Eileen Flanagan in Person

Veteran organizer Eileen Flanagan weaves together a series of stories of hard-won successes in the climate change movement based on grassroots organizing. As heat waves, wildfires, storms, and floods become 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 challenge of climate change. They fight companies and governments willfully blind to the climate change dangers we face as a society.

A Quaker activist, facilitator, and teacher, Flanagan takes us through her environmental direct-action experiences and 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. 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 elections, acting in solidarity with all life is humanity’s best hope for survival.

Eileen Flanagan brings a forty-year commitment to justice to her writing and climate leadership. She has confronted corporate CEOs, prayed in their lobbies, and been arrested alongside 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 group of Quakers to pressure a $4 billion-a-year bank to stop financing mountaintop removal coal mining. As a first generation college student, she earned a BA from Duke and an MA from Yale.