Barbara Kingsolver has been weaving her concern about the environment into her books ever since she started writing novels in 1988. Her 2012 novel Flight Behavior explored how climate change might affect the monarch butterfly, and the 2007 nonfiction work Animal, Vegetable, Miracle recounted her family’s experiment eating only food grown near their home in Virginia.
She recently applied this skill to a new, much shorter genre: pledge-writing. The coordinators of the American Climate Corps — President Joe Biden’s signature green jobs program — invited Kingsolver to pen the promise new members would recite when sworn in. “I told them, ‘This will be the first vow or pledge I’ve written since my wedding vows,’” Kingsolver said. Last month, the first 9,000 members of the Climate Corps committed to Kingsolver’s oath:
I pledge to bring my skills, respect, and compassion to work every day, supporting environmental justice in all our communities.
I will honor nature’s beauty and abundance, on which we all depend, and commit t... Read more
