Affirming Older Adults as Champions for Intergenerational Justice and Climate Reform

• Date: 01 January 2024

Something to Think About Arming Older Adults as Champions for Intergenerational Justice and Climate Reform By Aliya Prosser, Trinity College Older adults need to be included in advocacy on climate change as many are interested and adversely impacted by this issue. Age is one of the first things we observe about someone. When we associate someone’s age with distinct life experiences and behaviors, we are imagining who the person is in relation to specific cultures and capacities. Therefore aging, a highly individual experience, is oftentimes understood through socially constructed generalizations surrounding what older persons know and practice. Several of these impressions are grounded in negative, narrow attitudes that are frequently paired with aging in society. As they are adopted, the order of our humanity is influenced by age-discrimination. This mode of inequity is best described as “ageism”: the imposition of stereotypes and prejudices against a generation. The older adult population is susceptible to ageism as older persons often experience high rates of cognitive impairment, illness, risk-taking behaviors, healthcare spending, incarceration, poverty, and other adverse conditions that impair their functional abilities 1 . Between these issues and other costs of aging, younger generations and older adults themselves tend to devalue people of older ages, perceiving them as too incapacitated and disconnected from reality to provide any credible contributions to the world. In fact, 1 in 2 people are ageist against older people 2 . While they are already prone to an abundance of wellness and financial challenges in the aging process, older persons are vulnerable to the marginalization that results from the spread of ageism as their identities and needs are shut out of critical movements for change. Because older adults endure inordinate rates of ageism, they are often denied representation in modern climate reform initiatives. Often portrayed in mass media as the generation that behaves complacently in the face of global warming, lawmakers frequently exclude older adults from legal action designed to address climate change by targeting younger adults as the central audience for their policy interventions and dismissing older persons’ perspectives on environmental justice. Therefore, media outlets Bifocal January-February 2024 Vol. 45, No. 3 95 Working adults often experience a loss of earnings. And older adults may face health risks because of the...