Spirit in Action

Botswana, Ireland, Simplicity, & Climate Change

From a financially-strapped Irish-American upbringing, to Peace Corps Service in Botswana, to the the trade-offs of life, family, and finances, and, now, to deeply engaged activism with Global Warming and environmental responsibility, Renewable: One Woman’s Search for Simplicity, Faithfulness, and Hope is Eileen Flanagan's story of wrestling with the big issues and putting her life in service

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 23 Aug 2015
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Today for Spirit in Action, we're welcoming back writer and activist Eileen Flanagan. Last time she was here, it was to speak about her book, The Wisdom to Know the Difference, which is to say, "Just speak about how she and we engage in discernment." She's just released a new book, Renewable, One Woman Search for Simplicity, Faithfulness, and Hope. Wrapping together experiences of growing up in a financially strapped Irish American household, time in the Peace Corps in Botswana, wrestling with the trade-offs of life, family, and finances, and her call to activism, in particular with global warming and environmental responsibility, Eileen models a process of discernment, finding our callings in the world, and finding a fruitful way forward for ourselves, individually, and for the world. Eileen Flanagan joins us by phone from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Eileen, I'm delighted to have you back today for Spirit in Action. It's great to speak with you again, Mark. How long was your book, Renewable, Ingestation? It really was at least a few years, and the idea for the book shifted a couple of times before I was really ready to write it. At first I was thinking about writing a book about money. I knew that there was something around values and consumption that was really important, and I felt that I had some interesting things to share about it. I grew up in a working-class family, lived in a one-bedroom apartment, but then I went to a Quaker school that had families that had much higher income levels. I went to colleges that were very elite, and then I lived in a mud hut in Botswana, all before becoming a Quaker, so I feel like I've been exposed to a wide range of experience in terms of money and consumption. There was something around that that I was grappling with, but it wasn't really until I got involved in the work on climate change that the arc of the story took shape, and it became clear what I really wanted to say. The name of the book is Renewable. Where did that name come from? Well, the word Renewable really has two meanings in this case. One is it's about the renewal in my life, and realizing that at age 49 or 50, you really can renew your life. At any point, really, we can take stock and we can readjust and realign ourselves with our values and our leadings. But for me, that process brought me to this work that is working against the dangerous, extractive fossil fuel industry and working for a renewable energy economy. And so the name kind of captured those two arcs of the story. You start and really end the book with focus on the climate change action with Bill McKibben and all those folks at the White House. So that's kind of the outside of the sandwich, and of course, all these other things you're talking about, your Irish background or parenting and so on. Those are all part of the middle of the sandwich. How crucial of a step in your life was that action with Bill McKibben and the hundreds of other people who dealt with civil disobedience? You're now a criminal, right? Hardly. I've committed civil disobedience twice now, and both times they were really misdemeanors. It wasn't the most risky or dangerous kind of civil disobedience. There are, you know, allies in Appalachia, for example, who are taking a much higher risk when they get arrested or people in Black Lives Matter movement as well. But it was an important step. It was really kind of throwing my hat in and saying, "Yes, I'm really in this struggle." It was also a sense of completion of a leading that I felt that I was called to do climate justice work. I felt that I was supposed to be doing more than I had been doing. And so that story of getting invited to be part of a national civil disobedience action, as you said, was Bill McKibben. It was also Julian Bond and one of the Kennedys, or two of the Kennedys, Daryl Hannah. It was kind of a crazy scene. It's not that that moment was a turning point in my life, but that it was an affirmation that I was on the right path. Because part of the story is about feeling like I haven't found my niche yet. The rest of the book is explaining how I got to that point. About that action, I want to mention right away, you note in the book that that was the first ever, I guess, civil disobedience that was authorized by the Sierra Club. So clearly climate change has a special place. Sierra Club has been concerned about all kinds of environmental despoilation, destruction, loss of species. But this is the first time they said, "Okay, civil disobedience. We bless this." You know, it's been really interesting over the last few years watching the climate movement, because I think what's been moving among friends relates to something bigger happening in the culture. And that is that many people have cared about these issues for a long, long time. Many of us have tried to take short showers or turn down the thermostats in our houses. People have given up need or given up their cars or bought a Prius. There's so many things that individuals can do and that people have been trying to do for decades now. But I think that we reached this point a few years ago where a lot of people started realizing that it just wasn't enough. That happened in Philadelphia yearly meeting in 2009. George Lakey gave a talk where he said to people, "If