Oil and Honey

by Bill McKibben

  And the next night was pretty good, too—a homecoming of sorts. I’d grown up in the suburbs of Boston and gone to college at Harvard; the city is the capital of American higher education, and so we’d known all along it would be a crucial hub of our divestment campaign. We’d sold out our first venue—an eight-hundred-seat church—in twenty-four hours, so we’d gone looking for a new home. The only place available was the Orpheum, a venerable hulk just off the Boston Common in the center of the city, which began life as a movie palace but became a concert hall in 1971 (with James Brown as the opening act). I’d seen the Ramones there in 1978, as a college freshman. It was dauntingly huge, the biggest hall of the tour—but we sold it out, too, and the place was absolutely buzzing. Thank heaven it was the night that Naomi Klein joined the tour live.

  She’d been in on the planning from the start, obviously. But having a four-month-old son does not jibe easily with driving around America in a bus, so we’d settled on back-to-back shows in Boston and New York as easiest for her. The video she’d cut for the other nights was sterling, but having her there in person made life much sweeter—we got to play around with Toma for an hour backstage before the show (life would be better if everyone just went around blowing raspberries on each other’s tummies), and then I got to play around with her on stage for two hours. She took half the script, and we threw lines back and forth like pros. It couldn’t have gone better, which was nice, since my mother was in the third row. We were pumped up as high as I can recall by the time we finished.

  Which sounds great, except that somehow you then have to get to sleep. Adrenaline is your friend—there’s no way to engage three thousand people without a steep dose of it coursing through your arteries—and then it’s your enemy. For the first time in my life, I have a real sense of why so many musicians end up doing some combination of drink, drugs, and groupies. I did fitfully sleep, and rose at four forty-five for the early Acela to New York—I was going ahead of the bus to talk with Bob Semple, the legendary editorial writer for the New York Times, and then David Shipley, who once ran the op-ed page at the Times and now does the same thing for Bloomberg, and then the ABC enviro correspondent, and then—there’s a lot of media in New York.

  And a lot of story. We were barely three weeks past Sandy, and though the tunnels had been pumped out and most of the subways were running again, much of the city was still a mess—the Rockaways, Breezy Point, and Red Hook were piled high with rotting trash. We’d been working with our colleagues at Occupy Wall Street since the storm hit—they’d been remade for the moment into Occupy Sandy, so the show that night, in the giant Hammerstein Ballroom, felt different from the rest of the tour. There was more anger, because if anyone had taken climate change seriously a quarter century ago when I started in on it, we might not have set the scene quite so perfectly for this monster storm. The work was more pressing as well—there was a big table in the back with people volunteering for relief efforts.

  Josh Fox—the filmmaker whose Gasland had sparked the nationwide anti-fracking movement—joined us in person that night. He explained to the crowd how all the local fights need to come together as one. “We’ve been like the little Dutch boy,” he said, “sticking fingers in a hundred holes in the dike” as we fought frack wells and coal ports and pipelines. “We’ve got to join those fingers together in a fist,” and go on offense against the fossil fuel industry. He’s right—there’s simply not enough time to do it one local fight at a time, playing an endless game of Whac-A-Mole with the endless bad ideas a profit-obsessed fossil fuel industry keeps hatching. Instead, we need to take away their social license, turn them into pariahs, and make it clear that they’re to the planet’s safety what the tobacco industry is to our individual health. I’m old enough to remember when working for Philip Morris was a perfectly honorable job, back before we knew that cigarettes were killing folks. But once we did know, that changed, and Philip Morris became Altria, in a vain attempt to shed its repugnant image. We’ve got to do that again.

  From New York we traveled to Philadelphia, and then on to D.C., rolling in next to the Warner Theatre in the early morning hours. We had to set up fast, because just this once the show was a matinee, designed to end at three p.m., so that we could spill out into the streets outside for our Keystone demonstration before dark.

