Oil and Honey

by Bill McKibben

  But we had one card to play. President Obama would make the final decision; before Keystone could be built, as I’ve said, he had to declare that the pipeline was “in the national interest.” So reaching him would be the goal, and we figured the next few months were our only opening. His reelection campaign was gearing up; he was heading out for more speeches on campuses, trying to rekindle some of the enthusiasm of 2008. Weighed down by the economy, he was trailing in the polls and his advisers feared that young people and liberal donors were tired of his compromising ways. In fact, two days before our sit-in ended, the president unexpectedly turned down a proposed EPA smog rule, a regulation to curb dirty air that even George W. Bush had supported. I cursed when I saw that news—but I confess it also occurred to me that it might help our effort. He’d given environmentalists precious little, and now he might feel the need to give us something.

  So before we left Washington, I thought we should talk to the White House. The administration hadn’t reacted to our sit-in—the president had been on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard for the first half of it. Jay Carney, the president’s spokesman, told reporters that he “hadn’t told” Obama what we were up to. But we figured someone must have noticed, and indeed when my colleague Jamie Henn called the administration’s Office of Public Engagement to arrange a meeting, we were quickly offered a time the next morning, the second to last day of our protest. It was to be private and unofficial—we suggested the bar at the venerable Hay-Adams Hotel, because it was right next to Lafayette Square. And because, I confess, it appealed to my sense of the absurd.

  The Hay-Adams is named for the two men who lived on the site before the hotel was founded: William McKinley’s secretary of state John Hay, and Henry Adams, great-grandson of John and grandson of John Quincy and our finest nineteenth-century writer about American politics. It’s a power place—Obama and his family stayed there the two weeks before his inauguration in 2009. And it shares the block with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest donor to American political campaigns, outspending the Democratic and Republican National Committees combined. (And, not coincidentally, the most important opponent of action on climate change, going so far as to file a brief with the Environmental Protection Agency explaining that global warming was not worrisome because humans would “adapt their physiology” to deal with a warming world.) In fact, Jamie went off to the bar to fetch a round of Diet Cokes, and he came back with news that Tom Donohue, the head of the chamber and arguably the second most powerful man in D.C., was two tables away having a tête-à-tête of his own.

  Jon Carson was our guest. In his midthirties, he’d ended up in the White House after a career as a political operative and a stint in the Peace Corps. In 2008 he’d served as field director of the Obama effort, perhaps the greatest and most interesting presidential campaign ever. Now he ran the Office of Public Engagement, in charge of—well, public engagement. “We create and coordinate opportunities for direct dialogue between the Obama Administration and the American public, while bringing new voices to the table and ensuring that everyone can participate and inform the work of the President.” That’s how the White House Web site explains it. But politics surely was part of Carson’s brief, and my guess from his biography was that he’d respect the scale of what we’d pulled off the last two weeks.

  Not that I gave him a chance to tell us, one way or the other. I began by explaining that good Gandhian practice demanded that we tell our adversary our plans in advance, but truth be told I wasn’t feeling Gandhian at all. I was doing my best instead to channel Leo McGarry, the chief of staff from the television series The West Wing. Powerful people intimidate me; my instinct is to try and make friends. So McGarry in steely mode is my model. Don’t shout, but speak firmly and as if you have all the power you need. I didn’t expect Carson to give in to us, and indeed I barely talked about the pipeline at all; but I did need him to pay attention—to understand that we weren’t normal Washington lobbyists who would be appeased by half measures. I needed, I thought, to make an impression.

  So for twenty minutes of unbroken eye contact I just talked. Here’s what we were going to do: Follow the president wherever he went, making sure that the pipeline message became ubiquitous. And we were going to round up every big donor we could think of, using them to get the message back to the White House that this pipeline was now the measure of his environmental commitment—that it was the first environmental cause in thirty years that had filled the jails.

  More to the point, though, was what we weren’t going to do. “We won’t do you guys the favor of attacking the president,” I explained. “If we do, we’re angry extremists, easy for you to marginalize. Instead we’re going to pay you the much more dangerous compliment of taking your words seriously.” I showed Carson some of the president’s quotes from the campaign he’d run. “It’s time to end the tyranny of oil,” for instance. Or, most powerfully, the close of the speech Obama had given the night he clinched the nomination.

  I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.

  “He shouldn’t say stuff like that if he doesn’t mean it,” I said. “If this is the moment when the planet is going to start to heal, you don’t get to tap the tar sands. We will say a thousand times in the next few months that we’re confident the president will do the right thing, because he said he would. We’re going to refuse to be cynical. We’re going to be deliberately naive. And if, in the face of that, you approve the pipeline, you’re going to take a hit. You’ll have to decide if the hit is worth the grief you’ll get from the oil industry. You’re the political professionals—you’ll be able to make the calculation. But you can count on us to do our part.”

  We shook hands and left, heading back to Lafayette Square where the police were busy hauling away that day’s protesters. I had no idea if we could keep our promise.

