James Chappel is an associate professor of history at Duke University and a senior fellow at the Duke Aging Center. His latest book is Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age.
History moves fast. Almost every day, headlines describe life-changing technologies, from self-driving cars to genome editing. But history moves slow, too. One of the benefits of historical thinking is that it asks us to think – not just about those headlines, but about the slower, long-term processes that are transforming our world, often under our noses. A thought experiment: Imagine that an alien zipped by our planet once a decade and wrote dispatches back home. What would that alien find fit to report?
Beyond the churn of daily events, there are two major features of our century that will stand out to those living in the distant future – or to extraterrestrial visitors. Each has gotten a good deal of attention, albeit in different quarters. First of all, our planet is getting hotter, which is already causing all manner of disruptive weather events. And secondly, our planet is getting older. The global collapse of birth rates, combined with improvements in public health, is transforming the demographic makeup of our species. For most of human history, most people have been young. Our entire world is organized around the rearing and instruction of the young, and the employment of the middle-aged. That world is going to have to change, as the number of children dwindles and the population of those older than 65 continues to explode in size – in Canada, in my native United States and around the world.
Both of these phenomena have excited a good deal of investment and commentary. While most countries are loath to do much about it, we do at least recognize that climate change is real, and that it is a problem, and that something ought to be done about it (by someone, anyway, and preferably someone else). The same can be said for population aging. Old-age pensions constitute a mammoth proportion of the federal budget in Canada, as they do in most developed countries. And in recent decades, the private sector has seen this as an opportunity for fabulous profits, investing in chains of nursing homes and assisted-living facilities.
But what’s most interesting, and has attracted surprisingly little comment, is the intersection of these two phenomena: Our planet is growing hotter and greyer at the same time. These twin phenomena, I submit, cannot be considered in isolation from one another.
Illustration by Marcelle Faucher. Source image(s) iStockphoto
They are not, I should note, problems of the same kind. Global warming is a disastrous reality and one that we should try to halt at all costs. An aging population is not a problem in that same sense. It is in fact a marker of social progress. People live longer because public health is better, and birth rates fall because women have more autonomy over their reproductive choices. Population aging, in short, should be welcomed as the inevitable byproduct of major social advances.
Right now, by and large, we are seeing the effects of a world in which this connection is not explored in any meaningful way. This can be seen in numerous ways. First, and most obviously, older people have been on the front lines of climate disaster around the world. A staggering proportion of the deaths in hurricanes and heat waves occur among the elderly. Hurricane Katrina, for instance, has been understood overwhelmingly through the lens of race and class, and it is absolutely true that people of colour and the poor were disproportionately affected by the 2005 storm. But it was age that produced the most extreme and depressing inequality: Well over half of those killed by the storm were over 60. That proportion looks as though it will be repeated in the wake of Hurricane Helene more recently.
And this is not just an American malady, either, even though my country is rife with poorly regulated nursing homes and underfunded welfare systems. In Europe, many older people have died in heat waves. Perhaps hurricanes are rare in Canada. But floods, droughts and wildfires are not. And in Canada, as elsewhere, many older people live alone and have fragile social networks. They often lack the ability to receive and interpret information as quickly as younger ones, and might lack the ability to act, or evacuate, with the requisite speed. Older people are especially vulnerable to the diseases, such as asthma and heart disease, that can accompany wildfires. Even heat waves are becoming more common in Canada – a country that has placed far more emphasis on preparation for cold-weather events than for warm ones.
The authors of a 2024 study explained the mitigation tactics that might be employed to help older people in Canada, especially, to weather these phenomena (pun intended). These include, for instance, the availability of cooling centres and transportation options to help older people find and access them. They recommend, too, public awareness campaigns to remind Canadians – old and young alike – of the dangers of weather emergencies and the ways that older people are uniquely threatened.
This, though, is only one side of the coin. To be sure, Canada and other countries should be finding ways to shield older populations from the ravages of climate change. But older people will also need to be part of the actual solution to climate change. That is, if we hope to use, in the aggregate, less carbon in the future, then we should be asking specifically how older people, an ever-increasing slice of that population, ought to be leading the way.
In the past half-century, the energy has been moving in precisely the wrong direction. Ever since the advent of mass consumerist prosperity after the Second World War, older people have clamoured to “get in on the action”: to consume and to spew carbon as freely as their younger peers. For centuries, older people had, by and large, led modest lives, probably living with younger kin and pitching in on the farm where they could. But starting in the 1960s, older people clamoured to live the same kinds of lives, with the same consumption patterns, as younger ones.
First of all, older people wanted to live in their own houses. Stand-alone housing, especially for one or two older people, is an ecological nightmare of heating and cooling. After the war, though, cultural norms and zoning laws alike pushed older people into their own homes. In 1971, about one-third of Canadians over the age of 75 lived with someone other than their spouse. Within just 15 years, that number was cut in half.