  As I’ve explained, we’d pushed the button on that invitation to the demonstration ten minutes after NBC had called the election for Obama. The inside word was that he’d approve the Keystone permit once the election was past, so we thought we needed to strike quickly to show that no one had forgotten. And a day after the election I was glad we’d done so, when the head of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, told reporters that the oil industry had been “implicitly promised” by the administration that the project would now be approved; a day later the giant rating agency Moody’s said the same thing. Washington wisdom can set faster than superglue, and once it does it’s hard to pull apart, so we needed to make it look like a contest from the start. But eleven days to pull together a mass protest is pushing it, even with a crack crew like ours, so I worked extra hard up on stage to make sure the audience was fired up enough that they’d flow straight into the demonstration. And indeed they did, meeting a couple of thousand more who hadn’t been able to get tickets. We followed an eight-hundred-foot inflatable pipeline in a long snake dance around the White House; by the time we had reassembled in Freedom Plaza the sun was going down, and the temperature, too, but it was a spirited group—they stood and cheered through the end. Naomi had said it best during our New York show: we were glad that Barack Obama had been reelected, “but this time, no hero worship and no honeymoons.”

  As the bus rolled on to North Carolina that night, two particularly good omens emerged. The first was on the Keystone front—we’d started that fight with our small ragtag army, but the big green groups had become increasingly larger players. Now the Sierra Club was offering to take the lead for the next big demonstration, one that we were planning for President’s Day in February. And that moved the odds a little further; now approving the pipeline would mean not only disappointing the activist wing of the environmental movement, but also its biggest single organization. The Sierra Club under John Muir had saved Yosemite, and under David Brower had stopped the flooding of the Grand Canyon; now, under its new director, Michael Brune, it was taking on this most pitched of battles with the oil industry. Brune joined us in North Carolina, taking the stage at the vast Duke University auditorium to tell the story of the past few weeks of his life. Born and raised in one of those New Jersey barrier island towns, he’d been helping his folks piece their lives back together after Sandy wrecked their home, searching through soaked scrapbooks and mucking out moldy basements. He seemed ready to fight.

  The other omen came from the divestment battle. In the ten days we’d been on the road, about one hundred campuses had joined in, with more almost by the minute. Unity’s announcement that it would divest had been a jolt—but Unity’s endowment was tiny, just $12 million. We received news that more than four thousand Harvard undergraduates, in an officially sanctioned referendum, had voted by a three-to-one margin to demand that the college divest its holdings in fossil fuels. I’d seen a boy on campus that afternoon with a sweatshirt that said “Harvard: Duke of the North.”

  “Prove it,” I told the throng that gathered that night, and they roared back that they were up for the challenge. I knew how long the road from student interest to trustee action would be—but I knew, too, that just getting the battle going was a win for us. If people were talking about the evil oil companies, we were winning.

  We couldn’t leave for Atlanta right after the show that night—our driver’s logbook showed he needed a few more hours of rest before he’d be legal again. I climbed into my bunk and fell slowly asleep, waking when the bus lurched to life a couple of hours later. I groggily checked my watch: sure enough, we were now the midnight bus to Georgia.

  It turned
out our Atlanta theater was in Little Five Points, a trying-almost-too-hard hipster enclave of skateboard shops and vintage vinyl outlets. I pulled on my suit for a retro moment of my own, a noontime visit with some of the city’s key black clergy, summoned by the Reverend Gerald Durley, who’d first met Martin Luther King Jr. in 1959; in fact, the road to our lunch spot went right by King’s birthplace and Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he had followed his father into the pulpit. Durley had been an early champion of climate change action; it felt good to be with some churchmen, to say grace over lunch, and to feel the movement broadening a little.

