Friday, October 23, 2015, 7:00 p.m., Wayland High School Auditorium, 264 Old Connecticut Path, Wayland, MA 01778.
Join us and bring along a friend or two for a discussion with Guest Speaker: Wen Stephenson, climate activist and independent journalist and author of “What We’re Fighting For NOW is Each Other – Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice”.
The evening will begin at 7 pm with John McGah playing some great live tunes on his guitar. After the discussion, please join us for coffee and sweet treats to meet and greet our speaker.
Music by John McGah
John didn’t just like the Beatles, he was obsessed with them. This touched a deeper connection to everything for him. It led John to sing a lot, eventually learn guitar, and later join a band and write songs. He started guitar lessons in sixth grade, then started again as a freshman in college – and hasn’t stopped since. In 1999, he started a nonprofit that uses music to dispel myths about homelessness and to help end veteran homelessness. A number of homeless musicians and celebrities have been involved. He is honored to play at the Walden Forum.
The international scientific consensus is that we’re in trouble: catastrophic climate change is upon us. In 2010, Wen Stephenson woke up to this reality and to what he calls “the spiritual crisis at the heart of the cli
mate crisis,” and asked: “What am I going to do about it?” He decided to walk away from his successful career as a mainstream journalist to join the growing climate justice movement. In What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other, Stephenson tells his own story of becoming an unlikely radical and the stories of the remarkable and courageous people he has worked alongside: old-school environmentalists and young climate justice organizers; frontline community leaders and Texas tar-sands blockaders; evangelicals, Quakers, and Occupiers. He argues that the movement is less like environmentalism and more like the great human rights and social justice struggles of the past, such as abolitionism and civil rights. This is a movement about human solidarity—and a profoundly spiritual struggle on behalf of our fellow human beings.
What people are saying about Wen Stephenson’s book:
“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”
“An impassioned call to action, offering a deep well of wisdom for any person coming to terms with the climate crisis.”
– Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine.
“It has been often said that the fight against climate disruption needs stories and heroes to bring the struggle to life. Well, look no further than Wen Stephenson’s What We’re Fighting for Now is Each Other. This glorious, moving telling creates a narrative that can inspire a movement for deep change before it is too late.”
– James Gustave Speth, author of America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy.
“To take the climate crisis seriously is to take it personally, to let it shake your soul. Wen Stephenson has done that, in a book that beautifully intertwines his own story with the stories of other Americans who encounter the endangered world with the better angels of their nature. This is a profound, soul-stirring exploration by a twenty-first century abolitionist who, when he warns that it’s too late, means that it’s not too late.”
– Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties and Occupy Nation.
“This is a young, fascinating, in-motion movement, and Wen Stephenson captures it with grace and power. I learned a good deal about things I thought I already understood.” ~ Bill McKibben, co-founder 350.org.
“In this lucid, compelling and deeply moving book, Wen Stephenson invites the reader to confront the same stark question that he himself had to confront: given the climate crisis now unfolding around me, what are my sources of hope and what shall I do with the time I’ve been given? This marvelous book charts a path to social and political transformation that springs from a spiritual awakening to the power of love.”
– Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Ph.D., Missioner for Creation Care, Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts.
