Oil and Honey

by Bill McKibben

  That night Father John walked me up to the monastery and seminary, officially closed by the Islamic government but still manned by a skeleton crew of three monks. We let ourselves into the church, lit only by a few candles in the twilight, and stood in front of one of the oldest and most beautiful icons, its base literally crumbled away by the hundreds of thousands of lips that had kissed it over the years. Most icons, he told me, were painted on wood, in part because the Orthodox had a strong sense of the sacredness of the material world. Outside, from the hilltop, we could see a rambling wood structure on the summit of the next island over, an old Orthodox orphanage that Bartholomew is trying to turn into an interfaith environmental center. God only knows if any of this will matter.

  I was up before dawn, because I had to leave Turkey after only twenty-eight hours, and head, trailing a cloud of carbon behind me, to the global environmental summit in Rio. My companion for the hour-long boat ride back toward Istanbul was Jim Hansen, the NASA scientist who had really launched the global warming era with his 1988 testimony to Congress. I explained to him the logic behind the Do the Math campaign we were starting to plan, and he offered to help pull together a scientific advisory board—it was time, he said, for some other scientists to join him on the front lines of the fight. He’s been arrested, testified in court cases, written innumerable op-eds, and taken more abuse than any of us from the climate deniers, all the while continuing to carry out groundbreaking research. As our boat skimmed the Bosporus, he told me about some of his latest work, including some preliminary modeling of the effects of what appears to be a rapidly accelerating melting of the great Greenland ice sheet.

  “We have to look back into the paleo record to understand what’s really going on,” he said, describing the remarkably violent storms that had marked a similar period in the Eemian interglacial period, 120,000 years ago. Researchers had found evidence of tempests that tossed debris far beyond the tide lines, the remnants of superstorms that he said could be one legacy of our rapid warming in the lives of his grandchildren—of whom he had pictures. (I countered with a day-old shot of Naomi Klein’s brand-new baby boy, Toma.) “This is coming fast,” he said. “Faster than any of our leaders understand.”

  Proof of that last point was on full display in Rio de Janeiro, where I arrived fourteen hours later to join the Rio+20 environmental summit. The first gathering, in 1992, had been a chaotic carnival, but a hopeful one; climate change was still a new problem—new enough that there was some reason to hope world leaders meant what they said when they promised to tackle it. (Though there was the ominous declaration from President George H. W. Bush on the plane that “the American way of life is not up for negotiation.”)

  At least the first President Bush had bothered to go. This time most world leaders stayed away, and those who did attend used the broadest platitudes. Hillary Clinton could think of only one American leader to quote, Steve Jobs. “Think Different.” But nobody was thinking different, or even differently. They agreed on no targets or timetables for anything—theoretically they were for ending fossil fuel subsidies, but not at any particular point in the future. One sharp-eyed analyst went through the text, grandly titled “The Future We Want,” and found ninety-nine uses of the weaselly formulation “governments should encourage” and fifty “governments shall support,” but only three straightforward declarations that “we will” do anything at all.

  Everyone in the sprawling conference hall seemed to sense the prevailing mood of futility—the celebrities were the same ones who’d been there twenty years before (Richard Branson, Ted Turner); the walls were papered with announcements of seminars so mind-numbingly dull (“Ecovision Turkey 2050”; “A Project for Human-Based Sustainability Through Ontopsychological Methodology”) that it was hard to imagine actual human beings attending them. I’d been there about three hours, mostly talking with reporters desperate for something, anything, to cover, when a couple of young people asked if I’d join a protest they were planning. Of course—I seem to spend half my life asking people to join protests, and so am always eager to return the favor. Anyway, it sounded far more useful than any other thing I might spend the afternoon doing.

  At the appointed hour we gathered outside the main plenary hall, and a leather-lunged young Canadian climate organizer, Cam Fenton, led us in ripping up our copies of the text—it was, he pointed out correctly, a sham. Then we sat down, maybe a hundred of us. I was the oldest (and over the next three hours would have reason to remind myself that sitting cross-legged on a stone floor gets somewhat harder as you age) and watched the young leaders conduct the session. Eight months’ worth of Occupy assemblies had clearly taught them a good deal about the power, and the limits, of consensus.

