In 2005, environmental activist Bill McKibben wrote “Wandering Home,” a chronicle of his journey from Vermont to his Adirondack residence in Johnsburg. The optimistic subtitle of the book is “A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape.” That hope is mostly gone in McKibben’s latest book, a memoir that examines three symbols, “The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon,” that prompt the concerned confusion of the subtitle: “A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.”

Or, “I’m curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith and American prosperity.”

Born in 1960, McKibben grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, which was part of the suburban explosion that followed World War II. As a teenager, he guided tourists around the 1775 Revolutionary War battlefield, his narrative describing the beginning of our country echoed in poet Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “where once the embattled farmers stood/and fired the shot heard round the world.”

McKibben remembers that story he and his fellow guides shared with tourists, “It was a clean and brave story, and … has informed me ever since.”

In 1971, however, another group and another conflict had come to the Lexington Battle Green. Vietnam veterans planned to protest American involvement in that war by marching the route Paul Revere rode, but in reverse, and when they got to Lexington set up camp on the Green.

The Lexington government, the selectmen, denied the protesters a permit to camp there. When the protesters bivouac without the permit, they, including McKibben’s father, were arrested.

McKibben’s activism is influenced by both the farmers who stood against the British and the veterans who protested a different war.

“The Cross” is McKibben’s view of what happened to American Christianity in his lifetime. He reviews the history of religion in Lexington, from when it was a colony, through the growth in the 1940s and ’50s, to the civil rights turmoil of the ’60s — Dr. Martin Luther King spoke in Lexington in 1963.

As a high schooler in the ’70s, McKibben traveled with his church to rural areas to help communities filled with complexions and needs that were not present in his Lexington neighborhood. It’s a beautiful section of the book — a sensitive rendition of the expansion of a young person’s world, a “contact with a larger and harder reality [that] was an enormous gift.”

But the vehicle of that gift was changing. McKibben notes that in 1958, 52% of Americans belonged to a mainline Protestant church (and Catholics made up another sizable portion of the population). By 2021, that 52% had dropped to 16%! And overall, in 2021, only 47% of Americans belonged to a “church, synagogue, or mosque.” The survey number that is growing is “none,” people who are not churchgoers.

“The Station Wagon,” is a discussion of the connection between suburban expansion and automobile use. It contrasts the economic trajectory (called “The Great Compression” by economists), that was bringing more economic equality during McKibben’s youth with the present, “where the 50 richest Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of the population.” His review of tax rates from the Nixon administration to those of President Reagan and his successors reminds the reader why income inequality has grown.

This is a memoir of an articulate activist, aware of the heroism and horrors of American history, who writes that “my life … was built in very real part on the suffering of others.” He still has the fire, the commitment, that’s made him famous, and worried: “For me, the scariest thing about the last 40 years, even more than the rising temperature, was the ascension of the libertarian idea that the individual matters more than the society an individual inhabits.”

Bill McKibben’s writing is always worth our time.