Common Ground due out August 19!
In Common Ground, veteran organizer Eileen Flanagan weaves together inspiring stories of grassroots organizing against the huge companies most responsible for climate change. As heat waves, wildfires, storms, and floods become ever more deadly, the book describes citizens of all ages, races and political stripes who are working to understand each other and join forces to protect our air, water, and climate in the face of a government hijacked by special interests.
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 we are separate from each other and the Earth that sustains us—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.
Links to purchase coming soon!
Advance Praise
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 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.
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 when illusions are cracking open. In such a moment, Eileen Flanagan’s timely Common Ground invites us into a deeper conversation— not only to grieve the gut-wrenching losses, but to tend the flame of tantalizing connections on the other side. As she journeys across continents, Eileen offers us stories we need: tales where the fiercest resistance is stitched with spiritual insight and grounded in the steady craft of nonviolent strategy. This is a timely and compelling read—one that meets the moment with heart and vision.
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.
