What We're Fighting for Now Is Each Other
Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An urgent, on-the-ground look at some of the “new American radicals” who have laid everything on the line to build a stronger climate justice movement
The science is clear: catastrophic climate change, by any humane definition, is upon us. At the same time, the fossil-fuel industry has doubled down, economically and politically, on business as usual. We face an unprecedented situation—a radical situation. As an individual of conscience, how will you respond?
In 2010, journalist Wen Stephenson woke up to the true scale and urgency of the catastrophe bearing down on humanity, starting with the poorest and most vulnerable everywhere, and confronted what he calls “the spiritual crisis at the heart of the climate crisis.” Inspired by others who refused to retreat into various forms of denial and fatalism, he walked away from his career in mainstream media and became an activist, joining those working to build a transformative movement for climate justice in America.
In What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other, Stephenson tells his own story and offers an up-close, on-the-ground look at some of the remarkable and courageous people—those he calls “new American radicals”—who have laid everything on the line to build and inspire this fast-growing movement: old-school environmentalists and young climate-justice organizers, frontline community leaders and Texas tar-sands blockaders, Quakers and college students, evangelicals and Occupiers. Most important, Stephenson pushes beyond easy labels to understand who these people really are, what drives them, and what they’re ultimately fighting for. He argues that the movement is less like environmentalism as we know it and more like the great human-rights and social-justice struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from abolitionism to civil rights. It’s a movement for human solidarity.
This is a fiercely urgent and profoundly spiritual journey into the climate-justice movement at a critical moment—in search of what climate justice, at this late hour, might yet mean.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With an apocalyptic tone, journalist and climate activist Stephenson introduces the work of fellow activists, environmental scholars, and frontline community organizers in this substantial volume on the climate justice movement. Stephenson considers climate change "the most fundamental and urgent threat humanity has ever faced," and faults "the fossil-fuel industry and those who do its bidding" as they "deceive the public, and willfully obstruct any serious response to the climate catastrophe." When Stephenson shifts the focus to comrades in the fight, the conversation gets more interesting. Among the leaders and foot soldiers Stephenson presents are Tim DeChristopher, a climate activist in Salt Lake City jailed for disrupting a Bureau of Land Management auction of oil and gas drilling leases; longtime environmentalist Wendell Berry, whose 1979 essay "The Gift of Good Land" makes "a Biblical argument for ecological and agricultural responsibility"; and Beverly Wright, a New Orleans native who helped document "the deep structural and environmental racism" many African Americans experience in communities along the Mississippi River. There is plenty of harsh language, which may turn off some audiences, but others will be glad to see Stephenson promoting the work and commitment of an array of activists engaged in what is often a thankless battle.