we're really serious that climate change is going to be catastrophic, then why don't we use the kind of tactics that we know historically have worked?" And he told stories from the Civil Rights Movement, the nuclear test ban movement. And it was out of that that earthquake or action team was born with this mission of using nonviolent direct action to work for a just and sustainable economy. Our mission is to look at that intersection of climate change and justice issues. What's interesting to me is that at the same time a similar process was happening to people like Bill McKibben, who then in 2011 organized this huge civil disobedience action at the White House to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, which if your listeners don't know is a pipeline planned to ship some of the world's dirtiest oil from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. And it became a kind of focal point for the climate change movement. It was considered a done deal before McKibben did that in 2011. But many people participated. And in fact, there's a funny story about Quakers. On the first day of the action of members of Central Philadelphia meeting, Jen Karsten was there. And she saw Bill McKibben, and I guess he was a little worried that not enough people had come. And she said, "Don't worry, Quakers are coming." And he said, "That makes my day." And sure enough, there were many friends who came, including some members of Earth Quaker Action Team, participated in that action in 2011, which was seen as really shifting the debate on Keystone. It went from being a done deal to being something that the Obama administration really had to think twice about, you know, whether they wanted to alienate this important part of the Democratic Party. And so since then, you know, the decision's been delayed and delayed and it's become clear that the tide has really turned. The action that begins my book is part of that tide turning. It was in 2013 that groups organized the forward on climate rally, which turned out to be 40,000 people, which at that point was the largest climate rally to date. And they had a smaller civil disobedience action in conjunction with that, because one of the things I've learned from George Lakey is the power of a mass movement that includes lots of people and a few people willing to do a riskier action at the same time in a strategic way to say this is really important. We're willing to take some personal risk to show how strongly we feel about it. So that was part of what was exciting about that week. There have been lots of actions around the Keystone pipeline, but it combined this small number of people, including the head of the Sierra Club and other organizations, taking that stand while 40,000 people came in the streets to show that there was widespread support for the President to do the right thing. And again, Eileen Flanagan's book is Renewable, One Woman Search for Simplicity, Faithfulness and Hope. And we really do hope that we somehow get a hold on this climate change thing. Of course, just recently President Obama announced his plan, his effort and environmental change decreased by 30-some percent carbon emissions, I guess, by what, 2030 or something, which seems pitifully small to us, doesn't it? It does. I mean, it's good to see a President doing something. It's too bad that it wasn't more sooner. But it does add an opportunity for citizens' groups, grassroots groups to push, which I think is part of what we really need. It's clear that the political process is not solving this problem, that the fossil fuel industry has way too much political power because of the amount of money that they hold. And we really need grassroots groups to pressure decision makers to do the right thing, because otherwise we're not going to make the changes that we need soon enough. You know, one thing I want to do is because your book does such an excellent job of laying out how on the human terrain you got to the point where action was a necessity for you, that you had no choice but to follow your leading. Obviously, we always have choices, but when we find that place where the inside of us breaks and our deep need, our deep joy meets the deep need of the world to open up to that. A lot of people try and sleep through that. I mean, obviously, your life has been filled with a lot of concern about environment and lifestyle and all that. So you already mentioned your Irish background, the family you came from, and you mentioned a number of times in the book, the parallels, this concern about Irish background and how that formed the person's, your ancestors were and how that leads to you and how that compares with Botswana. Fill in a little bit of your personal background there. Well, my mother's family came more recently, my grandparents were Irish immigrants, and on my father's family side it was back around the potato famine in the 19th century. I always knew that, but over the years, and especially right around the time I was learning more about climate change, I started learning more details of that story. I found out that my grandmother came from a county that lost 50% of the population during the famine years to starvation and immigration and disease. The village that she was supposedly from, when I went to Ireland, it wasn't even on the map, and I found out that they took it off the map as a result of the famine that there just wasn't a village anymore. And I started thinking about what that does to people to survive that kind of deprivation. And on the one hand, I think it explains why so many ethnic groups came to the United States and bought into the American dream and the idea that we can give our children more than we were given and more than our parents had. And I think part of that sometimes fuels the consumption that I don't think is actually good for us spiritually, but it's become clear that it's