Common Ground

di Eileen Flanagan (Autore)

Seven Stories Press, 2025

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. The book features reporting and interviews with a range of individuals and groups, including: Gina Peltier, an Ojibwe woman who is arrested for praying over the narrow headwaters of the Mississippi River, to protect her people and life downstream. A white community in Louisiana that insists it is not affected by the chemical plant their Black neighbors are fighting a few blocks away. Louisiana oil and gas industry leaders who meet at a New Orleans hotel that flooded during Hurricane Katrina, who won’t even mention climate change—until they are interrupted by grassroots activists who stride courageously to the stage. Minh Nguyen, a spiky-haired son of Vietnamese immigrants, who shares lessons on power from the vibrant multi-racial coalition that worked to prevent a new gas plant in New Orleans East. Members of the Navajo Nation who successfully advocated for the closing of a coal plant and then applied Indigenous values to the creation of new green jobs for their people. An ongoing direct action campaign to take on Vanguard, the powerful global asset manager, which turns out to be the biggest investor in the companies destroying the frontline communities profiled in this book.

• Autore: Eileen Flanagan
• Anno edizione: 2025
• Editore: Seven Stories Press
• Compatibilità: Tutti i dispositivi (eccetto Kindle)
• Layout: Other
• EAN: 9781644214794

Testo in en