  Our moderator, a young British woman named Anna, quickly got the human mic up and running, and managed to head off a good-hearted suggestion that every comment be translated into Portuguese, instead assigning a few translators to the corners of the sit-in. She also constantly relayed messages from the UN security officials who were surrounding us in a phalanx of agitated consternation. They had declared this an “unsanctioned gathering,” she said, and demanded we leave immediately or else “lose our accreditation.” Which was, in its way, a serious threat—these young people had made their way from around the world, and the credentials around their necks were the token of their admission to the debate; some melted away into the surrounding crowd, unwilling to give up their legitimacy. But most seemed to understand that they were token in a different sense of the word, and decided to stay.

  I clambered to my feet (a relief) to offer the suggestion that perhaps we should turn in our badges ourselves—that we could best demonstrate our disdain, our sense that the meeting had become a charade, by simply walking out and handing in our precious credentials. After some debate people agreed, and so our sit-in turned into a noisy, joyful march through the vast halls toward the exit. Lots of people joined in as word spread of what was going on. “The Future We Want Is Not Found Here,” we chanted as we left. “Walkout, Not Sellout.” Paula Collet, my 350 colleague who had done the most to organize our efforts at the conference, held a huge garland of everyone’s lanyards and badges, which she presented to the security chief as we exited the hall. Our crew headed back to the crowded apartment we were sharing in time to catch the evening news—and found that we were the lead story across Brazil.

  And when the proceedings mercifully ground to their official close the next day, we found we’d set the tone for the international verdict on the gathering. “Summit of Futility,” said Der Spiegel in Germany. Juliet Eilperin, the Washington Post reporter covering the proceedings, put it like this: “The global environment summit concluding Friday, which drew nearly 100 world leaders and more than 45,000 other people to Rio de Janeiro and cost tens of millions of dollars, may produce one lasting legacy: Convincing people it’s not worth holding global summits.”

  On the one hand, that’s a shame—sooner or later, if we ever get serious about limiting carbon, we’re going to need a global architecture that will make it possible. But at this point the international process was clearly going nowhere—and wasting effort better spent at getting to the root of the problem, the fossil fuel industry. Unless and until we weaken the industry’s power, UN conferences are no more productive than Senate bills.

  For me, that meant the most important parts of the gathering had been the chance to huddle with the leadership of the Natural Resources Defense Council (on the beach at Copacabana, with an army helicopter hovering overhead making us shout at top volume) and Greenpeace (over caipirinhas) to explain the idea for Do the Math. They got it, and they offered to help, and I left for the long flight home in a better mood than most of the delegates.

  * * *

  Man, it’s a good thing climate change is a hoax, because by the time I got back to the States you’d sure have thought there was something to this global warming stuff. For a hoax it has excellent production values.

  Consider: i
t wasn’t just the 2,132 new high temperature marks in June 2012. It was what went with them. Duluth, Minnesota, broke all its old rainfall records, and in an excellent cinematic touch, so much water flooded the city zoo that the seal escaped and swam down Grand Avenue. In the Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, Tropical Storm Debby became the earliest fourth storm of the season ever recorded, and then dumped “unthinkable amounts of rain” on central Florida. (Giveaway movie moment: the nine-foot gator that washed into a Tampa swimming pool.)

  Out west the largest fire in New Mexico history torched more than 170,000 acres, and then the most destructive blaze in the annals of Colorado burned on the edge of Fort Collins. But that was just the warm-up—it was Colorado Springs, in Waldo Canyon, where the nation really got to see what a wildfire looked like. Tweets and blog posts recounted the specific terrors: one resident wrote a harrowing account of driving his SUV across suburban soccer fields to escape the blaze, with “a vision of hell in my rearview mirror.” It was cinematic in the extreme—the flames perfectly framed the famous chapel of the Air Force Academy on the very day the new cadets arrived. Another firestorm near the Boulder campus of the National Center for Atmospheric Research forced the evacuation of the planet’s foremost climate scientists. I mean, c’mon.

