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Taking on the challenges of cross-racial organizing and unequal access to power, Common Ground traces the history of racist and colonial divisions that have facilitated the environmental crisis, showing how everyone can join forces to make change.
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.
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. Yet many people still don’t realize that environmental threats exist in their own neighborhoods.
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.
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.
