A graduate of both Duke and Yale, Eileen Flanagan writes for a wide range of national publications and speaks at conferences, colleges, and religious gatherings. She is the author of The Wisdom to Know the Difference: When to Make a Change–and When to Let Go, which was endorsed by the Dalai Lama and won the Silver Nautilus Book Award. Her forcoming book Renewable: One Woman’s Search for Simplicity, Faithfulness, and Hope is due out March 3, 2015. It tells the story of her midlife realization that she was not living up to her potential or her youthful ideals, and the journey that took her to southern Africa and eventually to handcuff herself to the White House fence.

At age forty-nine, Eileen Flanagan had an aching feeling that she wasn’t living up to her potential—or her youthful ideals. A former Peace Corps volunteer who’d once loved the simplicity of living in a mud hut in Botswana, she now had too many e-mails and a basement full of stuff she didn’t need. Increasingly worried about her children’s future on a warming planet, she felt unable to make a difference—until she joined a band of singing Quaker activists who helped her find her voice and her courage. Knowing her own Irish ancestors had survived famine, she returned alone to southern Africa, where scorching heat was already withering maize crops. Inspired by the people she met there, she came home ready to handcuff herself to the White House fence to challenge the corporate greed fueling climate change.