What We Can't Burn
(hardcover)
by Tom Osborn and Eve Driver
Forming an unlikely friendship amid the fossil fuel divestment campaign at Harvard University, Kenyan clean energy entrepreneur Tom Osborn and American climate writer and strategist Eve Driver reckon with coming of age in a generation confused and divided about how to save itself, the meaning of ‘climate justice’, and what it will take to build a global climate movement.
August 2024.
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Eve was a fossil fuel divestment activist from Massachusetts who believed capitalism was at the root of the climate crisis. Tom was a clean energy entrepreneur from a rural village in Kenya who believed an activist approach was idealistic and suspended from the real-world experiences of those facing the worst of the crisis’ effects. What We Can’t Burn explores into what it means to fight for friendship and future amid the intense debate around climate change, the Harvard divestment movement, and our collective energy transition that hangs in the balance.
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We are pleased to offer pre-orders of What We Can’t Burn, coming in August 2024. Orders will ship the first week of publication.
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ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-958510-03-2
Dimensions: 6 x 9
Publication date: August 2024
Price: $27.95
Memoir / Climate Change
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Eve Driver is a consultant and journalist with a focus on environmental justice and innovation. Her writing has appeared in Grist, Quartz, Mongabay, and elsewhere, and she has spoken on panels sponsored by international environmental organizations including The Better Future Project and Uprooted & Rising. Eve studied environmental history and philosophy at Harvard, where she was involved in the successful fossil fuel divestment campaign and led research into the endowment’s SEC filings as the designated student representative speaker in the campaign’s first public dialogue with the Harvard Management Company. She resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Tom Osborn is a community-oriented entrepreneur and co-founder of the Shamiri Institute—a public benefit organization that develops and scales mental healthcare to young people across Africa. He is a 2021 TED Fellow and a global Forbes’ 30 under 30 social entrepreneur, and has won numerous national and international awards for his work, including World Deliver Social Entrepreneur of the year in 2016 and the Donors’ Circle for Africa Energy Prize. Born and raised in rural Kenya, he graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor’s in Psychology. He lives in Nairobi.
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“Few things I’ve ever read have done a better job of getting at the complexity of the climate fight: how we need to do many things, at the same time, and without stumbling over each other! This is also a moving testament to the power of ongoing dialogue and friendship, just the sort of thing we need to be thinking about in this ever-angrier movement.”
– Bill McKibben, contributor to the New Yorker and founder of the fossil fuel divestment campaign
Having grown up in Kibera—the largest urban slum in Africa and founded SHOFCO to list communities out of poverty—the answer to changing the world lies in both activism and entrepreneurship. This book tells a very important story: Solving the biggest problems of our generation, like climate change, requires not just activism or entrepreneurship but both. That is the way to catalyze the change that we need to make the world a better place. An important read.
– Kennedy Odede, Founder & CEO, SHOFCO; New York Times best-selling author of Find Me Unafraid: Love, Hope, and Loss in an African Slum; TIME 100 Impact Award Winner