Our monthly newsletter featuring poems, art, music, science, op-eds, and member profiles:

April 6, 2025,

March 2, 2025,

February 2, 2025,

January 5, 2025,

November 24, 2024,

September 23, 2024,

July 28, 2024,

June 30, 2024,

May 27, 2024,

April 14, 2024,

March 17, 2024,

February 18, 2024

John’s life as an activist began when he was twelve years old. He was living in suburban Westchester when the local highway authority proposed a parkway be re-routed to run through a patch of woods where he loved to play. His response was to pull up the stakes marking the path the highway was supposed to follow—John’s first act of protest.

Like so many members of Third Act, in the early 1970s John protested the Vietnam War and joined the burgeoning environmental movement. A turning point in his activism came in the 1990’s when New York State planned to authorize a 210 megawatt coal fired power plant to be built in Halfmoon, New York at the confluence of Mohawk and Hudson Rivers. John helped organize the opposition, rallying the affected downwind states, and gathering support from a wide variety of groups including hunters and fishermen like Trout Unlimited.  “We make a mistake when we identify just as lefties. The climate crisis is everyone’s problem and we need all people of good will with us!” John helped lead the fight against the coal burner for five years. And they won. The plant was never built. “I’d been an activist my whole life,” John said. “That’s when I became an organizer.”

John’s long history as an activist/organizer is marked by many moments of revelation and joy.  As part of a group of musicians called The Hoping Machine, a group founded by Sarah Lee Guthrie, Woody’s granddaughter, he sang songs of protest at demonstrations.  And along with Michael Richardson and Marjorie McCoy, he founded Rivers & Mountains GreenFaith, an inter-faith climate and environmental action group. John describes a transformative moment during a protest when faith groups marching from both sides of the Hudson River converged on the Rip Van Winkle Bridge just as a rainbow suddenly appeared above them.

When John first worked with Third Act Central’s organizers as part of a national day of action against dirty banks in 2023, he was impressed. “They were very thorough, very supportive, and had a special focus: they were calling on the untapped potential of us elders, understanding that we had a unique & powerful role to play. I joined up.”

John has occasionally used his skill as a photographer to document Third Act demonstrations and protests. During the Summer of Heat demonstrations, as he videoed fellow Third Actors lying down on the hot pavement in front of Citibank to be arrested, he was inspired by the extent of their determination to bring about change. In December, when Third Act campaigned in Albany for the Climate Change Superfund Act, as a sign of his commitment, John took arrest for the first time.

So – why does John do this? “Because I can. I have a basic measure of comfort that far too many of my fellow citizens don’t have,” he says. “Some things you do simply because they need doing. You don’t know whether they’re going to work or not. But I do know we can’t afford the luxury of despair. You do what you have to do.” 

As someone who has been exploring Buddhist teachings, John reflects on the Buddhist notion of “don’t know” mind: “We don’t know how this will turn out, and that’s OK. In not knowing, not having pre-conceived expectations, you can be flexible and adapt to changing circumstances with creativity.”

“I have no history of being an activist at all,” Donna told us. “My teaching was all consuming.” It was only after her retirement and her work as a volunteer at two non-profit associations in Utica that Donna found Third Act. She quickly claimed her space by becoming TAUNY’s social media expert, something that isn’t a common skill among elders, and a skill we sorely need. “Third Act gives me a chance to do what I can to get the message out: Life on earth is important.” 

Donna also brings her commitment to fighting the climate crisis to her students at SUNY Polytechnic. “I write my own curriculum, so I insert the struggle to protect the planet into my Spanish language classes.” Donna teaches her students about the efforts of the indigenous peoples in Ecuador and Peru fighting to keep the international oil companies from extracting fossil fuels from the Amazon basin. “It’s hard to tell if it’s sticking, but I do what I can.”

“What drew you to teaching Spanish?” we asked. Donna told us that immersing herself in a foreign language offered a window into other cultures, ethnicities, and countries, while teaching gave her a chance to develop her ability to communicate and work with others. She grew up in a suburb of Kansas City, where her parents were conservative Republicans. Her mother passed away in 2007. During the last decade, her father and stepmother, along with her siblings— the entire family except for Donna—became strong Trump supporters. 

“How do you stay connected to your family when you’re at odds with their politics, particularly the politics of climate?” we asked. In a polarized country, Donna confronts a sensitive issue that many of us can identify with. Donna says she sees no upside in arguing. “No one in my family knows that I’ve become involved with Third Act. They know I recognize that climate change is real, but that’s it. My father passed away recently, but he and my stepmother believed that any climate change we observe is the result of natural processes, the “climate has always changed” explanation of a lot of climate change deniers. It’s sad to be a ‘disappointment’ to the family, but I try to keep the connection.”

