Divesting From a Distance

As Martha Denton, an organizer at Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard, watched the university send students home in mid-March, she realized that the carefully laid plans they had made for the second half of the semester, and especially Earth Day, were no longer feasible. 

“Divest Harvard is a campaign, but it’s also a community,” Denton told me. “It’s definitely sad not to be able to hold these big rallies and teach-ins and occupations that we were able to do on campus.”

It was a hard blow for Divest Harvard. Just last November, the group pulled off one of its divestment demonstrations when it teamed up with students at Yale University to disrupt an annual football game between the schools. Denton says they planned to continue escalating their actions through the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day on April 22. 

The rapid spread of COVID-19 halted this momentum.

Now that organizing a massive, in-person rally wasn’t an option, activists scrambled to support low-income students who had suddenly lost housing in the middle of a pandemic. Divest Harvard managed to hold an Earth Day rally online, anchored by a speech from Harvard alum and climate activist Bill McKibben, but the long-term transition to online organizing has impacted the group in other ways. 

“Divest Harvard is a campaign, but it’s also a community,” Denton told me. “It’s definitely sad not to be able to hold these big rallies and teach-ins and occupations that we were able to do on campus. Right now, everything is kind of unstable, and everyone is a bit vulnerable, and this has definitely been a cause that makes me feel like I’m actually able to do something, rather than just sitting in my childhood bedroom.”

Fossil fuel divestment campaigns at universities are aimed at forcing academic institutions to give up their investments in oil, gas, and coal companies. They are part of a network of roughly 380 campaigns across the world, and they’ve seen some success in recent years, most notably at Georgetown University, Oxford University, and the University of California. 

Divest Harvard isn’t alone in its predicament. Across the United States, college fossil fuel divestment campaigns are scrambling to adapt to online organizing without the use of their greatest asset: in-person actions and demonstrations.

Many have turned to social media outreach to strengthen each campaign for future battles. At the same time, they’re continuing their activism in different ways, including constant Zoom meetings, extensive investment research, and phonebanks to protest the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline in Ottawa, Canada. 

Right now, stressing the importance of social justice is chief among activists’ concerns. 

“We have a lot to offer, as far as training, supporting, helping the fight for justice in every way,” says Ari Bortman, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania and an organizer at Fossil Free Penn. “The movement for black lives is really what’s pressing now, and we’re able to use the knowledge . . . and the network we have to support and amplify the messages of groups that are really on the front lines right now.”

Bortman’s campaign is grappling with how the fight for divestment translates to goals greater than just “moving money around,” he says. Its members have always thought of divestment in an environmental context, but now they’re attempting to understand climate change as inseparable from other injustices. 

In the pandemic, organizers see similarities between climate change, COVID-19’s  disproportionate impact on historically marginalized communities, inaction by political figures, and significant damage to the economy.

Gracie Brett, a campus organizer at Divest Ed, the national group dedicated to supporting student divestment campaigns, has noticed that the pandemic is also pushing more students to get involved.  

“So many students got screwed by their universities,” Brett says. “[They’re] realizing that their universities aren’t these benevolent things, and that they act like disaster capitalists like anyone else and are going to exploit the crisis, rather than help.”

With such stark changes taking place across the country, Bert argues, it’s much easier to make people see how climate change—an even greater disaster—might play out if inaction continues. 

“Investing in the fossil fuel industry doesn’t make moral sense, and it doesn’t make economic sense,” Denton says.

When the price of oil dropped below zero on April 20, activists saw another opportunity to pressure university administrations. They highlighted the volatility of fossil fuel investments, arguing that, beyond the obligation universities have to be fiscally responsible, they must also ensure long-term educational prospects for their students. 

“Investing in the fossil fuel industry doesn’t make moral sense, and it doesn’t make economic sense,” Denton says.

Jessica Cohen, an organizer at MIT Divest, worries that universities may be less willing to divest due to the economic impact of the coronavirus. But, despite the uncertainty, for Cohen, the urgent need to break from the fossil fuel industry has never been more clear. 

“It seems counterintuitive to be investing in fossil fuel companies which put out emissions which lead to asthma and other respiratory illnesses during a pandemic that is specifically a respiratory illness,” Cohen says. “We’re putting money into companies that are essentially worsening this issue.”