The Crucial Years

"It’s unfiltered communication, from me to you, about the deepest problem that humans have ever encountered. The climate crisis has been my beat for decades. I wrote the first book about the topic for a general audience, way back in 1989. Since then I’ve covered it for every major publication in the English speaking world, and I’ve helped build the movement to fight it. I founded 350.org, the first big grassroots climate campaign, and helped spearhead the campaigns against the Keystone Pipeline and for fossil fuel divestment. Here’s my bio. So I think I’m well-positioned to figure out, on any given day, what’s important and what’s not; where we have to push hard; where the the leverage lies. I know many of the players, and love to highlight good work. I get pissed off fairly easily. This newsletter will reflect all of that. So, subscribe. Most of what I’ll write will be free, and for everyone—this is a crisis, and information needs sharing. But there will also be a paid subsection, which costs sixty bucks a year, or $6 a month. I hope you’ll pay, because it lets me both keep writing, and keep up my volunteer work as an organizer—now at Third Act, the new movement I founded last year for progressive organizing among people over 60. If you subscribe, you’ll also get something somewhat different. Every Friday for the better part of a year I’ll send you a new installment of The Other Cheek—it’s a sequel to my oddly popular novel _Radio Free Vermont_, and as far as I know the first action saga that focuses on nonviolence. I hope it will be fun to read a book a bit at a time, sort of in the way that Dickens novels first appeared in serial. (Apologies in advance for not actually being Dickens—but I do hope that a small weekly chunk of fiction might actually work pretty well in our era of shorter attention spans.) Those Friday posts will also include a few random notes on where we are in the movement, new science, and so forth—and as a paid subscriber you’ll get the chance to respond, and to suggest new directions."