An End to the Fossil-Fuel Era?

THE MOOD ALONG Central Park West couldn’t have been sweeter: As block after block after block of scientists and students and clerics strolled by on the People’s Climate March, everyone was smiling. Serious, yes—but calm. Determined, but hopeful. It was a coming out party, and everyone was reassured to see how big and broad this movement actually was.

And everyone was relieved, I think, not to have to listen to speeches. Without politicians explaining what the day was all about, the march was able to speak for itself, with a mix of anger and inspiration exemplified by the front- line communities and Indigenous nations that filled out the first ranks of the procession.

That night, though, there were a couple of speeches worth listening to. They came further up the West Side, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where religious leaders had gathered for a series of meetings and services. At the reception following those talks, Stephen Heintz, the head of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, cued up a video address from Desmond Tutu, calling for “an end to the fossil-fuel era.” Dressed in his scarlet robes, Tutu saluted activists, saying “the destruction of the Earth’s environment is the human rights challenge of our time,” and demanded that institutions around the planet end their investments in fossil-fuel companies.

That was pretty good: One of our planet’s most revered church leaders speaking truth to power. And then power spoke back. Representing the Rockefeller family, Heintz said their various charitable trusts would now divest their holdings in fossil-fuel companies, arguing that it was both financially imprudent and immoral to continue trying to make money off the planet’s destruction.

The Rockefellers are not the first divesters, of course—already the World Council of Churches, big Catholic colleges, Australian pension funds, and various city governments have done the right and powerful thing. (An Oxford study last year called it the fastest-growing corporate divestment campaign in history). But for the Rockefellers—the original fossil-fuel fortune, the heirs to John D. who founded Standard Oil/Esso/Exxon—to cut their ties is sign enough of the Holy Spirit for me.

And then Heintz introduced one of the men who made it happen, Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus. Yearwood—who has done more than anyone to knit together the civil rights and environmental movements—gave a sermon of the kind that the cathedral has rarely seen, a soaring and crawling tour of our folly and our hope. “This is our lunch-counter movement for the 21st century,” he said, and in that moment every Rockefeller would have gone to jail with him.

Maybe even more so a minute later, when he introduced singer Antonique Smith, one of the stars of the album he’s produced of contemporary artists covering great environmental anthems. Smith—who’s listened, I think, to some Mahalia Jackson in her time—offered her remake of Marvin Gaye’s classic “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” probably the greatest ecological song ever written.

There, at 110th and Amsterdam, with the words of that great urban bard mixing with the earnest promises of the Rockefellers, it felt like history was finally moving in the right direction. Fast enough? Of that there is no guarantee, given the speed with which the physical planet is now changing. But the pace of our moral response is accelerating (now that the Rockefellers have divested, what excuse does anyone else have?). The fight is on.