also not good for us environmentally or climate change wise to always be producing and consuming more and more and more. But the other connection with the Irish history is that I started realizing that climate change is already causing drought and famine, and that people in Africa where, as you mentioned, I was in the Peace Corps are bearing the brunt of that, suffering disproportionate to the amount that they created the problem. And so that connection between having ancestors who faced famine and then knowing that our consumption today is fueling famine somewhere else, and that in many African countries, people are vulnerable partly because of the same colonial system that made the Irish vulnerable. Just seeing those parallels really weighed heavy on my heart and was part of making me feel like I really had to do something. Well, one of the things about your upbringing that made sense to me is growing up in a small apartment, and how that relates to living in Africa and how we don't live in the United States. Quite a very interesting comment passed to me just yesterday, we talked about household income declining in the United States, and you lost the middle class. And this was pointed out to me by Ross, who's a Quaker economist, he says, the reason that household income is declining as significantly as it is, is not because our incomes are declining, but because we have smaller households. So instead of have two parents and the kids in one house, they have them in two households. That means that your household income just dropped by 50%, because it's split between two households. So the fact that we live in really four times or five, six times as large a personal space per person as we did when I was growing up, and I'm 10 years older than you, that makes a tremendous difference to how much we hurt the environment, how much we impact the environment. So talk about how you grew up, the household you grew up in, and how that compared to what happened when you arrived in Botswana. Well, part of what was unique maybe about my story or difference in a lot of the people I grew up with is that I grew up in a one bedroom apartment over the Balam movie theater in the Philadelphia suburbs. So we didn't have a lot of personal space. One of the things that means is that you don't have a lot of room for endless amounts of junk, but my parents had gone bankrupt when I was a baby, so they didn't have a lot of money either. My clothes were mostly from secondhand stores, didn't have a ton of toys. I usually went to my friends' houses to play, so I had my one Barbie doll and my friend Lorraine had her entire city of Barbies and Ken's, it seemed like to me. And so I felt poor in comparison to my friends on the main line, and then going to friend central, which draws mostly from the main line, and the affluent suburbs of Philadelphia, or some of the affluent suburbs of Philadelphia. So I had this perception of myself as the poor kid. Then I go to a small village in Botswana, where nobody has electricity except the chief, the police, and the guy who owns the bar. Very few people had running water inside their houses. The teacher housing that I had, I had a spigot right outside my house, which was a luxury, but when I moved into the village I had to carry all my water on my head, most people had pit latrines. And yet there wasn't as big a divide between rich and poor in the village as there was in Philadelphia, for example, and I didn't feel poor without stuff. I had one radio that was battery operated where I could listen to the BBC, and that was really the only kind of envy-worthy possession I had in the village. Otherwise, my living situation was very simple, and I was very happy. And I should say that Botswana is a relatively well-governed country, and so there really weren't people who were starving to death. I don't want to sort of romanticize not having stuff, but it was a place where the people who I saw had enough food, had family support, so it was really the materialism that was absent. And that really changed my perception of wealth and what I needed to be happy. And then, after a couple years there, you come back to the United States. How uncomfortable was that? Oh, it was terrible. It was so hard to explain to old friends how everything seemed to me. I remember visiting a dear friend who I still treasure, and she was cooking or something. She turned on the water and just let the water run while she was doing something else. And here I had lived in this village where water was so scarce, and I had to carry everything I used in a bucket on my head. So I remember going over and turning off the faucet and having this moment of how do I explain how this feels to me without seeming preachy or judgmental. And that's a struggle that runs through the book, is how to share our ideals in a way that doesn't promote guilt or blame or shame because I don't think those things are really that effective. But it was hard for me to find the language to express to people how different my worldview was coming home. There was an incident kind of on the opposite side of that that you mentioned. Yeah, I think that was probably in Johnstown. Was that when the gathering was there? Yes, I think it was, yeah. And the story was just that I was going to the gathering with my son and we were taking the train. But I was going, I was packing for two, we were taking the train, I was going to be leading an interest group that needed some materials. And I remember this moment of thinking, should I pack my travel mug? And I thought, nah, I'll be able to find a mug in the cafeteria, I have too much to carry. So I left it at home, I get to the gathering and the first morning I'm looking for a cup of coffee, I can't find a real ceramic mug. So I end up using a styrofoam cup, which is what they had available. And I run into another friend who has a real mug and I