Despite being at odds with her family’s politics, Donna knows that she absorbed certain sensibilities from them which played a role in bringing her to Third Act. Her profound love of the natural world stems from her father and brothers’ love of hunting and fishing, which she always considered more an excuse for being out in nature than coming home with game and fish. Donna’s own experiences being out in nature include waiting on a Costa Rican beach for sea turtles during a lightning storm, hiking the Salkantay Trail to Machu Picchu in Peru, and walking the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain, at least until a broken ankle forced her to stop!

These days, being in contact with the outdoors, with the plants and creatures of her own yard, is Donna’s passion. She is currently training to become a Master Gardener Volunteer in a program offered by the Cornell Cooperative Extension in Oneida County. And as you can imagine, Donna tends her own extensive raised-bed garden, growing heirloom tomatoes from seed, pole beans, sugar snap peas, peppers, potatoes, garlic, summer and winter squash. Beets and carrots, however, have eluded her expertise. Donna loves it all, even the failures. That’s what gardening is all about. A sense of being part of the natural order is a calming project. As Voltaire’s Candide advises: “We must take care of our garden.” No better time than now.

We hope Donna doesn’t mind if we call on her for helpful tips with our own gardens, and much-needed assistance with social media. 

Alan Cole believes in collective action to get things done. Third Act Upstate New York, Indivisible Mohawk Valley, Beyond Plastics – he’s a member of all of them. Plus he is on the Democratic Committee in Oneida County. “When you work together you can effect more significant change than working alone.” His commitment to collective action to confront the climate crisis and to protect our democracy runs deep.

Alan is a child of the sixties. In college, he joined the anti-war movement, which gave him a taste for working as a part of coalitions committed to change. In 1976, he moved to Westchester County to work for IBM, and before long he joined the county Democratic Committee, serving for more than twenty years, variously as chair or co-chair of his local town committee. He also served briefly on the Westchester County Board of Legislators. One of his top priorities there was calling attention to the growing plague of microplastics. Alan knows how government works, and why you have to push hard to get things done.

Alan believes that growing up on a small dairy farm in rural Michigan shaped his values. Life on a dairy farm is demanding, to say the least. He learned hard work from his parents. They were church-going people with a strong commitment to education. Alan’s mother taught school. His father managed the farm, worked an outside, full-time job, and also found time to play the viola in a nearby symphony orchestra. Alan helped with the chores such as milking the cows before school. He always felt a deep connection to the natural world. He developed a passion for biking, canoeing and kayaking – activities that were part of the Michigan landscape with its many lakes and waterways. It’s not hard to see why he’s committed to helping to ameliorate the climate crisis.

After Alan retired, he and his wife moved in 2019 to Clinton in the Mohawk Valley, where he devoted himself full-time to collective action. He joined the local Democratic Committee and helped to flip his red district to elect Democrat John Mannion to Congress. To heighten his climate activism, he joined Third Act Upstate New York. And, as a long-time member of Beyond Plastics, he helped Third Act Upstate New York become a Beyond Plastics affiliate. “Cross-fertilization is critical to making change,” Alan told us. And since Alan is still a   member of Indivisible, he shares action plans with all three organizations – like the plan for the three-day demonstration in Albany in support of the SuperFund Act, where he joined in civil disobedience.

“That demonstration was the first time I had been arrested,” Alan told us. “It wasn’t as scary as I expected. The State Police were professional and courteous. And it’s a great example of what individuals working together can do. After all, Hochul signed the bill!”

“Working with all these groups,” Alan says. “It does take a fair amount of time. Thank goodness I’m retired!”

As a former senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York City, Kim Knowlton focused on the health impacts of climate change and strategies to make health preparedness a more central feature of city and state climate adaptation plans. Her research has included heat-and ozone-related mortality and illnesses, and the connections between climate, pollen, allergies and asthma, and infectious disease. Kim has been on the faculty of environmental health sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health since 2005.

How people come to their chosen field is often mysterious and surprising. Only looking in the rear-view mirror does it seem to make some kind of sense. Third Actor Kim Knowlton’s path was not straightforward, though in hindsight, the skills and knowledge she acquired by trying various and seemingly wildly unrelated endeavors added up to a ground-breaking career for which, without knowing it, she’d been preparing all her life. Kim participated in the early days of an entirely new field, climate-health science, which is now a pillar of the environmental movement, though Kim says, “We still have a lot of work to do to connect those dots for people.”

