When Boomers Come Together: Our new organization, Third Act, is mobilizing the generation with the most political and economic influence to fight for a working climate and a working democracy.

• Author: Mckibben, Bill

The changes we need to make over the next few years to safeguard our democracy and stabilize the climate are going to be hard. Without the active participation of a good proportion of Americans over the age of sixty--a.k.a. "Boomers"--these changes will be impossible. That's why we've formed Third Act: because we badly need experienced people across as many fields and industries as we can get to join this fight. We've got, literally, no time to waste.

Why is it so important that Boomers mobilize? With seventy million of us in the United States alone, we are a population larger than France; and, with about the same number of people in this country turning sixty each day as there are being born, we're still growing. We vote in a much larger proportion than any other group, meaning that if we want to, we can block any real political change--or bring it about.

Boomers (born 1946-1964) and the Silent Generation (born 1928-1945) also hold about 65 percent of the nation's financial assets, compared with about 6 percent for millennials. That may or may not be fair, but it's very real, and it means that if we let our life savings be loaned to those who would build pipelines and frack wells, the temperature is guaranteed to rise.

But we can turn those things around. We possess the political and financial power to make real shifts possible. Washington, D.C., and Wall Street should shake at the prospect that we might actually come together as a generation to demand progressive change.

This isn't an impossible dream. In fact, our generational DNA is tightly tied to transformative, liberating change. When we were young, we either participated in or bore witness to truly remarkable shifts: the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the anti-war movement.

Movement is the right word. We were in motion. That motion took us into the streets. On the first Earth Day in 1970, twenty million Americans marched, one in ten out of the country's then-population, amounting to perhaps the biggest single demonstration in U.S. history.

But, clearly, something changed. While many of us kept up the struggle throughout our lives--the subscription list of The Progressive, I would hazard, is filled with just such people--our generation as a whole did not keep moving. We settled in. If our first act was about liberation, our second act had more to do with consumerism than with citizenship.

We could talk for a long time about the reasons. Perhaps we thought the battles...