said, oh, where did you get that? And she said with what I felt as excessive smugness, she says, well, I brought mine from home. And it just infuriated me. So I refer to her in the book as the smug mug lady. And it infuriated me for two reasons. One, she touched this insecure part of myself that I was really struggling with. I want to live simply, I don't want to have a huge environmental impact, but with two kids, I'm finding it really hard. I feel like we use much more than I ever would have expected. And I am not always willing to make the sacrifices it takes to carry the travel mug when I already have a full bag. And so she pricked my insecurity, but she also represented something that I think Quakers can be kind of smug, and it's not inviting. It's not life filled within our own community, but it's definitely not a way to educate your sister-in-law who doesn't know that styrofoam's bad, having that kind of attitude. So that's one of the things I grapple with in the book, because I've been on both sides of being the smug mug lady. I can see both sides of it. And I know it doesn't feel good. When I was first a vegetarian, I think -- I think I was pretty obnoxious about it. And that's not to say that I'm not obnoxious now. But the first year, I was so evangelical about this. Anybody with either hamburger, I'd go moo, and just be obnoxious. And I've since given up most of those behaviors, and I don't think I feel as judging about other people. Although, you know, it's been 39 years now that I've been a vegetarian. And so, you know, I realized the whole world's not going to change, although a lot of the world has changed. Actually, I had a very interesting experience going to Togo, where I was in West Africa Peace Corps volunteer. It was hard at first to explain to them why I was a vegetarian. Did you have any personal practices that you either saw in a different light when you arrived in Botswana, therefore, gave up? Or that you took with you to Botswana, and you hoped to share with people there that maybe should change their life, that you felt maybe it was a good thing you brought from what you had learned before you went there? Yeah, I didn't really have anything comparable. I would say the biggest value struggle that I had was around gender issues, because on the one hand, I really wanted to respect the local culture and not be this white Western woman coming in telling people how to do things. But on the other hand, I think sexism is wrong. And I appreciated President Obama's recent remarks when he was visiting Africa about this is a part of your culture that's actually holding you back. And so, being a woman in a village, figuring out how much to buck convention was something that I grappled with. That was probably the trickiest cultural adaptation issue for me. I want to remind our listeners that you are tuned in to Spirit in Action. I'm Mark Helpsmeet, your host for this Northern Spirit Radio production. We're on the web at northernspiritradio.org, and that's ORG, like organic, instead of commercial. On that site, you'll find over 10 years of our programs for free listening and download. You'll find comments and connections. We do love two-way communication, so please post a comment when you visit. You'll find links to find Eileen Flanagan, for instance. You can follow the link to Eileen Flanagan.com, and you'll find her other writings and her other work that she continues to do. There's also a place there to donate to Northern Spirit Radio. Click on Support. That is how this effort is funded. It's full-time work. But even more important in supporting Northern Spirit Radio, I'd ask that you support your local community radio station. Community Radio provides a world of news and of music that you get nowhere else on the American radio dial. It's so important that we have alternative media sources, and Community Radio does that for us, so please start by supporting them. Again, my guest, Eileen Flanagan. She's author of Renewable, One Woman Search for Simplicity, Faithfulness, and Hope. And there's so many lessons in there for all of us to learn about how we get from point A to point B, which is for the good of the world, and for our personal good as well. Simplicity is really a gift that gives to the world, and personally, and we'll find more about that later. You were just talking, Eileen, about your time in Botswana. There's a phrase, a cultural phrase from Swanna culture. It translates in English as a person is a person because of other people. Talk about a couple of ways that affected you, how you've seen that working out in your life, not only there, of course, but in the United States because it's still true here. Yeah, and it's one of the ways that I really saw this parallel between Africa and Ireland as well. The pre-colonial culture, as in many pre-colonial cultures, really emphasized community and sharing. So in Botswana, if a neighbor needed to borrow an axe or a shovel, they would just go and ask their neighbor for one. In the language, there isn't a distinction between borrowing and lending. The word "share" doesn't mark who actually owns it in the way that in English, you know, if I borrow it, I know that it's really yours. There were lots of ways that that was true in the culture. In agriculture, people would help each other plow the fields. If someone was sick or needed help, people would show up and help them, which, again, was also true in traditional Ireland, and maybe still is true in some parts. And I really, really came to appreciate that aspect, and it was a cultural adjustment. So my first year, I lived in the teacher housing, so I was in a little house that was right next door to a row, you know, is in a row of teacher housing. And so frequently, a woman, usually, the wife or girlfriend of one of my male colleagues would stop by and say, "Hello, how are you? Give me an onion or give me an