There’s a sign popular on church marquees: “Looking for a sign from above? This is it.” If you’re looking for a call to action—an answer to why and how our culture needs to address the challenges of our age—look no further.

The landmark essays in Change Everything Now, a new offering in the Orion Reader book series, tackle topics such as consumerism, corporatism, and even environmentalism itself. The essays collected here are not just a call to action; they’re a call to the bold and brave action commensurate with the transformation required of humanity at this moment in time.

Contributors to Change Everything Now include Rebecca Solnit, who recalls when Nike was the goddess of victory, not shoe factories; Jeffrey Kaplan, who laments the future we left behind with the birth of the consumer; Curtis White, who describes capitalism’s dark heart; plus Winona LaDuke, Bill McKibben, and others. Their words are the literature of ecological urgency, a new genre evolved to address our profound ecological problems and their equally profound solutions.

We’ll let Curtis White have the last word. Here’s White, from his essay “The Barbaric Heart,” which appears in Change Everything Now:

The very notion of environmentalism is not much more than a way of isolating a problem from its true context. The crisis of a degraded natural world is a part of the larger problem of the crisis of thought, the crisis of faith, and the crisis of the relation of human beings to Being (or God, if you prefer).

Change Everything Now is available in paperback in the Orion Store.