  Our theater that night was a Depression-era vaudeville house that had closed in the 1960s to avoid desegregation, and only opened again in the 1980s. It was full to the brim, with students but also with white-haired older ladies, who laughed and nodded when I told them that getting arrested was one of the few things that got easier with age. “Past a certain point, what the hell are they going to do to you?” I said. The crowd rose as one at the end, promising that they’d march as southerners (black ones, anyway) had marched once before. I headed for the airport, home for Thanksgiving for three days, feeling buoyed—we’d done thirteen straight sold-out shows. At the gate I fired up my computer, and there was a special online Rolling Stone photo essay about the first half of the tour, sixteen powerful images of the crowds that had gathered. So far so good.

  * * *

  After our Thanksgiving break, the tour resumed in Providence, Rhode Island, and this time it was a little less chaotic—most of these towns had fewer newspapers and TV stations, which was good because the bus rides kept getting progressively longer as we headed west. From Columbus to Chicago, from Chicago to Madison, to Minneapolis, to Omaha, to Boulder, to Salt Lake City—bouncing between red state and blue, between plain and mountain. One day you’d be with ranchers and the next with people who would run screaming from a hamburger—my busmates included, who ate an inordinate amount of tofu; I told them I was planning to open a vegan restaurant chain called Tastes Surprisingly Okay. Eventually, inevitably, the bus became the common denominator—I wrote a short guide for life aboard that went up on the blog:

  RULES FOR SLEEPING ON THE BUS

  1. Feet go toward the front of the bus. So if something happens and Jim slams on the brakes, it’s your feet that take the hurt.

  2. The farther back in the bus, the higher you bounce with each bump.

  3. It’s very womblike when the bus is rumbling down the highway—the constant throaty vibration lulls you beautifully.

  4. But when the bus stops, and the engine turns off, you wake right up. The new city is disorienting—you went to sleep in Omaha and now you’re in Denver. But it’s okay. The bus is the bus is the bus, all across America.

  My favorite morning was the last, I think. We were headed into Salt Lake City from Denver, and I woke up somewhere in Wyoming, under a sky that was Chamber of Commerce blue and with a skin of snow on the high desert. This was almost the first snow we’d seen. It had been preternaturally warm everywhere—when we’d left Boulder the night before they were busy evacuating 583 homes about fifty miles west, because of a roaring forest fire. In December. We plunged down into the great gap toward the shimmering valley of the Great Salt Lake, and it was not hard to imagine Brigham Young declaring, “This is the Place.”

  My first stop when we hit town was a bookstore. And herein lies a tale. When I’d last seen Tim DeChristopher, he’d been in federal prison in the high desert of California. A few weeks before our arrival in Utah, though, having served eighteen months of his sentence, he’d been returned to Salt Lake and released to a halfway house. Tim was allowed to leave for a job during the day, the better to ease his return to society. His church had offered him work helping with their ministry to poor people, but the Bureau of Prisons official had exploded at the news, bellowing at Tim that his was a “social justice” crime so he sure as hell wouldn’t be “doing social justice work.” As a replacement, then, Tim found work at Ken Sanders’s antiquarian bookstore—which happens to be the only bookstore on the planet mostly devoted to the memory of the great desert writer Edward Abbey. It was piled high with copies of Abbey’s most famous work, The Monkey Wrench Gang, a rollicking account of eco-sabotage that, in the 1980s, had given birth to Earth First!, the monkey-wrenching environmentalists who spiked trees and poured sand down bulldozer gas tanks. And on that very day we were in Salt Lake City, their brave spiritual descendants in Texas had climbed deep down inside the newly laid southern length of the Keystone XL pipeline and chained themselves to concrete blocks. Anyway, I knew Abbey a little, and admired him a lot, and I am reasonably sure that he would have roared with laughter to know that Tim, the most famous eco-criminal of his day, had been effectively sentenced to selling T-shirts with crossed monkey wrenches by a federal official equal parts vengeful and obtuse—a character straight out of Ed’s novels.