Here’s the trajectory: at Cornell, Kim went from pre-med to geology, studying radioactive waste siting issues as an undergraduate; from there to NYC working in text book publishing by day, a performance artist by night (yes, a performance artist)!  Kim was part of a nervy, seven member group whose  shows often had a political edge, sometimes taking stories from the news, including one about white supremacy, which was well ahead of its time, and one that examined our stories about the end of the world. “That was 30 years ago,” Kim told us, “We’re still dealing with the same issues, kicking the can down the road to the next generation.”

Kim lived a double life of publishing and performance art for seven years before she felt the call of her first love—science.  At Hunter College, she completed a masters in environmental and occupational health science, and went on to work with a consulting organization that helped citizens’ groups review proposals for radioactive waste sites. When a company applied for a license to bury radioactive waste near a small community in West Texas, the direction of her life changed once again. Kim and her team discovered a potentially dangerous fault zone in the area, and local activists opposed to radioactive waste siting near their town used Kim’s team’s scientific analysis to get the license application overturned. “I saw how ordinary people could take action and win a fight for environmental justice with the help of science,” Kim says. 

The success combining science with local citizens’ advocacy against powerful interests was a “road to Damascus” moment for Kim, and once again, she was inspired to make a dramatic shift. She enrolled in Columbia University where she earned a doctorate in environmental health science.  When her research mentor was awarded one of EPA’s first grants to study climate change and health, Kim chose to work with him. Research on the relationship of climate change and health was unusual. It’s hard to believe, but in 2000, few people were studying those climate-health connections which are so apparent today. Kim became one of the first specialists in an entirely new field.

At the time, even the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of America’s premier organizations using science, policy, and law to confront the climate crisis, didn’t have a scientist who focused on how climate change affects human health. They hired Kim to fill a position that hadn’t formerly existed. It was a dream job that lasted for 17 years, growing in importance year after year, collaborating with other scientists working across the field, developing epidemiological studies, analyzing environmental data, and bringing the information to the public, the press, and to briefings on the Hill with members of Congress. 

Kim herself is as amazed as anyone by the serendipity of it all, how all these strands came together.  “Lucky, lucky me: I was in the right place at the right time a bunch of times in life in ways that connected strands of work and thinking that used to be separate.” And though you might think that the performance art piece was an aberration, it all fits. “The politics is consistent, and the training really helped me to communicate confidently and forcefully to get people’s attention… We’re all performing in one role or another most of the time— so it was great practice and so much fun.”

Kim joined Third Act Upstate New York in 2024 after being galvanized hearing Bill McKibben speak years earlier to NRDC. After all these years, she still believes that science and action can work together, that “writing articles doesn’t do squat without activism.” She participated in the Summer of Heat protests at Citibank, where she was a “singer and screamer,” loved it, and took part in the protests in Albany in the beginning of December designed to motivate the governor to sign the Climate Superfund bill.

“I’m an optimist,” she says. “It moves me to see how many people are determined NOT to kick the can of climate, environment and health problems down the road again to future generations. And I want to keep learning from them.”

When Evan is asked what motivates him to volunteer, he smiles and says, “I blame my mother.” His mother was a college educated farm girl from southeastern Kansas who grew up in the Depression and the Dust Bowl. For her, the biggest sin in life was to waste anything, especially water. She was very active in her community and she made sure her four children understood that community is what is important in life. When Evan and his two brothers went out to shovel snow for neighbors to earn a few bucks, there were always one or two addresses they were told to take care of and to not take any money. They did occasionally get cookies!

Being a lifelong science nerd, he has watched as the science and public awareness of climate change have grown. This growth accelerated in the mid ‘90’s: from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) through the 2015 Paris Accords continuing to today’s impassioned activism and organizations like Third Act. Throughout this time, Evan’s personal commitment increased to the point where, a few years ago, he committed to making the mitigation of climate change his ‘second career’.

Since 2006 he has been a very active member of the Rotary Club. He was extremely pleased when the Rotary Foundation Trustees and International Board of Directors unanimously approved an additional focus for Rotary: supporting the environment. Since 2020, Rotary, an international organization with 1.4 million members, has become increasingly involved in climate issues. Currently Evan is working in the Central New York Rotary to raise climate awareness. When he served as a Rotary District Governor, 21-22, his District Conference focused almost exclusively on climate change.

Third Act came to the forefront of Evan’s mind at the NYC “March to End Fossil Fuels” in September, 2023. He had heard of Third Act, but seeing Third Actors in action among the tens of thousands of protestors made an impact. Since joining Third Act what has impressed him most is the level of professionalism. “The web site, the e-mails, the messaging, the leadership are all top notch,” he says. He had investigated other organizations which seemed well-intentioned but lacked the ability to put together “a well-oiled machine.” “Being elders means Third Actors have been out in the real world as professionals with responsibilities and jobs that give them the tools to really accomplish things.”