  The record heat moved east from Colorado, as records that dated back to the Dust Bowl fell with uncanny speed. Images of a farmer kicking the dust in his drought-ridden field—that old Hollywood staple—reappeared on the evening news; the scene worked so well that the price of corn and wheat shot through the roof. At 115 degrees, Hill City, Kansas, was the warmest spot on the continent, with farmers fainting in the field and workers burning themselves on tools left in the sun. (The town is also home—cinematic touch—to a museum chronicling the history of the oil industry.)

  An absurd number of catastrophes kept happening at the same time, just as in the best disaster flicks. On the last Friday of June, Washington set all-time heat records (one observer described it as like “being in a giant wet mouth of a dog, except six degrees warmer”), and then shortly after dinner a storm for the ages blew through—first there was five minutes of high wind, blowing dust and debris, followed by an explosive display of thunder and lightning that left four million people without power—which is to say without air-conditioning just as the temperatures got even hotter. By the first of July, the newspapers had just about run out of adjectives: stifling, oppressive, unbearable. The numbers were most telling. Atlanta, hottest temperature ever recorded. Ditto Raleigh. Ditto—the list was endless. In Goldsboro, North Carolina, the temperature was 103 and the humidity was 83 percent, which made for a heat index of 131 degrees.

  None of this, of course, did anything to slow down the fossil fuel machine: the White House chose that week, in fact, to announce that the final permits for the southern half of the Keystone pipeline had been granted, that Shell could start drilling in the Arctic, and that it had auctioned off seven hundred million tons of Powder River Basin coal for the bargain price of $1.13 a ton. Nor did it humble the fossil fuel industry: Rex Tillerson of ExxonMobil told a New York audience, the same day that Colorado Springs burned, that global warming was “an engineering problem with engineering solutions.” Right—an engineering problem. I could feel my desire to do some damage to the oil industry growing with every new weather report. We started signing contracts with booking agencies for the concert halls that would host our Do the Math tour.

  * * *

  But truth be told, it wasn’t bad at all in Vermont. We were on the edge of the heat, so the temperatures nudged 90 once or twice—but mostly it was glorious high summer weather. Perfect for bees. Perfect.

  The rest of the nation’s agricultural system was buckling. Seriously buckling: the price of corn was spiking by the hour because across the Midwest the sun was withering the crop. The heat wave couldn’t have come at a worse moment—as Bill Lapp, the president of an Omaha-based agriconsultant put it, “You only get one chance to pollinate over one quadrillion kernels. There’s always some level of angst at this time of year, but it’s significantly greater now and with good reason.” In Kentucky, agronomists reported that “the corn crop is so desperate for water that kernels are aborting.”

  But the apiaries of Addison County were doing just fine. Or at least Kirk’s apiary. Or at least the beeyard by the hospital, where we were at the moment.

  Kirk smoked the first hive, lifted off the top, and gazed down. “That white? That’s what we’ve been waiting for,” he said. “That flash of white.”

  The white is the wax the bees use to cap the cells where they store honey. “They can’t secrete that wax unless the honey’s really flowing,” he said. “Wow. If I can get all my colonies to look like this by the end of July … wow. This looks … prosperous.”

  It hadn’t been a completely smooth morning. Earlier, at another yard, he’d had to burn a hive infested with American foulbrood, a disease that, before the invasion of the mites, was the most serious problem beekeepers faced. “In fact, around 1900 or so it seemed like just as big a problem as the mites are now,” he said. Over time, though, bees seem to have evolved some resistance to the spore-forming bacteria, and Kirk thinks his bees, uncoddled by any treatment, are probably hardier than most. “I don’t get it much anymore—I didn’t see a single case till last year.” Which is good, because foulbrood is about as nasty as its name. “You’ll usually notice that the cappings to the cells where the bees should be hatching out have a little hole,” he says. “The larva dies after it’s sealed in the cell, and it melts down into brown goop, and the whole hive smells like rotten meat.”

