BRUNSWICK

Climate activists and students are turning up the heat on Bowdoin College to divest itself of investments in fossil fuels.

A conference call is being held this morning by internationally known climate activist Bill McKibben — along with Matthew Goodrich of Bowdoin Climate Action, Max Sorto of Sustainable Endowments Institute, Jesse Pyles of Unity College and Glen Brand of Sierra Club Maine — to outline how college trustees might be pressured into nixing the college’s investments in companies associated with fossil fuels.

The call is part of a nationwide campus campaign initiated by Unity College, which said it was the first to divest.

Unity College President Stephen Mulkey warned in a November 2012 opinion piece in The Times Record that “those within higher education must now do something they have largely avoided at all costs: confront the policy makers who refuse to accept scientific reality.

“The colleges and universities of this nation have billions invested in fossil fuels. Like the funding of public campaigns to deny climate change, such investments are fundamentally unethical,” Mulkey wrote.

Bowdoin College President Barry Mills is on record opposing any agreement to divest the endowment of fossil fuels, telling the Bowdoin Orient in December, “At this point, we’re not prepared to commit to divest from fossil fuels.

“But I would never say never,” Mills told The Bowdoin Orient.

“Management of the endowment is squarely situated with our Board of Trustees and, to some extent with the president of the college,” said Mills. “It is not something which at Bowdoin — or frankly any other institution — is subject to a large democratic effort as to how the money is invested.”

Unity’s endowment — approximately $10 million — is finger food compared to Bowdoin’s $904 million cache.

Brand, the call facilitator, was more optimistic.

Cultural change always starts slowly and with faltering first steps, he said.

“This is an ongoing effort that was started by students at Bowdoin, who reached out to (McKibben’s grassroots website) www.350.org, and also reached out to Sierra Club’s Maine chapter, to see what we could do to help. For the most part we’re talking about oil, coal and natural gas companies which are profiting from our worsening climate disruption crisis,” Brand said.

“The reason for the call is to talk about this growing and somewhat controversial campaign on the Bowdoin campus to ask President Mills to divest, as well as to show that this can be done and there are good reasons to do it.”

Middlebury College has announced plans to investigate the feasibility of divesting its endowment as part of the campaign. The Unity College Board of Trustees voted to divest from fossil fuels, and Hampshire College in Massachusetts has effectively divested by passing a sustainable investment policy, according to McKibben. Students at Swarthmore College also are petitioning for divestment.

Locally, the movement has taken hold with Bowdoin Climate Action, a campus student group that already has asked for Mills’s support.

A petition asking Bowdoin trustees to consider the issue had 470 signatures — nearly a quarter of the student population — at the end of 2012.

There is a precedent: In the 1980s, Bowdoin halted investments in companies doing business with the South African government because of apartheid; in 2006, it did the same with the Sudanese government in response to the genocide in Darfur.

Mills explained that in these instances, “there was widespread national and international agreement that the subjects that we were dealing with were abhorred.”

Mills said that climate change has not generated the same universal consensus.

Bowdoin College also is committed to “carbon neutrality” to reduce its carbon footprint by 2020.

“One college divesting of its fossil fuel investments doesn’t do anything,” Brand admitted. “But one as distinguished as Bowdoin doing it is a signal that we really need to make changes from the dirty energy path that we’re on.”

A public forum regarding fossil fuel divestment on campus is slated for 7 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 9. The forum in Kresge Auditorium is sponsored by Bowdoin Climate Action.

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