In Common Ground, veteran organizer Eileen Flanagan weaves together a series of stories of hard won successes in the climate change movement, including against a multinational bank in one case, and a heavily polluting fossil fuel company in another, based on grassroots organizing.
As heat waves, wildfires, storms, and floods become ever more deadly, the book describes a groundswell of action in which citizens of all ages, races and political stripes struggle to understand each other and the enormous challenges we face fighting companies and governments wilfully blind to the climate change dangers we face as a society.
A Quaker activist, facilitator, and teacher, Flanagan takes us on a personal journey through her environmental direct-action experiences as well as her relationships with community leaders to understand how we can form coalitions to actually make a difference. Flanagan shows that “the illusion of separation”—the fallacy that humans can thrive in a dying world—is at the root of interlocking environmental crises and that it’s often politicians and corporations who benefit by keeping the rest of us divided across lines of race, class, religion, and generation.
In Common Ground, Flanagan argues that more than technology or even elections, acting in solidarity with all life is humanity’s best hope for survival.
Includes a foreword by internationally acclaimed South African activist Kumi Naidoo, President of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative and former head of Greenpeace International and Amnesty International.
EILEEN FLANAGAN brings a forty-year commitment to justice to her speaking, writing, and climate leadership. From a working-class Irish American family, she has confronted corporate CEOs, prayed in their lobbies, and been arrested alongside Indigenous water protectors, Black preachers, and fellow Quakers. Nationally known for helping people to make their activism more effective and spiritually-grounded, she shepherded a scrappy group of Quakers to pressure a $4 billion-a-year bank to stop financing mountaintop removal coal mining. She earned a BA from Duke and an MA from Yale as a first-generation college student, focusing on resistance to colonialism, which she taught on the college level. The Dalai Lama endorsed her award-winning book The Wisdom to Know the Difference, and some of the best-known climate activists in the world endorsed her memoir Renewable. She lives with her husband on Lenape land in Philadelphia.