Oil and Honey

by Bill McKibben

  Midway atoll in the Pacific checked in with a picture of volunteers trying to rescue Laysan albatross chicks from rising waters, while in Araranguá, Brazil, residents remembered the first South Atlantic hurricane in history and the damage it had done to unwary coastal towns. In California, people hung signs on freeway overpasses (“Wake up and smell the permafrost”), and in Sundsvall, Sweden, they gathered amid the forests devastated by a freak Christmas storm. We received photos of a giant nighttime bike ride in Sinaloa; a barbecue at the Palm and Pawn Pub in Wagga Wagga in Australia, which March flooding had left completely submerged; and an undersea rally in Mozambique, where dugongs and other sea life are threatened by an acidifying ocean. From the Gura River in Kenya came a picture of a busted dam, and a group of farmers with a sign saying “In the last few months I was almost dry and now I am full.” Their note said both drought and flood had caused havoc—that people were leaving the region. Rwanda, Palm Springs, Serbia, Senegal. So beautiful. Late in the day a picture of the tar sands refinery in Fort McMurray arrived with an anonymous note:

  I am an Oil Sands worker and risked my job to take this picture. Myself, along with the majority of my co-workers are ready for a renewable energy revolution. We need to stand together to eliminate the corruption that exists in this industry, start taxing carbon emissions, and creating green jobs for a sustainable future. We do not work in this industry because we like supporting large oil companies; we simply have no other choice. We want jobs that provide long term economic, social and environmental sustainability for ourselves, our country and our planet.

  Manaus on the Amazon, Guangzhou in China. One of the last pictures to trickle in came from the League of Women Voters in Montgomery, Alabama—a crew of black and white women in the city once torn apart by Dr. King’s bus boycott, now united by the fact that pollen counts were off the charts with the weird weather, and hence their kids were having to deal with extra asthma attacks. A few minutes later another photo appeared, this one of a single woman standing by the water’s edge in the African countryside. The caption read: “Here, it is in a village of Gatumba in a country of east Africa which is called Burundi. In this photo, we are in the presence of a young lady showing with the finger there where was her house before being taken by the violent rain. Now you see it yourself, there is only a swamp of water.”

  By then the foul image of Ted Kaczynski on that billboard was scrubbed from my mind. These hundreds of thousands of people who’d spend their weekend holding rallies and planting trees didn’t “believe” in global warming; it was the new reality of their world, making hard lives harder and shaking up the comfortable and the bucolic. And together we’d managed to put a human face on global warming. I figured we’d made our point when I checked the biggest of the climate denier Web sites the next morning, and there was a big headline about the day’s events: “Connect the Dolts.” Ah, but fighting dolts! And what do you know, State Farm had decided to stop backing the Heartland Institute—in fact, a whole passel of insurance companies had pulled out, not to mention Diageo, which imports Guinness. “Diageo vigorously opposes climate skepticism and our actions are proof of this,” the company said. But I’m still going to stick to local beer.

  * * *

  Vermont’s weather had been picture perfect for Connect the Dots day (though the best thing about global organizing is that you don’t worry about the weather—you know that some places it will rain and some it will shine). But the weather held the next day, too, and so, though pictures were still pouring in, I got up early and drove down to the valley to join Kirk. Temperatures were rising through the fifties in midmorning, and the weather forecast said it would be near seventy by day’s end—save for that weird and haunted March heat wave, this was some of the warmest weather of the year. But this time it was right on schedule.

  Kirk was still rebalancing boxes of bees, trying to build the strongest colonies possible in the weeks before the clover would blossom and the honey crop would, with luck, be made. Sometimes that meant splitting apart colonies that had grown too fast—he was worried they’d start feeling so chipper they’d swarm, and he’d lose tens of thousands of employees before the flow even began. So he’d move a third of one hive off to a new beeyard and combine it with a weaker colony, and give it a new queen. “It kind of sets the clock back on these hives a little, gets them on my timetable rather than theirs. Or so I like to think,” he said.

  We were driving between beeyards on this high-spring morning, which meant we were crisscrossing New England’s one real agricultural valley. Bordered by the Green Mountains to the east and Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks to the west, the Champlain Valley is a good-sized chunk of Wisconsin that somehow got stuck in northern New England. On a day like this, with the dust hanging in the air behind the pickup, it looks like a Ford commercial. But the soil’s not quite good enough for true Midwestern scale: there are big dairies, and fields with a hundred acres of corn, and a few implement dealers with John Deere–green combines parked in neat ranks out front—but there are also plenty of grown-in woodlots where small farms failed generations ago, and fence rows tangled over with vines, and small orchards white with blossoms. Scale is so hard to get right. We were working in the shadow of a caved-in barn, where once some family had earned its living. Now the nearby land is used for a much bigger dairy that’s going broke selling commodity milk, but also, down the road, a much smaller one, where half a dozen cows churn out ultra-high-end butter for a single restaurant. Mexican immigrants, most of them illegal, make the big dairies work; highly educated refugees from the city often run the artisanal cheese works and cideries. What’s missing is the middle-sized operation, neither boutique nor big-box, the kind you think of when you think of farming. Kirk’s apiary is pretty close to that sweet spot, though—a good year, remember, grosses him something like $50,000.

