John Nichols was raised among naturalists and nurtured by a family history as American as the Stars and Stripes: his great—times five—grandfather signed the Declaration of Independence for New York state. Nichols himself sailed happily through a top-notch private school education and sold his first, best-selling novel, The Sterile Cuckoo, at age twenty-three. At that point, he considered himself “a child blessed by the culture and fated for delirious success.”

But then a short trip to Guatemala changed his life, setting him on a very different path toward radical social and environmental commitment. This remarkable book describes a rich and often tormented journey out of a safe middle-class existence toward belief in what Nichols calls “a liberation ecology.”