets of extreme anger and fear from local miners and their families.

In a panel discussion before the RAMPS Mountain Mobilization, life-long West Virginia resident Junior Walk explained how the coal industry was the direct source of this anger:

They [the coal companies] are controlling their workers and they are controlling the citizenry here in southern West Virginia and manipulating them … getting these people to take that aggression and anger and pent up rage that they have against the coal industry and direct it toward us. Even though we are the ones trying to come in here to make something positive happen.

The strategic shift of anger away from oppressors is not a tactic that works on everybody. After protesters left the mine they encountered Friends of Coal protesters blocking the road. Two deep miners took the opportunity to ask one of the students from the tour, inquisitively and without hostility, what they stood for. One of these men expressed concerns about the “propaganda he had been fed [by the coal industry]” and wanted to know why so many people had come from all over the country to a place where they were not wanted. This led to a conversation about the viability of alternatives to coal mining and the concerns of the community.

While such conversations can make a difference, they’re not always easily had. Dispelling the hatred against so-called outsiders or tree huggers is a battle often fought indirectly. Shutting down the Hobet mine for several hours elicited a lot of fear and anger, but that’s because many saw it as an attack on a community that is entirely dependent on the coal industry. This misconception can be righted from all over the country where campuses are calling for divestment. By targeting its bottom line, the Divest Coal campaign pressures the industry to respect workers and their communities as well as re-evaluate its mining practices.

By resisting coal companies on their college campuses, students are fighting corporate domination and the power of the coal industry nationwide. As West Virginia resident and incarcerated Mountain Mobilization protester, Dustin Steele, said, “When you fight oppression anywhere, you fight oppression everywhere.”