  * * *

  Perhaps I’ve given the impression that I’m a courageous fellow, ready to trot off to jail at the drop of a hat, able to stare down presidential aides. That would be not quite true.

  In fact, on the long list of things that scare me, bee stings rank fairly high. And with some reason. Once, wandering the woods a mile or so behind the house where I lived for many years in the wild Adirondacks, I stepped on a yellow jacket nest. As usual I was lost in some reverie, when all of a sudden a drench of incandescent pain splashed up my stomach toward my head. It came so fast—a wash of pure feeling, as if someone had tossed a pot of boiling water at me—and it hurt so much, a distillation of pain I’ve never experienced before or since.

  It took several seconds to figure out what on earth was happening. I’d been climbing a steep slope, pulling myself up hand over hand one sapling at a time, which is why the yellow jackets were at waist level when they boiled out of the ground. I couldn’t see them—I just turned and ran, pure instinct demonstrating its limits because running on a forty-degree slope doesn’t really work. I cracked my head on a tree branch, cutting my forehead and closing my right eye. But the pain was still there, and I kept running—after a few hundred yards of nearly blind flight I was able to flick the last insects off my neck and pull off my shirt.

  The shriek of pain subsided to a dull roar, enough that I could collect my wits (though not my eyeglasses, which were somewhere Back There where I was definitely not going). I knew the woods so well that I was able to make it back home on autopilot, slightly panicky because big red hives were swelling across my torso. I thought of all the stories I’d read about shark attacks or lightning strikes that ended with the suddenly less comforting statistic that “more people die each year from bee stings.”

  I didn’t perish; I made it home, a
nd my scared wife drove me at top speed the forty miles to the hospital, where they hooked me up to six kinds of IV and counted my stings (seventy-six). And that was that. Not entirely—I’ve written elsewhere that the moment was a kind of epiphany, when the scrim between me and the rest of the natural world thinned, when, for a few hours that stretched into a few weeks and has never entirely gone away, it felt like I was part of the natural world around me, not just an astronaut moving through it in my bubble of thoughts and plans. So, that was compensation.

  But the experience also left me really scared of getting stung again. The doctors had warned that I was now likely far more sensitive to yellow jacket venom, and that if it happened again my throat might very well swell up and I’d get to contemplate my intimate connection to the natural world in an entirely different way. My GP gave me a prescription for an EpiPen, so I could jab it into my thigh if lightning struck twice. In fact, given my predilection for wandering far and wide, he made me carry two of them, so I’d have some chance of getting back to the road. I’ve been stung since, but only by one insect at a time. I’ve swelled profoundly each time but never so badly that I had to use my spike. Still, I can perhaps be forgiven for being just the littlest bit wary of Kirk’s beeyards with their buzzing clouds. Even though he assured me over and over that honeybees were different from yellow jackets, that their venom would probably be harmless, and that some people got stung on purpose for their arthritis, Kirk finally figured out I was a baby and gave me a bee suit to wear.

  He had one, too, but he often worked without the veil, or didn’t pull on the gloves. My routine never varied—a safe fifty yards from the hive I’d pull the white coveralls over my clothes, put on the special white gaiters that kept bees from flying up my pant cuffs, placed the helmet on my head and carefully tucked the veil into my collar, and finally pulled on the long white gauntleted gloves. And then I felt more or less safe, though the first few times I worked with Kirk I know I was still tensing my body and hunching my shoulders.

  Happily, working with him (which mostly involved carrying crates of bees to and from the truck, and fairly often involved staying out of the way) was fascinating—it was like getting to be the clueless studio assistant to Caravaggio, with an up-close glimpse of a master at work: a master who, happily, was willing to explain what he was doing as we carried crates. I slowly pieced together an understanding of just how innovatively this solitary and shy man had reinvented his profession. I’d known he was “chemical-free” and that this was “good,” but I hadn’t understood that it was only the most recent of the changes he’d pioneered.

  By chance, the day Kirk first gave me the bee suit we visited one of his biggest beeyards, just down the road from the house he’d rented for many years before we found the new farm. “This is really where it began,” he said. “This is really the place where I figured out that I could make my apiary work.”

  His revelation grew out of an accident in the winter of 1988. Long tradition held that you needed a big colony to survive a northern winter—at least two big wooden boxes of bees. But “one year I had some smaller colonies left over, two in each box,” he recalled. “I didn’t remember to combine them, I just left them on top of some other boxes. When I eventually noticed, I said to myself, ‘They’re done for,’ but when I came back in the spring they were all alive. The next year I did eight in that way, and they all survived. That spring, when I unpacked those colonies and found them living, that’s when the whole thing fell into place in my mind. I could see it all: raising new queens in midsummer, keeping them over the winter in nucleus colonies, and having this great new product to sell.” He’d changed the math in a decisive way—one that presaged real profits.