  And he’s done it not by piling on risk, but just the opposite: by building up resilience. There’s plenty of possible trouble: mites, bears, cheap Chinese honey. You could try and resolve those problems with high-tech solutions, or by growing so big that you could ride out every bump. Or you could focus on durability—on the squat, hardy colonies now buzzing around us. In a way, Kirk was managing against failure as much as he was betting on great success; he was, in that sense, un-American. He was solvent and pretty much at peace, and doing something productive that didn’t involve ever—ever—looking into a screen.

  I fear that I haven’t quite gotten that across. Kirk doesn’t have a computer. Doesn’t want a computer. Some of his friends set up a Web site, kirkwebster.com, that posts the essays he’s written over the years for beekeeping journals, but he wrote them with a pencil and pad. He calls his customers on the phone—the old kind that connects to the wall. I’m not out to prove that this is a morally superior way of behaving. I spend most of the day on the computer, and the kind of organizing we do would be literally impossible without it; I think the Internet is one of the few wild cards we’ve got in the battle against corporate power. But, man, not having access to it saves a lot of time. Kirk doesn’t ever have the task that takes up most of my day now, answering e-mail. His life doesn’t seem Luddite or retro—it seems advanced. He’s managed to choose the parts of modernity he needs (solar panels for the roof) and somehow kept the freedom to do without the parts he doesn’t need. Bees aren’t necessarily busy all the time—they spend the winter hanging out in a big warm ball—but they’re pretty good about staying on task, about doing the things that actually need doing.

  * * *

  May 18, 2012.

  It was exactly a year ago today that I first heard of the Keystone XL pipeline and began thinking about how we might bring it to wider attention.

  Today, Mitt Romney unveiled the first TV ad of his general election campaign. Here’s how it began:

  VOICE-OVER: “What would a Romney presidency be like?”

  VIDEO TEXT: “Day 1”

  VOICE-OVER: “Day one, President Romney immediately a
pproves the Keystone pipeline, creating thousands of jobs that Obama blocked.”

  Which is … weird to read. I don’t know whether to be shocked at how (relatively) easy it turns out to be to make a stir, or dismayed that I didn’t figure it out a long time ago. For better and for worse we managed to put something no one knew about at the center of the nation’s political agenda.

  5

  ON THE ROAD AGAIN

  Pandemonium! We were in one of Kirk’s big beeyards on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, breaking down big hives into small colonies that would then be used for breeding new queens. The task involved lots of lifting and carrying, all of it conducted inside a roaring cloud of bees. “They’re getting mixed in with bees from different colonies, they’re getting taken to a new place, they’ve suddenly got no queen,” said Kirk apologetically. I managed to get stung right through my bee suit—on this day we were dealing with wild animals, not domesticated creatures.

  Which probably explains why we were telling wild animal stories as we worked. Pat Whitley was there in a bee veil and blue jeans (he was getting stung through the denim repeatedly); the beeyard was next to his land, by the house he built when he’d moved up from New Jersey some years ago. The standard rent is thirty pounds of honey. His son was the first to take a real interest. “I was watching from the house one day and saw a kid following Kirk in a bee veil,” Pat recalled. “I thought, ‘Oh, he must have a grandson or something helping him.’ No, wait, that’s James’s shirt. He just got started into it, and I got into it to help him.”

  Pretty deep into it. Not long before, Pat had climbed halfway up a nearby pine to capture a swarm. A few weeks after that, a bear had crashed through this particular yard, knocking over a stack of boxes in the search for grubs and larvae. (Honey is an afterthought for bears, who really want the protein.) Pat went down to stack them back up, but “I didn’t have all the right equipment, really. It took me an hour, and before I was done I had about fifty thousand stings. Well, twenty stings anyway. I was wearing wool pants, and Kirk told me later that bees don’t like wool. Who knew?” Who indeed? As it turns out, wool retains some degree of animal odor even after you wash it a hundred times. So, wear cotton. Bees, by the way, don’t like a lot of things, including dark colors—perhaps, authorities speculate, because it makes them think you might be a bear.

  And bears really are trouble, which is why Pat—a dedicated hunter—decided he’d take down the bruin who’d gotten a taste for the local honey. “I was coming home from a function at the church one evening, and I could hear him crashing around,” he said. “I snuck down, and I could see the shadow in the trees over there, but it was a dark night. If you can’t see, you really shouldn’t shoot. But I figured, so, he likes to come late. I got my blind set up—but the next night he was there by seven thirty, before I could get in place.” After that, the bear had disappeared, and Pat thought he knew why. “On the school bus the other day, the kids were showing pictures of a bear. Apparently they’ve started feeding him marshmallows a couple of roads over, and he likes those better.”