egg or I want to use your radio." So I would comply, and I would be gracious, but I sort of didn't understand what was happening. I assumed that because I was the white westerner, people thought I had a lot of onions or something. I don't know. I was in this kind of mindset that I was separate and that they were asking me because of who they thought I was. But eventually, what I figured out was that I was really reading it all wrong and that community is built by people helping each other, and that in Swanna culture, it's perfectly normal to ask for help, and that what I was actually supposed to do is the next time I needed an onion or an egg, I was supposed to go ask them for help. And instead, what most of the white westerners did was we would walk down to the village store in 100-degree heat and buy our own egg because we have this ethic of being independent and helping ourselves and good neighbors have good fences or whatever the Robert Frost line is. And so it took a real shift for me to realize, "Oh, they're not asking me to take advantage of me. They're asking me. It's an invitation to be friends." And so as soon as I went back and said, "Hey, I want your whatever," people were thrilled. It put us in a real relationship. And so that was a big learning for me that I've tried to bring back to the United States, and I've lived in different kinds of neighborhoods. Since then, I've lived in group houses. I've lived at Pendle Hill, and the communities that have been most nourishing to me are the ones where someone can go ask their neighbor for something. And it's one of the shifts that happened when we bought the bigger house that's part of the story is we now don't have that kind of community with our neighbors. We nod hello to them. But I think if the house was on fire, I'd feel comfortable running to my neighbors, but not nearly as frequently as in my old neighborhood where there were row houses, people were right next door. And it was commonplace for someone to stop by and say, "Hey, I'm cooking, and I'm low on sugar," or that kind of thing. I was actually kind of amazed. You're writing about simplicity. You're talking about living with less. And that's right at the point where circumstances led you to be in this larger house. And you talk in the book, and that's one of the reasons it's so valuable. Renewable focuses on the things of a real life. You focus on how the issues of a personal life in the United States make it hard to live simply and introduce terrors at our heart. Kids, I think, is probably the biggest one that make it hard to be faithful to what on one side of our personality we're very clear is where we want to go. You were writing about living simply, living in a smaller space, having less impact, and you moved to a larger house. How many times did you have to say mia culpa mia culpa mia maxima culpa to deal with that? Well, I think part of the problem is that we oversimplify things, and although I have had a lot of struggle about the house, I would point out that it wasn't an obvious right or wrong. One of the things I really wanted to do was garden more and grow more of our own food. And it was hard to find a yard that had sun and space without finding a bigger house. So it wasn't just greed that propelled us here. The other thing I would say is that my husband is an introvert. He is a hospice social worker. He works with people all day, and it was really hard for him coming home to our old really small house where there was not a quiet spot in the house for my very kind social work husband to rejuvenate. So part of what led us to buy the bigger house, I think, were some good impulses, wanting to have a guest room that we could invite out of town family. Me wanting to have my own office, which I had never had before. I was scrunched in a corner and everybody always put their junk on my desk. As I said, wanting to have a bigger garden, I don't think those are wrong or evil impulses, but they did put us then in tension with the carbon footprint idea of how much energy you use to heat your home or to light it has to do with how large it is. And so that was where then this issue came. And so we insulated the new house to reduce its energy consumption. We put solar panels on it, which we weren't able to do at our old house because it was too shady, which was part of the garden problem as well. I do feel that when my kids go to college, we will probably downsize pretty quickly to a smaller house. But part of what I was trying to do in this story was to help friends think about their choices in a deeper way and not make such rigid judgments that we can judge ourselves and we can judge other people of something as a clear right or wrong. And we need discernment. Were we wrong to buy this house? I don't know. I still -- it still sits uncomfortably. It didn't feel like it was a spirit-led decision. And so in that way, I do have regret about it. But we have been able to share the space with different organizations that have had board meetings here and whatnot. So part of my intention in sharing the struggles is because I think a lot of us struggle with things that are not 100% clear-cut. Absolutely. Learning how to do those -- that discernment. And actually, you do workshops at Pendle Hill. You've been doing in the past, and I'm sure you'll do in the future. One of them was called answering the call to radical faithfulness. It's a thorny proposition. It's not easy in how you go between all of the rocks in the stream is a really important question. How long have you been doing work out at Pendle Hill? You first went there as a student quite a few years ago. That's right. I went as a student in '92 and stayed on as staff in a kind of temporary position, which was how I met my husband, who's a Roman Catholic, but he was there on sabbatical. From that time, I've done various workshops, weekend kind of programs over