As a Third Actor, Evan has gone all in. He was fully committed to go to Washington DC to join Bill McKibben and other Third Actors to protest Liquid Natural Gas production. He attended the online nonviolent training sessions and was prepared to get arrested if it came to that. Then Biden did the right thing and put the LNS on hold. But Evan is hoping to put his training to use when the next opportunity arises.

More recently Evan joined TA-UNY Rochester folks in a rally at the Chase Bank protesting their financial support of the fossil fuel industry, and he attended the climate storytelling workshop at the Chautauqua institute, an intergenerational collaboration sponsored by Third Act Upstate New York.

With the relentless grind of daily climate news, both bad and good, Evan recharges his batteries by running, occasional open water swims, and repairing broken, useful objects giving them new life.

The primary reasons Evan is committed to climate change work are his three adult children, three grandkids, and several great nieces and nephews. “What little I can do,” he says, “to make the world a better place for them, I try to do.”

Cookie Barker grew up on a dairy farm in Pennsylvania, always outdoors, hunting, fishing – “just being,“ she says. “Since I started to walk, the environment was my life.” Her interest in science grew out of her love of nature, particularly how organisms interact with the natural world around them. Inevitably, biology became her passion. Her dream was to be a college professor with a focus on ecology. But after completing a Masters degree in zoology, she returned home to the family farm to escape the stress of graduate school. That fall she suffered a near fatal farm accident and after a long recovery, decided to leave farming and devote herself to teaching young people. She abandoned the PhD track, completed a teaching certificate, and began a life-long career teaching science to 7th – 12th grade students in a small public school in the Adirondacks.

Cookie fell in love with teaching almost instantly. “Every time I witnessed that magical moment of students moving to the edge of their seats with expressions of curiosity and questioning, fully engaged in science, I knew I was where I belonged.” Her love of teaching grew even deeper working in the intimate family atmosphere of the small North Country school where she drew close to the children and their parents. “Making the teaching even sweeter was the ease of working collaboratively with staff and having agency to explore creativity in what and how I taught,” she says. Her focus in all her courses was the environment and its interplay with evolution.

What shocked her was the opposition to critical, scientific thinking pervasive in America, especially in rural areas. Word of Life International, an organization advocating so-called “creation science,” was headquartered in her community. Year after year, Word of Life pressured her to include “creation science” in her classroom, which she always refused to do. Cookie had a gift for teaching children respectfully, but without bowing to pseudo-science. Her approach increasingly focused on the science behind the climate crisis, how and why the human use of fossil fuels is a threat to our planet.

Cookie’s commitment to science and how it’s taught continued after she retired: Cookie started a business in the professional development of science teachers, traveling to schools across New York state, helping science teachers develop and update their lesson plans. But when COVID struck, teaching science the way she believed necessary, in-person and hands-on, became impossible, and a new chapter began, living each day doing things she enjoyed – wood working, hiking, canoeing.

It soon became clear that there was more she had to give of herself. She started looking for a connection to her community with a science theme. “I knew just who to reach out to for ideas – Scott Ireland, our fellow North Country Third Actor. Scott had relocated to her area and she knew of his interest in the biology of NY state lakes. Scott recommended she join the Schroon Lake Association (SLA), and, of course, Third Act. Cookie also knew Bill McKibben – Bill and her husband are part of a small group who canoe and camp together, calling themselves with some amusement the League of Extraordinary Adirondack Gentlemen.

Cookie joined the SLA as a board member, working to educate young people about Watershed Ecology. With Third Act, she is determined to help fight the war on science and disinformation so pervasive in rural areas. “Each day my main focus through Third Act becomes clearer to me” she says. Currently she is working with Third Act’s Uplift Democracy campaign to support Paula Collins in congressional District NY21 to defeat Elise Stefanik and Trump. “I consider Trump and Stefanik primary evils of democracy and science.” Having grown up in a rural township and after teaching science in one for 30 years, Cookie brings to the Collins campaign her understanding of people living in rural communities. As Third Act now gears up to focus on supporting climate friendly candidates in the coming election, Cookie says, “I’m realizing just how important my engagement can be to the future of our democracy.”

Cookie continues to live in the Adirondacks with her husband Mike Prescott, a retired high school principal and Adirondack historian. When she finds time to relax, she enjoys canoeing, hiking, and training her two Newfoundland dogs to participate in water rescue work and obedience and scent work trials.