Common Ground: Stories of Resistance and Healing from the Movement to Protect the Earth

Weaving stories from diverse communities, a Quaker Irish-American activist calls for solidarity and a collective response to the environmental disaster due to climate change.

Traces the history of racist divisions and unequal access to power that have facilitated our current crisis, showing how everyone can join forces to make change and build a better world for all.

As heat waves, wildfires, storms, and floods become ever more deadly, it has become apparent that we have a shared stake in protecting the air, water, and climate--for ourselves and for future generations. There is a groundswell of action as citizens of all ages struggle to address the problem--some commit civil disobedience or move money out of fossil fuels.

In Common Ground, veteran Quaker activist, facilitator, and teacher Eileen Flanagan takes us on a personal journey through her environmental direct-action experiences as well as her relationships with community elders to understand how we can form coalitions to actually make a difference. Flanagan shows that ＂the illusion of separation＂ 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. But we are at a new moment in human history.

Amid the chaos and conflict of our times, people are stretching their hands across old divides and are ready to take action. 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, who is both the former Secretary General of Amnesty International and former Executive Director of Greenpeace 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 with 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.