the years. I think it was around '98 or '99. I started teaching discerning our calls and taught that for several years. The resident program has really shifted. They're not having the kind of 10-week term that they used to have, but now they're experimenting with new programs, and we're just entering the forced residency of this program called answering the call to radical faithfulness, which invites people from any kind of spiritual background to come and explore how that relates to a life of activism of trying to make an impact in the world, and it's been a great experiment. And again, the place is Pendle Hill. It's Quaker Retreat Center outside of Philadelphia. For those of you listening, in case you don't happen to know about it and it's open to anyone, it is Quaker Run, Quaker Organized, so you'll have daily meeting for worship and other things that are part of Quaker Practice, and nobody's required to do these things. But it's a great opportunity to step out of life and get a clearer look inside, and I hardly encourage people to spend some time at Pendle Hill if you get the opportunity. Let's go on to a couple more things, because again, Renewable, the book that you just released, One Woman Search for Simplicity Faithfulness and Hope, has all kinds of helpful lessons about how one person did this, which can give ideas to other people about how they might make the next step in the direction that they want to go, whatever that is. Climate change, environmental concerns are clearly very big for you. Simplicity, both on a personal and, I think, a national way. Obviously, that has a lot of power for you, Eileen. Talk about how you got involved with the earthquake or action team, which is kind of this culminating step in the development in the book. Well, that's one of the fun turning points in the book. As I had mentioned earlier, George Lakey gave this speech in 2009 at the sessions of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, challenging people in saying if we're really serious that climate change is going to be catastrophic. Shouldn't we use the kind of tactics that have actually worked before? I was really struck by that idea. It felt like a very spirit-led session. One of the men, Jonathan Snipes, who I know has been on your show, he stood up. I didn't know him by name then, but he stood up and he said, "I'm ready to hear what is the most radical thing you can tell us that we have to do." And another younger man said, "Show me the way." And it felt like there was this real yearning in our yearly meeting to respond to this crisis. I was busy promoting my last book, actually, and having two kids and serving as a volunteer in my school and meeting communities. So I really didn't even think about joining this new effort that was taking place, but I heard that there was this group called Earthquake or Action Team, and I heard that they had chosen PNC Bank to be their first target. And the reason was that PNC was a major financer of mountaintop removal coal mining, which is horrible for climate change. It's horrible for the people of Appalachia who have high rates of cancer and birth defects as a result. And at the same time, PNC liked to brag about being a green bank. They had Quaker Roots, so there were a lot of Quaker organizations that had their money there. And it was a way of tackling this enormous question of climate change by biting off a piece that we could chew, which is part of what George really urged us to do. If you look at all of climate change, it can just be overwhelming. You'll be in despair and you'll just want to go back to bed. But biting off a piece that we could maybe make a difference on was the idea. So I had heard that this was going on, but my first connection with the group was in 2011 in the spring. I had this really strong intuition to go to the Philadelphia Flower Show. For your listeners who don't know what that is, it's this kind of crazy scene. The enormous Philadelphia Convention Center is they haul in tons of dirt and they plant indoor tulips and set up all these gardens inside the Convention Center. PNC was a major sponsor of the Flower Show at that time. And I just happened to go on this day that I kept feeling led to go. And I'm walking through the crowd. It was really busy and I started wondering, "Why am I here?" And I ran into Walter Jelp Sullivan, who is a member of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. And he said, "Me to set the PNC pavilion at noon and pray for us." And then I started to ask a question and he said, "Leave if the police tell you to." And so I was like, "Oh my gosh, this must be an earthquake or action team." And I had 20 minutes. I had just enough time to go look at the bonds I exhibit and then come back and support the group. And here there were several people who I knew, including Jonathan Snipes, who here he was doing this radical thing after making that comment at sessions. And this group was right in front of the PNC pavilion. They had roped it off with crime scene tape. And they were joyously singing, "Where have all the flowers gone?" in the middle of the Flower Show. And there was something about this gang that was both creative and spiritually grounded and having fun, but supporting one another and being very strategic and thoughtful. That just really captured me so that when I then was ready with the space in my life a few months later to get involved, that was where I put my energy. And let's continue down that road because eventually this leads to your first action of civil disobedience. And as I said, the book kind of culminates with the thing that you start with the opening glimpse of. One of the things I wanted to ask you about is how you feel about fasting. Now, were you actually raised Roman Catholic as I was? I was raised Roman Catholic. I never really understood Lent. My mother would give up ice cream and eat