  From the early twentieth century till that day, northern apiarists had mostly purchased new queens each spring from breeders in the south. “I’d always wanted to raise queens from the start, but I figured there must be some reason that no one did it,” said Kirk. “You’d get them by mail, that was how it was. The man who was the dean of northern apiculturalists then, a fellow at Cornell named Roger Moore, just flatly said, ‘Nucleus colonies don’t survive winter in this latitude. Take them to Florida.’ He wouldn’t even come to the beeyards to look at what I was doing. I remember once going to give a talk at the New York State beekeepers meeting and when I got up to speak he got up to go judge the honey entries.”

  Overwintering small colonies meant you could multiply hives fast enough to make some real money—suddenly a beeyard that could yield $3,000 worth of honey could also produce enough queens to be worth five times that much. And it meant Kirk could start working on the genetics of his now largely self-contained apiary; instead of importing queens from someone else, he could pick them from the very best of his colonies and propagate them rapidly—which allowed him, years later, to stay barely ahead of the mites and pests that wrecked so many other beekeepers. “I was the first one to make it a practical system since the early 1900s,” he said. “I’m proud of that.”

  But we’ll get to mites and chemicals and so on a little later. What I liked from the very beginning about working with Kirk is that alongside his pragmatism, he thought philosophically about bees as well. He waxed romantic, almost. Because this beast he was busy domesticating was also, simultaneously, very wild, going forth every hour to explore the wider world. “It’s kind of like fishing for me,” he said. “The resource out there, the fields, it’s just a kind of ocean. It’s like being there putting your nets out. And at its best it’s just remarkable. You know how the Bible talks about a land of milk and honey? Well, they’re very closely related. The same leguminous plants that are great for cows—the clovers—are great for bees, too. But the clover doesn’t come up strong every year. That depends on the weather. The honey either materializes in the hives or it doesn’t, and you often don’t have that much control.”

  3

  HONEYBEES AND CONGRESSMEN

  Civil disobedience is hard work—training a hundred new people every night, getting them safely arrested in the morning, writing press releases, talking to reporters. In the downtime of the afternoon hours we were doing our best to rally the rest of the environmental movement to this upstart effort. Which was key, because the “environmental movement” had largely become a collection of environmental groups, each doing impressive work but often without enough connection to the grass roots or to one another. (The grassroots groups, by contrast, were vital—but their voices didn’t break through to the national level often enough.) Big Green’s supporters had largely aged, and many were best at writing checks. We wanted to help these groups see this new surge not as a threat but as an infusion. We also needed their help to make Washington, a city accustomed to its elites, pay attention.

  Fresh out of jail, I’d written a letter for the CEOs of the Washington green groups to sign, and all of them did, even though the language was stronger than some were used to using: “Mr. President, there’s not an inch of daylight between our position and those of the people getting arrested in front of your house.” About ten days into the siege Al Gore released a two-sentence blog post pointing out that the tar sands were the “dirtiest source of liquid fuel on the planet,” and saluting the people who had “bravely participated” in the arrests. On the one hand, this was expected—Al Gore was the greatest climate advocate on the planet. On the other hand, he’s a loyal Democrat, who’d once hoped to sit in the White House we were now besieging. It felt like we were starting to break through just a little. It also felt like we were taking the movement new places: one night Benjamin Jealous, the young and dynamic head of the NAACP, showed up to address our training session. The crowd on hand, used to being told that environmentalism was something rich white people did, were thrilled by his tales of civil rights organizing; it was just as powerful when the Indigenous Environmental Network showed up in force and the even younger but no less dynamic Indian leader Gitz Crazyboy told tales of life in the tar sands desert.

  And we would wake up
each morning to news of what our allies from 350.org were doing overseas. In Cairo, delegations arrived to see the Canadian and American ambassadors. Our friends at 350 New Zealand shut down the Canadian embassy in Wellington for the afternoon, waving an oil-soaked maple leaf flag. Judging by the number of CBC journalists suddenly on the scene, the protests were coming as a bit of a shock to the Canadians, who had mostly either celebrated or overlooked the fact that their nation was trying to become the next Saudi Arabia. One morning the news was even less expected: ten of the most recent Nobel Peace laureates, led by Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, had written a letter to Obama urging him to block the pipeline. Nonviolent protest was working in textbook fashion—moved by the courage on display, people were responding. Sometimes I’d see the members of our crew just looking at one another and grinning.

  We knew we couldn’t keep the arrests going indefinitely, though, and we knew that the Obama administration would shrug off pressure from the usual suspects. So we had to figure out what to do next—how to take the movement off Pennsylvania Avenue and into places like Pennsylvania.

  Once the final arrestees on the final day had been hauled away in handcuffs, our small circle of core organizers sat down at a Thai restaurant to eat and plan. Somewhere in the middle of the pad thai, Matt got a text that the police had released the last of our band, and I felt a huge weight lift. Improbably, for two weeks and through 1,253 arrests, nothing had gone wrong. But now what?