Kate Aronoff ’14 Opinion Piece in NYTimes
In one of the clearest signs yet that the college fossil fuel divestment movement is being taken seriously on the national stage, The New York Times ran a series of opinion articles online yesterday discussing the effectiveness of the divestment movement. One of those articles was written by Swarthmore Mountain Justice’s very own Kate Aronoff ’14.
The articles, which ran under the headline “Is Divestment an Effective Means of Protest?” is part of The New York Times’s ”Room for Debate” series. The respondents were asked to answer the question: “Calling on companies to cut their ties with certain companies may be a worthy goal, but does it bring about change?”
Three of the five responses said, essentially, “yes,” including–of course–Kate’s. Another of these three was written by Bill McKibben, the prominent environmentalist who has interacted closely with MJ in the past. McKibben visited Swarthmore last spring.
The remaining two, one written by an anti-Apartheid activist and the other by a sustainability professor at the School for International Training, were more measured. While these two did not condemn divestment, they claimed that the political ends of divestment campaigns can only be achieved within broader contexts of activism.
Kate’s article makes reference to the upcoming “convergence” at Swarthmore. MJ has invited over a hundred student activists to Swarthmore’s campus to push for divestment during the weekend of February 23.
Did you read the piece by Price and Israel? In what sense is “Those who advocate for divestment surely demonstrate noble intentions, but they are merely absolving themselves of direct moral culpability while hiding their heads in the sand. The problems we face are real and simply cashing out and walking away won’t solve them,” a response which says “Yes” to divestment?
Parenti thinks divestment is mis-targeted and mis-conceptualized by many of its advocates, Counts thinks it’s a strategy that only makes sense if it’s part of a sustained, comprehensive campaign (by analogizing to anti-apartheid divestment), and even implies that of the components of that past campaign, it was one of the least important. (Which would be my own assessment of divestment, particularly on college campuses, in the anti-apartheid movement.)
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