Rally with Bill McKibben & Training with EQAT for Divestment at Swarthmore

Last Thursday, 43 students and alumni began the largest ever sit-in for fossil fuel divestment, asking Chris Niemczewski and Gil Kemp to reopen a productive dialogue on how we can end our investments in a rogue industry. And now, one of the world’s leading climate activist will join this sit-in. This is a huge opportunity to finally put our College on the right of history.

Rally with Bill McKibben this Thursday at 4:30pm in Upper Tarble and hear from students and alumni participating in the sit-in. This could be the largest climate action in Swarthmore’s history.

The rally will be followed by a training with Matthew Armstead and Ryan Leitner from Earth Quaker Action Team,at 6pm in Upper Tarble. We encourage everyone who attends the rally to stick around for the training and learn how you can support our sit-in. There will be pizza!

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Bill McKibben is an author and environmentalist. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He is founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement. The Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2013 winner of the Gandhi Prize and the Thomas Merton Prize, and holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities; Foreign Policy named him to their inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers, and the Boston Globe said he was “probably America’s most important environmentalist.” A former staff writer for the New Yorker, he writes frequently a wide variety of publications around the world, including the New York Review of Books, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern.

Matthew Armstead is a community builder, facilitator, and organizer in Philadelphia, PA, and he is a trainer with Training for Change. He has worked with diverse groups of people from Occupy Wall Street activists to Ivy League university students, and led sessions on a variety of topics, such as anti-oppression, strategic planning, community outreach, peer counseling, nonviolent direct action, training of trainers, and organizational development. He is currently working as a part of the grassroots, nonviolent direct action campaign, Earth Quaker Action Team.

For directions to Swarthmore College, visit: http://www.swarthmore.edu/visitors/directions-to-campus#car