  Tim looked fit and calm and happy, and we talked about his plans to head east for divinity school come fall if his probation officer gave the okay. And then I spent the afternoon getting ready for the last of our shows. By this time I hardly needed to glance at the script—I’d gotten the hour and a half down pretty pat, knew the cues to the video clips and the laugh lines. In fact, I almost knew it too well—I’d found myself, the last few nights, starting to play myself playing myself, a kind of Hal Holbrook does Bill McKibben thing that unsettled me. It’s hard to get truly psyched up to say the same thing night after night; on the other hand, this wasn’t a play. I kept saying, “The nights on this tour feel like some of the most important nights of my life,” and I wanted to really mean it.

  Tonight would be no problem, and not just because it was the last. I’d wanted to come to Salt Lake in part because I was pretty sure Terry Tempest Williams would show up to help. She’s not just among my favorite writers—her book Refuge is on the short list of the classic pieces of American nature writing—she’s among my very favorite people. We’d known each other for a quarter century, since she had invited me out to Utah to give a talk when The End of Nature first appeared; her absolutely unfailing kindness, matched by that of her husband, Brook, is one of the givens in my life. So it didn’t surprise me in the least when she volunteered, despite ill health, to make the long drive from Moab up to the university auditorium where we were gathering, and to give the sweetest, strongest possible introduction—a promise, in effect, that this crowd of her people would be part of this fight, though they’d be doing it in the most conservative state in the union. And in return I gave the truest talk of the whole long month, a valedictory that gathered in strength as it rolled toward its end.

  I realized, as I was talking, how much the trip across America had touched me. It had been years since I’d driven the country; now, pressed for time, I usually flew, with America reduced to a two-dimensional map out the airplane window. So it had been a revelation again to sense the size and relief of the country: to start out amid those great volcanoes of the Northwest, to meander south through the coastal forest and toward the Hollywood hills and the Pacific beach—iconic for good reason; to drift through my beloved Northeast, from the last lingering leaves of the New England fall to the spreading concrete of the New York corridor, to the gentle Georgia hills; to strike out across the Appalachians, and into the rippling flat of Ohio and the dead flat of Illinois and Nebraska, and to come roaring across those plains and then run into the heart-filling wall of mountain west of Denver. We’d seen damage everywhere we’d gone—the ocean off Puget Sound too acidic for oysters, the ruined beach towns of the Jersey Shore, the sere droughty farmland of the West, even the smoke from those bizarre lingering Colorado fires. But it was still so beautiful, still so worth saving from the radical simplifiers of the fossil fuel industry who were crashing a million years of evolved gorgeousness and meaning into a homogenized layer of hot, bare, broken planet.

  Everyone climbed up on the stage for the end—Terry, the great writer Rick Bass, who’d driven in from Montana
, the young people who’d worked with Tim at his local group Peaceful Uprising, and our crew: Jean, who’d been bus mother all week, though she was the youngest on board; Rae, a sharp sly organizer; Steve, our silent, solid photographer; Duncan, a whiz both at organizing and at computers; and Matt, smiling Zen master of the whole operation. We, in turn, managed to get the whole crowd on its feet, ready to fight, ready to march.

  We’d accomplished our objective. I’d written that piece for Rolling Stone in order to launch the tour, and the tour had launched a movement—we put out a press release in midafternoon announcing that we were well past one hundred campuses with active divestment fights under way. It wouldn’t be easy at all—I knew the New York Times was planning an article for the next day, which would doubtless highlight the pitfalls and difficulties. But that’s the nature of fights. We were, at least, in one; that much I could say for sure as I came off the stage. Also that I wanted a beer, and that I was ready to head for home.

  * * *

  If I thought the end of the tour would mean a rest, I was wrong—I’d been back in the house about an hour, unpacking the suitcase and drinking a beer, when the Times article popped up online. By the next morning it was on the front page of the business section, and before long it was the most e-mailed story of the day, and then of the week. This was fine by us, since it explained in ringing terms just how fast and far this new divestment movement was spreading. The students were at the “vanguard of a new national movement,” the Times declared, drawing the parallel to the anti-apartheid fight of three decades earlier.