  As our climate shifts, winters have gotten steadily shorter and people have gotten used to seeing bears out in the woods much later into the year. In fact, the state of Vermont had just announced it was changing the dates of bear-hunting season. “It used to end the first Wednesday of deer-hunting season,” said Pat, meaning mid-November. “A decade ago there was usually snow then. But now bears can stay out a lot later in the year, so guys were seeing bears but they couldn’t shoot them. They’ve extended the season, so that should get some more of them killed.” The whole state was bear conscious at the moment, because our governor, Peter Shumlin, had woken up a few nights earlier to find a sow and three cubs dining from his bird feeders. Acting with the resolution one expects of a chief executive (albeit against the advice of all the wildlife experts, including the ones on his own payroll), he’d gone out on the deck to shoo them away, at which point they shooed him back in. “I was three feet away from getting ‘arrrh,’” he explained to reporters, showing them cell phone photos he’d shot of the bears. What made the encounter memorable was a detail that the governor added: “Let’s just put it this way, real Vermont boys don’t wear pajamas. So the bear was better dressed than me.” In some places that image might reduce gubernatorial popularity ratings, and indeed Shumlin’s Republican opponent hired a man in a bear suit to follow the governor around for a few weeks—but most Vermonters seemed to think it was about what they would have done. It is, after all, the most rural state in the union—we’ve only got one real city, Burlington, whose population is forty-two thousand; Montpelier, where Shumlin works, has only about eight thousand residents (and is the only state capital in the country without a McDonald’s). So we’re used to seeing creatures.

  The day before, for instance, the neighbors reported seeing a moose and calf in the meadow behind our house. That pleased me no end, not just because I like them above all other animals, but because they’re in increasing trouble. Just that week Minnesota researchers reported that moose numbers had dropped by more than half in the past few years, according to new aerial surveys—the state estimated that as few as four thousand of the creatures were still roaming the north woods. And the culprit, not surprisingly, was climate change. Moose are exquisitely well adapted to the cold, which is to say that they’re exquisitely badly adapted to the heat—above 20 degrees Fahrenheit they start looking for shade. (The need to cool off explains why they spend much of the summer standing in swamps and ponds.) By contrast, ticks love the new warm weather. In days of old, when I was in my forties, we had winters cold enough to kill them off—they weren’t a problem up in the mountains. But no more—and so the Minnesota scientists were reporting that moose, who had evolved to deal with ten thousand ticks, now were carrying as many as seventy thousand at a time. The insects were driving them so crazy that they were scratching off their fur—biologists reported finding animals with only 10 percent of their hide intact. And then, what if we have the occasional old-school cold spell? “With no hair, if you’re trying to survive in a cold climate, you’re basically going to die from exposure,” said one expert. “We may see little clusters hanging on in some areas, but it won’t return to where we were before. Those days are gone.”

  As it happened, I’d found a tick in the shower that morning, fully engorged with my blood. So I’d be spending the next week or so looking for signs of Lyme disease (flu-ish lethargy, a bull’s-eye rash). Pat said his wife and son had both come down with Lyme the year before, fortunately recognizing it early enough that a course of antibiotics could knock it down. We never had Lyme disease in Vermont, not until the past few seasons. But already it was changing the feel of the place—there were people I knew who didn’t really want to walk outdoors anymore. I could feel the reluctance myself a little—or at least the annoyance at having to tuck my pants into my socks and search my nooks and crannies when I came in from the woods. There are reasons enough for modern Americans to stay indoors, everything from obesity to screen dependency; all we need is another excuse for our ongoing denaturalization. It was a vicious cycle: warm weather breeds ticks, which causes people to care even less about the natural world.

  But happily some folks remain engaged. We heard a gunshot from someplace nearby as we worked. “Another squirrel has succumbed to James Whitley,” said Pat with a little paternal pride. “They steal the bird feeder food,” he explained. The family raised chickens and bobwhite quail, along with their own hives of bees that Kirk had helped them start; they didn’t have much use for predators. “We’re an outdoor family,” said Pat. “I like it out here in the beeyard. There’s no radio or TV down here. It’s just quiet time, a chance for me to talk with the kids as we work.”

  And the work for the morning was done. We had thirty-six new colonies, tied securely to the back of Kirk’s truck. Up out of the valley we drove, into the mountains about twenty minutes away, where he kept his special isolated yards for raising queens.
From the heat of the valley the temperature dropped ten, maybe fifteen degrees; a breeze was blowing in the sun-dappled grove of maple and white pine where we unloaded the hives. If all went according to plan, he’d be producing two hundred or so queens here every couple of weeks for the rest of the summer—since there weren’t many flowering plants, no other commercial beekeepers kept hives in the neighborhood, which meant odds were good his untreated drones and queens would find one another, continuing to genetically improve his operation. The blackberry bushes were coming into lovely white bloom. “That will give these guys just enough to eat,” said Kirk.