frozen yogurt instead. And I just didn't get how God really cared about this. Frozen yogurt instead. I guess that's American for sacrifice, I guess. I mean, we would give up chocolate routinely for Lent. And then on Easter morning you eat as much candy as you can manage to eat. So I never really got sacrifice as a spiritual practice. The thing that made me start to understand it a bit was actually parenting. And I have a Pendle Hill pamphlet about parenting as a spiritual path. And that was the time in my life that I started realizing like, oh, there is something about giving up your own convenience. Or sacrificing a night's sleep to care for someone you love. There is actual spiritual growth in that. And that sometimes a calling might involve sacrifice. I really probably would have resisted that idea when I was 18 and left the Catholic Church. But as I came into direct action, I began to learn that sacrifice has actually always been an important part of nonviolent direct action. And it serves a couple purposes. Gandhi often fasted to prepare himself as a kind of self purification. It also is a way of showing other people how serious an issue is, showing that you're willing to sacrifice. And so it is an element of some of the things that we do. When people risk civil disobedience, that's part of why it captures people's attention. It also, frankly, is more likely to get news coverage. But on a deeper level, people pay attention and go, wow, I don't really understand this keystone thing, but you were willing to go to jail for that. And then they pay attention in a different way. During the course of our campaign, we also organized a walk for 200 miles across Pennsylvania. There were only two people who were able to walk the whole 17 days. But there were many people who took off a few days' work to walk as far as they could. That sort of sacrifice also captures attention. We also used fasting, I believe it's actually right after the book ends, because my life, of course, continued after where I stopped the story. Equate used fasting as a way to both prepare ourselves and involve a broader number of people as part of our campaign. But in the book, I do it to try and prepare for civil disobedience. And again, I talk about my own struggles. I am not a natural pastor. I'm the person who, at 8 a.m., is looking at the gummy bear vitamins. I'm wondering, is that cheating? I guess. Actually, I've done something for the last, I guess, 15 years now at our yearly meeting sessions, the regional Quaker gathering that I'm part of. It's a three-day session, and I've chosen too fast, only have water during those three days as part of my personal discipline for that. And I find it very enriching for me. I feel lighter. I'm not a thin person by any means. But it's no effort at all. It's more like, oh, now I've got all this time freed up to be with people to do good things, to feel unrushed, as opposed to, I've got to hurry up and get over before they close the cafeteria line. I'm surprised that more people don't practice fasting just because from my personal experience, and I don't have blood sugar issues or anything like that, it generally makes my life so much happier. That's so interesting how different people are. Isn't it a blessing that we're not all the same? No, it makes me crabby, and you don't want me crabby at sessions. But it's interesting. I've spoken to other people who have a similar experience of feeling lighter or feeling freed in a way. Well, let's talk just a little bit more about equates, the earthquake or action teams. And if listeners are interested, they can go back and listen. About a year ago, I had an interview with Ingrid Lakey and Lola George. As you mentioned, I've spoken with Jonathan Snipes as well, who are all part of that earthquake or action team. EQAT, as it's abbreviated. And you can find a lot about how to do organizing in a fun, energizing, faithful, inspirational way. And really, if you don't know who George Lakey is and I've interviewed him as well, he has such great insights into how we can do organizing in a way that's not just to have a group of people ignored by Fox News when they get together and have a march. It's so unfortunate. Actually, the earthquake or action teams set, as you said, Eileen, a very definite goal. And that is we're going to try and get the PNC bank out of investing in mount top removal. Okay, that's not the way we should be getting our call. And so it has implications for climate. It's a very focused objective. And at the time that I spoke with Ingrid and Lola, at that point, the action was very underway. There had been some signs that maybe PNC was aware that maybe this was not really a good idea of what they were doing, funding mount top removal, but there hadn't been any signs of that the success was on the cost. But what happened in between? Well, right after our big action at the gathering, and there were a series of things that just fell into place in a way that really felt like way opening. One of them was that the 2014 gathering was not far from Pittsburgh, which is where PNC's corporate headquarters is. So during that gathering, we organized six buses full of friends. We had an event in Pittsburgh that included 200 Quakers from around the country, 200 people, most of them Quakers. And then we stayed in touch with people who went home, did further training, stayed further involved. On December 6th, we had 31 actions in 31 different locations in 13 states and the District of Columbia. Over 300 participants, so this movement of friends was really expanding geographically. People were increasing their leadership and their boldness. And then on March 2nd, PNC announced a change in policy about mountaintop removal, which is what we had been pushing them to do. They had said for a long time that they would not make a policy to exclude a sector and they changed their mind. And