As heat waves, wildfires, storms, and floods become ever more deadly, Flanagan explores the groundswell of action in which citizens of all ages, races, and political stripes struggle to understand each other and the enormous challenges humans face as they fight companies and governments which are willfully blind to the climate change dangers we face as a society. Flanagan takes readers on a personal journey through her environmental direct-action experiences to understand how we can form coalitions and actually make a difference. Moreover, Flanagan exposes the "illusion of separation” - the fallacy that humans can thrive in a dying world - an idea at the root of interlocking environmental crises.
Sarah Willie-LeBreton, President of Smith College, says: “With a capacious heart, an unerring moral compass, and consummate evidence-based research, Eileen Flanagan shows that, together, we have the power to rescue the planet from a path of greed and self-destruction, and, in the process, come to know ourselves and each other. Flanagan has given us both a history of and a blueprint for our mutual liberation.”
Eileen Flanagan is author of The Wisdom to Know the Difference and Renewable. Flanagan has confronted corporate CEOs, has been arrested alongside Indigenous water protectors, Black preachers, and fellow Quakers, and shepherded a scrappy group to pressure a $4 billion-a-year bank to stop financing mountaintop removal coal mining. Flanagan earned a BA from Duke and an MA from Yale.