In My Third Act: Dan Terpstra on Bridging Science, Faith, and Activism

In January, we spoke with Dan Terpstra, a Third Actor who lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Dan has been involved with Third Act from the very beginning, when it was just an idea that Bill McKibben and a few others had.

Currently, he serves as the Fossil Free Finance Liaison for Third Act Faith and manages its technology. He is also the outgoing Co-Facilitator of Third Act Tennessee, its Technology Lead, and volunteers on the Digi-Comms team.

Scientist to Environmentalist

Dan grew up in a tight-knit Dutch farming community in northwest Indiana. As a kid he was fascinated by the U. S. space program and science in general. “If anyone had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would have said I wanted to be an astronaut,” says Dan. Science fiction was pretty much all he read. His interest in science led him to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. However, Dan eventually spent his career in computer science, and now also sees himself as someone with an engineering mind. “I like to fix things, to solve problems.” 

When Dan and his wife, Peggy, started raising their three children, one problem that began to interest Dan was consumerism. In addition to supporting their family, they were running a small software development business, which got Dan thinking about the economics of consumption, sustainability, and the possibilities of voluntary simplicity

“My thinking migrated from voluntary simplicity to sustainability, and from sustainability to climate, and eventually to energy,” says Dan.
”As a scientist, energy was something that I could get my hands around because I understood a little bit more about energy and how that fit into the whole scheme. And I felt that energy was something we could do something about and particularly fossil fuels.” In 2012 Dan read Bill McKibben’s Rolling Stone article “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” which laid out the case for divestment from fossil fuels and launched 350.org’s divestment movement. 

Becoming an Activist

Dan didn’t start out seeing himself as an activist. “I was a scientist. I was objective. I was disconnected from all that messy people business,” he says. But when he retired, McKibben’s Rolling Stone article was still on his mind so he and a friend went to Washington DC in February 2013 for the Forward on Climate rally on the Capitol Mall. It was a very cold day and by late afternoon all they cared about was getting warm. They ducked into a church where an event was being held to present various ways to carry the work forward. Dan found his way to a session on divestment. “We sat in this big circle and they went around the circle as is so often done, introducing ourselves, and it was what university are you associated with or what faith group or other group that might consider divestment. Going around the room, there were Methodists and there was a Unitarian and there was the whole gamut. And I said I was Presbyterian. And all of a sudden the conversation stopped and they said, we don’t have a Presbyterian.”

I was a scientist. I was objective. I was disconnected from all that messy people business

So Dan returned home and worked with others to bring a proposal to the next General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA to divest from fossil fuels. ”It was the classic thing,” says Dan. “I didn’t step back fast enough when they said, well, who’s gonna lead us? So I ended up being the moderator of the volunteer group that brought that whole issue to the church.” Eight years and several failed attempts later, the church voted to divest its holdings in Exxon, Chevron, Marathon, Valero and Phillips 66. 

Earlier, in 2011 Dan was taking his son to Vanderbilt University in Nashville when he saw a poster that said Bill McKibben was coming there to speak. Dan found an email address for Bill and invited him to speak in Oak Ridge. To his surprise McKibben responded right away, saying he was too busy right then but to contact him again. A year later Dan tried again and got a similar reply. Finally, in late 2012 Dan saw that Bill was going to be speaking at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, not far from Oak Ridge and reached out to Bill with another invitation. This time Bill said he’d come if Dan could get a big enough crowd. “When I asked how big is big enough, Bill just said ‘You’ll know.’ We turned out about a thousand people when Bill came to Oak Ridge,” says Dan. 

The Beginning of Third Act

Dan became involved in Third Act when it was still an idea in Bill McKibben’s head. In late 2021, Bill announced he was stepping back from his weekly New Yorker column to organize older Americans. “In that final column Bill asked anyone interested to get in touch, so I did. A few weeks later Anna Goldstein called me, we talked for about 45 minutes and I’ve been involved in Third Act ever since.” In early December, Dan joined a call with about 20 other people to figure out what this Third Act thing should look like. Dan and Pat Almonrode, another early volunteer, had both organized faith groups for climate in the past so they proposed the idea of a faith based affinity group. Working with B. Fulkerson they defined what a working group would look like and in January 2022 launched Third Act Faith. 

Leadership Journey

The first time Dan saw himself as a leader was when he was asked to join his church’s leadership team. “I had no clue what I was doing but three years later I’d survived it,“ says Dan. Later he became involved with Living Waters for the World, a church affiliated non-profit that trains US teams to assist communities with water treatment systems in Central America and Africa. As part of that project he got involved in a teaching role which allowed him to make connections across the national church community. 

Dan is modest about his entry into leadership, saying that Oak Ridge, home to the Oak Ridge National Laboratories, “has a lot of introverted scientists” so he didn’t have to show much leadership capacity to stand out. He recalled his terror at the undergraduate speech class that was required for graduation and how that terror only gradually eased when he had to make scientific presentations in graduate school. The Living Waters project with his church gave him an opportunity to lead on an issue of moral and ethical significance on a national level and contributed to his feeling of confidence as a leader. 

If I think that something could push the cause forward, I’m willing to do it, but I guess I would classify myself more as an instigator than a leader, more as somebody who can twist arms and get other people excited about something and ready to make things happen.

After learning the ropes in helping to establish the Faith Working Group, Dan was eager to see a Tennessee group, too. “But I was smarter this time,” says Dan. He was facilitating an adult Sunday school class, based on Katherine Hayhoe’s idea of the importance of talking about climate change. So he challenged a member of that class to organize Tennessee’s only 3.21.23 bank protest, which led to the start of Third Act Tennessee. The Tennessee working group launched in late 2023. Dan recently stepped down as one of its Co-Facilitators and continues to manage technology for the group. 

Looking back on his leadership journey, Dan says, “If I think that something could push the cause forward, I’m willing to do it, but I guess I would classify myself more as an instigator than a leader, more as somebody who can twist arms and get other people excited about something and ready to make things happen.”

In any case, Dan retains his scientist’s love of the objective and the measurable. As for hope, Dan finds it not in wishing for something but in figuring out what will make a positive difference and then going and doing it. And getting other people to do it, too. 

Dan Terpstra

Born in Chicago and raised in Northwest Indiana, Dan and his wife, Peggy, raised three kids in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Trained as a chemist, Dan spent his career in computer science, first as a technologist for several companies in East Tennessee, then as a commercial Macintosh software entrepreneur, and finally as a supercomputer scientist with the University of Tennessee.

These days, when they’re not on the road with their tiny teardrop camper, Dan and Peggy shuttle between their home of 40+ years in Oak Ridge and their second home in Nashville where he spends time with his kids and two (soon-to-be three) grandkids.

Dan’s most satisfying recent moment was commissioning a 20 kW solar installation on the roof of his church in Oak Ridge. The ball is rolling and won’t be stopped; we’ve all just gotta keep pushing.

Jane Fleishman

Jane Fleishman is a Third Actor residing in Nashville, TN who is regularly pulled to NYC where her first grandchild lives and to the Southwest where so many of her other family members live. She is retired from a social work career mainly focused on creating and promoting volunteer and civic leadership opportunities for youth in their First Act.