Who We Are

We are citizens working to make information about climate change accessible to others.
Mission Statement
Our Common Earth is an online information resource for individuals looking to understand human-driven global warming.  The information is organized so visitors can look for articles organized by topics and/or from their value perspectives (liberal, conservative, secular, faith-based, youths, elders).  The site primarily features links to videos and articles from periodicals, scientific magazines, nature journals, government agencies, and faith-based sites. The information is intended to be inclusive and relevant to people from diverse social, employment, racial, religious, secular, political, economic and educational backgrounds.
The site offers three sections of information on human-initiated climate change.
  1. Learning Center with articles on Climate Change categorized by affinity groups and subject content,
  2. Solutions with resources on innovative technologies being developed to reduce carbon emissions or to more effectively sequester carbon below ground where it belongs.
  3. People Power to help readers find local chapters of membership and resource organizations working on climate change and climate justice,
Every effort is made to provide a diversity of material so that a broad range of individuals can find credible information about climate change and its possible impacts.  We’ll be adding to and updating the site on a regular basis.
Contact  info@ourcommonearth.org

Lynn Raskin 
Founding Director







































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Marcus Raskin
Associate Director







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​Jennifer  Armstrong
Associate Director





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Advisory Board
Harriet Barlow

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Our Common Earth is a project initiated by Lynn Raskin, whose concerns about sustainability, equity and resource use and distribution originated from her two year experience in the Peace Corps in Kenya, East Africa in 1970 and 1971.  Her last year in Kenya marked the beginning of a drought and famine in East Africa that was to last into the mid to late 1970s.  After returning to her home state of Texas, Lynn began organizing education programs and fundraising on world hunger.  She learned that hunger in the horn of Africa was not just an issue of drought, but the intermingling of many currents such as global trade, disruption of traditional food production for cash crops, third world debt and high international energy and food prices that plunged the fragile economies of East Africa into decline.  While completing her MA in Urban Affairs, she raised funds for and organized a conference series for the general public in Austin on environmental and economic crises like energy, water, third world debt, natural resource extraction and inequality of consumption.  She met and worked with UN officials, environmentalists and activists working on social justice all over the U.S.
 
Lynn moved to Washington, DC for a staff position on President Jimmy Carter’s Presidential Commission on World Hunger where she organized public hearings around the country and later managed a grant program to help nongovernmental organizations develop constituent education programs on world hunger.  After the commission disbanded, she raised funds for a study she published about the public education programs on third world development that Sweden, the Netherlands and Canada had been conducting for their citizens for ten years.  The study included how each program was structured and the lessons their grantees (always citizen groups) learned over the ten year period. 
 
With the imperative of raising a family in the 1980s Lynn got a job in the business sector as a realtor.  After twenty seven years helping families buy homes, she returned to the work of consciousness raising and passionate activism on global sustainability. ​
 
She is married to author and co-founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, Marcus Raskin, inheriting three extraordinary step children, Erika, Jamie and Noah, and as they began to have children, they added to their number with another remarkable daughter, Eden.  They have nine beloved grandchildren and a first great-grandchild.  
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​Marcus Raskin is a prominent American social critic, political activist, author, and philosopher, working for progressive social change in the United States.  He was one of the youngest appointees to serve in the Kennedy Administration, working as McGeorge Bundy ‘s assistant on national security affairs and disarmament as a member of the Special Staff of the National Security Council. 
Raskin broke with the Kennedy Administration over the war in Vietnam and co-founded with Richard Barnet, the progressive think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., where he is currently a Distinguished Fellow. He is on the editorial board of The Nation and is a retired professor of public policy at George Washington University’s School of Public Policy and Public Administration.  He is the author and co-author of over twenty books and journals.
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​Jennifer Armstrong has served on several nonprofit boards in various capacities. The focus of her nonprofit service (and clients) has a central theme of civic engagement whereby she works to help people have a voice at the places where decisions are made. She has a BA in English, Communications, & Women Studies from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she was the first Women's Studies major to graduate in the newly approved (at the time) degree program.

​​Board Chair, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Founding Director of the Blue Mountain Center, she has been on more than 50 boards of directors and has founded or co-founded 15 national and local nonprofit organizations.