so they named health and environmental concerns in the policy statement and said that they would be drawing back that financing. So just for all those people out there who feel despair or feel that what we do doesn't make a difference, this is the thing that I really want people to know. PNC Bank netted $4.2 billion last year. They are in the nation's seventh largest bank. And we are a small group. We don't even have a full-time staff person. We have two part-time staff people. Our annual budget is $100,000, but we have hard and persistence and creativity. And our little group pushed a bank that netted $4.2 billion to change a policy that they didn't want to change. I just want people to take that in because it's made such a difference in my life to realize that what we do can actually matter. And I want to say hip hip hooray! Yay! It's so inspirational to see that kind of thing coming true. And so that means, of course, now you're a drift. You've got no purpose at all for the earthquake reaction team. That's not true, of course. Where are you going now? Well, and just to finish that story, since then, other banks have pulled out. And yesterday, one of the main coal companies that's been engaged in mountaintop removal declared bankruptcy. It really might be that pulling the money away helps to keep coal on the ground. So we're very excited about that. Where we're going next, we undertook a discernment process to collect ideas. We put those ideas through a series of strategic questions to kind of narrow it down to the ones with the most possibility. We did more research on those. We presented them in our general meeting and talked about the different options. And at our June board meeting, we chose a new campaign to push local utilities to power local green jobs. The idea is that especially as many states are requiring their utilities to do more solar and do more renewable, you mentioned earlier, President Obama's plan is going to give incentives for states to do that. We want the utilities to do that in the way that is best both for climate change and for our local economies and for our local communities. There are many places where unemployment is really high, where people are desperate for good, well-paying jobs. And rooftop solar has the capacity to meet both of those problems. And so we're going to start with a focus in the Philadelphia area and push PICO to get their state mandated to increase the amount of solar they buy in 2016. And we wanted them to do that by supporting rooftop solar, especially in parts of our region that have high unemployment communities of color. In particular, we want to see benefiting from solar energy savings and from the jobs that it creates. That sounds like a great undertaking. And I have no doubt with the creative and spiritual energy that the folks of Earthquake Action Team have, that there's going to be some success there. It's really wonderful to see, at least in the right direction, although what we'd really like is a stampede in the right direction. And they'll start with the first cow that moves, right? The first buffalo that runs is part of getting the whole stampede going in the right direction instead of over the cliff, where it's currently headed. Yeah, the metaphor that a few of us have been using is a wave. It feels like there's a wave coming. And we're among the early surfers getting out there. And it's kind of scary, but it's also very exciting. And I do feel like it really is a wave. President Obama's announcement, right after we made this decision as a board, Bill McKibben had an article in the New Yorker, I believe, explaining how solar had become so much cheaper that it was now a viable option for people just on economic grounds. People who weren't particularly concerned about climate change were buying solar because it really has become economical in a new way. So there's all these things happening. It seems like every day we get some article about somebody somewhere doing something innovative around solar. So it's very exciting to feel that we're part of this movement that I do believe is growing. And the way to grow these things, people, is to do the internal work that prepares you to be part of that work. And something that's going to sustain you, which is, of course, a very important factor in why I do these spirit and action interviews. This program is here to help you discern for yourself where you're led, where you're called to put your energy and define the environment that makes it sustainable for you. A good step in doing this would be to read Eileen Flanagan's book Renewable, One Woman Search for Simplicity, Faithfulness, and Hope. You'll find her search going on, and I'm sure many points in there, you'll recognize yourself and the decisions you've had to confront. We learn from one another's stories, and Eileen shares such wonderful stories. We've introduced you to a couple of the stories here in this interview, but the book is full of them. So please go out and take a look at Renewable, One Woman Search for Simplicity, Faithfulness, and Hope by Eileen Flanagan, her website, Eileen Flanagan.com. You can follow the link from northernspiritradio.org. As always, Eileen, it's wonderful to talk to you. You're so thoughtful and deep and so energetic. On the other side, it's a great confluence of energy for the future. Thank you for joining me for spirit and action. And thank you, Mark, for this ministry, which I know that you've been holding for a long time. I really appreciate this opportunity to speak to your viewers and appreciate the way that you weave these things together as well in your own work. Remember Eileen's website, Eileen Flanagan.com, the links on northernspiritradio.org, and the book is Renewable. Thanks to Andrew Janssen for a tremendous production assistance on this program, and we'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. You