How Climate Change Kills History

It's eight days to our global climate day of action and I'm just headed back from Nashville, where I spoke to the annual meeting of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. I feel like one of those candidates on the eve of the election, scrambling across the landscape to make sure they leave no vote ungot. But truth be told, I don't really know what I'm doing.

I'm an author turned part-time activist. Not out of desire—my bumper sticker should read "I'd rather be writing"—but out of frustration, and the sense that no one was really building a popular movement about climate change, and that it needed to be done. In this quest I've worked with a crew of young people, all recent college grads, and we've learned side by side about how to organize. Learned by experience, because there's really no guidebook (so we wrote one last year, Fight Global Warming Now).