  But it was just one hive, and he seemed unfazed, mostly because everyone else was starting to make honey. Most of the year, the bees are taking care of themselves—raising new bees, cleaning the hive, building comb. They’re bringing in enough nectar to stay even, or using up stored honey, or relying on the sugar syrup Kirk provides when times are tight. But for a few weeks (sometimes just a few days, and some years not at all) flowers will open in such abundance across the valley that the hive turns into a honey factory. The bees bring in far more nectar than they need, and convert it to honey. If you keep adding storage space, they’ll keep filling it up. Our job today was, in essence, to add attics to hives so that the bees had room to put up more and more honey. These attics are called “supers,” and each can hold about thirty pounds of honey. In the very best days in the very best seasons on the shores of Lake Champlain, a colony can fill a super in two days—that is, they manage to produce fifteen pounds a day. “And this is nothing compared to, say, Saskatchewan,” said Kirk. “I almost couldn’t believe it when I saw it. The resource is so huge—the landscape is one-third canola, a third alfalfa, and a third wheat. Between the alfalfa and the canola there are unlimited flowers. They have hives on scales there that have added fifty pounds in a day.”

  Even fifteen pounds a day seems miraculous, though, given that the freight of pollen any one bee can carry is almost too light to weigh. “I love them as wild creatures,” says Kirk, who was as relaxed as I’ve ever seen him. “It’s just so amazing that they can produce much more honey than they need themselves, so I can take it without hurting them.” And if that sounds a little like exploitation, well—in return he feeds the hives if they run short, and works year-round to see that they survive. He’s out in the cold of November, wrapping insulation around hives, and in the mud of March making sure they’ve got plenty of syrup. It all works, at least in a year like this. Kirk’s got a thousand supers, made by hand in his workshop during the winter. They’re stacked six deep on some of the colonies. That means that if all goes right he could theoretically harvest thirty thousand pounds of honey. All hasn’t gone right since 2005, mostly because of weather—“there just isn’t any rule book anymore.” But this has—so far—been a golden year. Kirk leads me down the country lane to see where at least some of the nectar is coming from. “That’s a basswood tree,” he said. “See those blossoms—it’s just c
overed with flowers. A perfect honey tree.” And the clover is showing up across the fields where the hay’s been mowed.

  * * *

  So there’s an easy moral to our story. On the one hand we have an agribusiness Midwest covered with uniform rows of corn and powered by fossil fuel—the same fossil fuel now driving the climate change that’s causing the corn to wither in the impossible heat. It’s a dead end. Here’s Rex Tillerson again, the ExxonMobil CEO who truly doesn’t know when to shut up. Expanding on his explanation that global warming is an “engineering problem with engineering solutions,” he brightly added, “Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around—we’ll adapt to that.” Actually, we won’t, not in the ways he’s thinking. It’s true that ExxonMobil has helped melt the tundra, but that doesn’t mean you can just move Iowa north and start growing corn—the temperature may be cool enough, but there’s no soil. And what do you do with the Midwest? Just let all that topsoil turn to desert?

  No, the moral goes like this: we instead start producing a nation of careful, small-scale farmers such as Kirk Webster, who can adapt to the crazed new world with care and grace, and who don’t do much more damage in the process—Kirk uses just enough fuel to get the pickup between beeyards. And that’s almost kind of happening: in the past year, federal officials reported that after a century of decline there has been a net gain of thirty thousand farms in the country. And almost all the new ones are small.

  But it’s not going to be quite that easy. For one thing, the impossible weather can be at least as hard on good, small farmers as it is on large agribusiness concerns, precisely because they’re small. Kirk weathered Hurricane Irene just fine, because the rain didn’t fall that hard on this side of the mountains. But twenty miles to the east, great small farmers had their great small farms washed away. One young couple in Cuttingsville had built a lovely CSA farm, feeding dozens of subscribers, along the Mill River—which turned into a farm-wrecking torrent in minutes. As the local newspaper described the aftermath, “All that’s left are thousands of rocks—permanent reminders of the land they once had.”