Quotes from Published Reviews of Common Ground
Flanagan, a Quaker and environmental activist, weighs in on the underlying causes of the climate crisis and offers nonviolent strategies to combat it in her strong debut guide… Well researched and impassioned, this successfully mixes big ideas with frank advice.
Throughout the book, Flanagan’s knack for vivid description helps readers feel as though they are gaining first-hand experience. . . The many practical tips could easily come alive and fuel both the strategy and creativity needed for new winning campaigns.
Common Ground reads like a climate activist travel journal: a collection of “lessons in resistance and solidarity” that Flanagan has picked up along the way in her life-changing journey to protect the earth. . . For those looking to follow suit in their own change work, this book is invaluable.
Endorsement Blurbs for Common Ground
In these times of prophecies, change and immense challenge, the future is best determined by collective spiritually based movements who work together. This book shares insights into the stories of that convergence.
In Common Ground, Eileen Flanagan guides us toward the longview, helping to illuminate our deep interconnectedness and the very real capacity that we have to harness people-power. She does so by reminding us that separation is an illusion and that we have the collective ability to actively co-create the future that we most want to inhabit.
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 has both the breadth of campaigning experience and the depth of heart required to be a reliable colleague, guide and teacher–this is the right book for a moment when our government is trying to divide us, and when we must respond with real and meaningful unity.
We are living through a time of gut-wrenching losses, when illusions are cracking open. As author Eileen Flanagan journeys across continents, she offers us stories we need: tales of connection, where the fiercest resistance is stitched with spiritual insight and grounded in the steady craft of nonviolent strategy. Common Ground is a timely and compelling read—one that meets the moment with heart and vision.
Whether you live next to an oil refinery or are inadvertently invested in one, Common Ground shows how our fates are intertwined, and how we need love and courage to build a better world for all.
Eileen Flanagan puts into words what history reveals as a powerful truth. When people of faith and spirit get up and get organized, and go into the streets and halls of power calling for change, transformation becomes possible. There’s no message more vital right now.
If you like heartening books by positive, engaged people who act out of deep conviction, Eileen Flanagan’s book is for you. You’ll be encouraged as well by comrades whose work she describes — diverse movers and shakers elsewhere in the U.S. and as far away as India.