Mac divestment fight not over yet

On March 20, five McMaster students, members of the group MacDivest, began a hunger strike, to press the university to end its investment in fossil fuels and cancel plans to bring CO2-emitting gas generators on line.

The university’s prompt and careful response to the hunger strike — doing daily mental and physical health checks on the students with an emergency response team standing by — is striking in its contrast to its response to the climate emergency. And it is an emergency, as the most recent IPCC report makes clear. Without “swift and drastic” action to reduce carbon emissions, we are on track to exceed the 1.5 C increase beyond which damage to the climate will become irreversible and many places on Earth will become uninhabitable. The students understand that. It is therefore dismaying that, beyond its concern with their immediate health, the university reacted to the strike by belittling their message and underplaying the catastrophe that is jeopardizing their future.

Beyond touting its sustainability strategies, which include using money saved by the gas generators to fund future green projects and divesting from fossil fuels “as soon as possible” after 2030, the university told the students that their action would have no effect and encouraged them to find more “productive” ways to join conversations about divestment and sustainability. There are two problems with this advice, one practical and one more philosophical. Practically speaking, this directive implies there are productive avenues of conversation the students hadn’t yet pursued. As the students noted: “We’ve tried sit-ins, protests, letterwriting campaigns, meeting with the administration, a non-donation campaign, the list goes on. The university administration isn’t listening.”

The last time an opportunity for conversation arose was in 2021 when the university held a webinar billed as a “town hall.” Other than a brief presentation by our faculty group, MacGreenInvest, the agenda featured a lengthy defence of the university’s actions followed by a short Q&A period, with all questions vetted in advance and read by a moderator. Students who had looked forward to the meeting as an occasion to ask questions and outline their carefully researched proposal for divestment did not get a chance to speak and left the meeting in protest. Since then, requests for meetings with the president and board of governors have been ignored. So, the suggestion the students had other options to engage in conversation about these issues is disingenuous.

There is another, larger problem with the university’s rejection of the students’ message and dismissal of their strike as unproductive: it casts the students in the role of immature children with unrealistic demands and a limited understanding of the complexity of things. In reality, the students proceeded from a clear, well-researched, evidence-based understanding of the dangers we face and the steps necessary to limit the damage. They also proposed concrete, non-polluting strategies for cost savings like storage batteries and a carefully rolled out conservation program. University administrators also understand — or they should understand — the direness of our situation, but are choosing to stay the destructive course they have chosen rather than considering viable alternatives. In putting short-term economic gain ahead of long-term planetary health, it is they, not the students, who are operating from an unrealistic, selfish timeline.

On Monday, eight days after they began it, MacDivest ended its hunger strike due to health concerns. This does not mean its campaign is over. A long-standing myth about young people is that they are idealists, whose utopian fantasies will give way to a more clear-headed, pragmatic view of what’s possible when they grow up. Always questionable, this myth is now blatantly wrong. The current generation of older adults (our generation) is in no position to lecture young people about how to move forward into a world that will look nothing like the one we know. We need to listen to them and take seriously not just health risks they are facing now but those that are imperilling their future and the future of the planet.