Lessons from the Climate Movement

Stories from the environmental justice and climate movements offer many lessons applicable to other social change issues. One is the potential for people to find common ground around shared values and interests, even when they don't share ideology or identity. Another is the necessity of building such alliances when challenging powerful institutions, like the fossil fuel industry. Based on years of research in the United States and India, as well as her own experience as a leader of nonviolent direct action, Eileen Flanagan will explore how thinking of social movements as an ecosystem can help us understand how groups may play different but interconnected roles.

Eileen Flanagan graduated from Duke with a BA in Comparative Area Studies, now called International Comparative Studies, and earned an MA in African Studies from Yale. She is the award-winning author of four books, most recently Common Ground: How the Crisis of the Earth is Saving Us from Our Illusion of Separation. She has played key leadership roles in three grassroots climate campaigns, including one that pressured a $4 billion-a-year bank to stop financing mountaintop removal coal mining. In the movement against authoritarianism, she worked with Choose Democracy to create training materials used by tens of thousands of today's activists.