Dave Mann, 74, decided to retire in 2019 following decades of organizing around issues from racial and economic equity to renewable energy.
But as Mann consumed more news articles and studies about the globe continuing to get warmer, and the disastrous effects a changing climate will have on future generations, he felt compelled to make a comeback.
“I have a 26-year-old son who has his own anxiety about where we’re headed,” Mann said. “I didn’t feel like I could keep looking him in the eye if I wasn’t doing something.”
For Mann, and a few dozen other like-minded retirees, that meant taking to the Wells Fargo corporate building in downtown Minneapolis Wednesday morning and picketing outside, attempting to disrupt employees from entering and demanding that the banking giant divest from fossil fuels.
Their group is called Third Act, which is a community of activists each over the age of 60 – in the third act of their lives – who advocate for a more sustainable future in which they’ll have no part. The action on Wednesday was part of a larger national campaign called the Summer of Heat, described as a series of sustained, nonviolent civil disobedience movements targeting CitiBank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase – four of the five largest investors in the fossil fuel industry.
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The Minnesota chapter has about 150 members and counting, who are part of a much bigger network of elder activists with numbers in the tens of thousands nationwide. The protest Wednesday at the Wells Fargo tower in Minneapolis did not result in any arrests like its counterparts at CitiBank in Manhattan earlier this week, where dozens of elders were arrested after staging a funeral procession.
“They’re at a point in their lives where they’re looking around and thinking about their grandkids and the future they’re going to have with the way that the global crisis has gone, and so they’ve got to do something,” Mann said of his fellow Third Act activists. “So they’re stepping up and many of them have never been in a street demonstration before so this is their first time.”
Third Act Minnesota co-facilitator Carolyn Ham said her first exposure to the climate movement was back in 2014, and shortly after she began working with MN350. Following her retirement in 2022, Ham became aware of Third Act and its goal of working to curb fossil fuel usage, and she has been doing that ever since.
As for motivations of the group’s other members, Ham said they ranged from frustration that writing and calling their politicians never yielded results, to wanting to make up for a lifetime of not doing much organizing at all. But the nearly universal answer among the activists was “it’s my grandkids, it’s for the future of my kids and grandkids,” she said.
Going forward, Ham said specific plans for further Third Act actions are still in the works, but the group will be pivoting to the election and promoting candidates that champion the climate issue.
“We recognize what a critical election this is because we have Trump who denies climate change and withdrew from the Paris Accords,” she said. “There’s just no comparison, and so I think that a lot of energy will be going into making sure that we elect somebody who has taken significant action on climate change.”
“As a leading financial partner to the energy sector, Wells Fargo finances companies that provide the fuel that powers the economy today and supports their evolution towards cleaner and renewable energy opportunities,” Wells Fargo spokeswoman Staci Schiller said in a statement. “As the real economy demands more lower-carbon solutions, we will continue supporting the expansion of clean energy and advancing innovative technologies.”
Mohamed Ibrahim
Mohamed Ibrahim is MinnPost’s environment and public safety reporter. He can be reached at mibrahim@minnpost.com.