Secondly, older people wanted to drive. Endless driving is of course an American malady, but Canadians are not immune. Sometimes, they even drove to see one another! In the 1960s, an “international picnic” took pace in Baudette, Minn., opposite from Rainy River, Ont. “Canadian and American older people,” according to a press account, “drive as far as 200 miles to the picnic. Last year two bus loads went from Bemidji, more than 100 miles away.” In 1985, a graduate student conducted a series of surveys of older people in Richmond, B.C., and from our perspective, her findings are dispiriting. “Most of the elderly car-owners surveyed,” she concluded, preferred “their own car over public transit, regardless of whether or not existing public transportation systems were to be modified to better satisfy their needs.”
And thirdly, older people wanted to travel. Before the 1960s, travel was not considered one of the benefits of getting older. But it gradually became one, as pension systems ramped up, people started living longer, and travel became cheaper. In the 1980s and 90s, cruise ships and airlines began catering to older people as a privileged market: They were, after all, an age group that was growing, was increasingly wealthy, and with increasing amounts of time on their hands. In 1989, this very newspaper reported on the Canadian travel industry’s efforts to court senior travellers with special discounted tickets. Seniors these days, the article concluded, “have the money, time and inclination to travel, and the industry is anxious to tap that market.”
The story 'Travel industry woos seniors' surrounded by travel advertisements from The Globe and Mail's Saturday March 11, 1989 issue.The Globe and Mail
In the era of postwar largesse, in short, we created a normative ideal for old age that was extraordinarily reliant on carbon. As the older population mushrooms, and as all of us try to find ways to live with smaller carbon footprints, this will have to change. The grey population is going to have to get green.
Climate change is often depicted as a “young person’s issue”: It’s not exactly the geriatric population that is hurling paint onto artworks. The reality is of course more complex. Many older people care about climate change a good deal, and it was the boomer generation that created Greenpeace and Earth Day. But still, polls from around the world show that younger generations are more convinced than their elders that climate change is an existential risk.
This is going to have to change, because older people, like it or not, will have the reins of power for the foreseeable future. Even if we could afford to wait for today’s younger people to get old and take those reins, which we can’t, there is every indication that, absent some change in the cultural and political definition of old age, they will become just as complacent as their elders. What we need to do is redefine the meaning and purpose of old age: no longer a time to take, from the Earth and from the future, but one to give, to posterity and the planet.
This “giving” could take the form of activism. Maybe older people should be hurling paint – they have, after all, less to lose. It’s not just me saying it. In the United States, one of the most famous of all climate activists is Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org. He recently turned 60, and when he did he founded a new organization called “Third Act.” The main point was to urge his generation to claim responsibility for climate change: To a great extent, boomers caused the problem, so they should be cleaning it up. In Canada, a similar group called Seniors for Climate Action Now is pursuing the same mission, allying with Indigenous activists against pipelines and extractive industries in general.
Climate change activists from the group Extinction Rebellion spray paint a message that reads 'Life, not death for my grandchildren' on the side of the building housing the Treasury in central London, in October 2019.BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images
On a rapidly aging planet, though, older people will need to reform their personal lives, too, pioneering hyper-modern forms of aging that will rely far less on carbon. This could take, and indeed is taking, many forms, as the ideal of stand-alone housing and individualized transit loses its lustre for many people. We are, after all, suffering an epidemic of loneliness: Surely the struggle for a cleaner climate might involve the discovery of more communal and less extractive ways of living?
For many older people, this might involve a rediscovery of intergenerational living. After all, a century ago, this was the standard option for older people. There is much to like about it: It is more sustainable and communal, while also helping to resolve the explosion in housing costs and the various crises of care that have also attended the explosion in longevity. While they are able, older people can care for grandchildren; once they become disabled, they can more easily receive care from nearby children. It is little wonder that more and more families are choosing this option. By one reckoning, the number of intergenerational households in Canada has gone up by 45 per cent in just the past two decades. This does not always involve residence under the same roof, which many families are justifiably wary of: It can also be done through building an accessory dwelling unit in the backyard (often called a “granny flat”).
This will never work for everyone, though, and green aging should not be “one size fits all.” Childless, queer, divorced or disabled older people had a very difficult time a century ago. So we need solutions for senior housing, too. And experiments of this sort are taking place across North America – some of them consciously in favour of sustainable living, and others not.
Consider, for example, the various experiments in senior “co-housing.” These communities, of which there are many, feature downsized apartments in walkable settings. They are designed to allow sociability and independent living for seniors without the vast costs in terms of both carbon and money that come with independent, stand-alone housing.
I’m proposing here a new perspective on the demographic changes of our time. The decline of the birth rate and the aging of the population are normally seen as crises, which need to be resolved through more childbearing. But when we think about demography from the lens of the climate, rather than the GDP, we see something different.
An aging population can actually be an opportunity: an opportunity to imagine more sustainable and more human ways of living. Whether we like it or not, the future is going to be greyer than humanity has ever been before. It’s a vast experiment whose results will affect all of us, either as older people or those who love them.
And who knows: Maybe the experiment will be a successful one.
Photo illustration by The Globe and Mail