When I handcuffed my wrist to the White House fence on February 13 along with author Bill McKibben, the Sierra Club's Michael Brune, civil rights icon Julian Bond and 44 others, it was a big moment for my organization, Earth Quaker...

"They are not victims!" shouted Gasland director Josh Fox as he stood on stage before a group of about 10 people who had allegedly been hurt by hydraulic fracturing. They...

South Africa announced Friday that it would lift its moratorium on hydrolic fracturing, the controversial natural gas extraction technique known as "fracking." In response, Treasure the Karoo Action Group (TKAG) is launching a legal battle to protect the...

More than one black South African has told me that they saw the environment as a "white people's issue" when they were cutting their activist teeth in the struggle against apartheid. So, in 2012, how does Greenpeace -- which has historically been associated with not only white people, but often...

Although environmental awareness sometimes seems to drop off the day after Earth Day, this spring there are a number of eco-justice groups taking their message on the road, making connections, and building broader coalitions in the process.

On April 30 the Earth...

Recently I went to a panel discussion that's part of a series on Revolutionary Nonviolence organized by a coalition of groups, including Quakers and representatives of Occupy Philadelphia. There were supposed to be four panelists on this particular night, but the one representing "Faith Community-Based Nonviolent Action" could...

Before the end of chattel slavery in the United States, some people of faith refused to buy sugar produced by slaves. During apartheid many divested from companies working in South Africa. In that tradition of non-cooperation with injustice, the Earth Quaker Action Team is launching a new program called

When Oprah Winfrey recently announced that she had just learned of the existence of a half-sister, she described it as news that "shook [her] to [her] core." I understood what she meant. Two years after my father's death, as I was going through family documents, I discovered that...

When most people hear of Quakers and social action, they think of nineteenth-century abolitionists, the early advocates of women's suffrage, or maybe the anti-war movement. Now, after decades of not being in the news much, American Quakers are applying their tradition of non-violent action to environmental issues, focusing on the...

People who believe that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim often cite as evidence the fact that his father was a Muslim and that he briefly attended a Muslim school. The assumption seems to be that the President couldn't be sincere in his claim to have embraced a different faith,...

I have a friend who describes herself as "a controlling type of person," a single mom who tends to worry about money and germs. A practicing Muslim, she says that fasting during Ramadan helps her to feel more peaceful, despite the physical difficulty. Self-denial, daily prayer, and heightened compassion for...