Students said they were well aware that the South Africa campaign succeeded only after on-campus actions like hunger strikes, sit-ins and the seizure of buildings. Some of them are already having talks with their parents about how far to go.
“When it comes down to it, the members of the board are not the ones who are inheriting the climate problem,” said Sachie Hopkins-Hayakawa, a Swarthmore senior from Portland, Ore. “We are.”
Two days later Time magazine’s Bryan Walsh chimed in, ending his account like this:
University presidents who don’t fall in line should get used to hearing protests outside their offices. Just like their forerunners in the apartheid battles of the 1980s, these climate activists won’t stop until they win.
The journalists were right to feel the momentum—by week’s end, which also marked the close of the semester at most schools, we had divestment fights up and running on 252 campuses. Or rather, students had them up and running—at best we were helping to coordinate, to spread the word. “More vector than virus,” was how I’d taken to describing my role. Still, it was a heady moment, for this was one of the biggest student movements in many years. And I was proud of my own college, Middlebury. Its president, Ron Liebowitz, in the midst of all the national furor, sent out a message to the whole campus promising a serious discussion in the semester to come. “A look at divestment,” he wrote, “must include the consequences, both pro and con, of such a direction, including how likely it will be to achieve the hoped-for results and what the implications might be for the College, for faculty, staff, and individual students.” Which seemed just about right, and set us up for a good fight on home turf.
In the middle of all the op-ed writing and tweeting and so forth, though, a phone call came from the most important address in all of academe: my daughter’s freshman dorm room at Brown. And it wasn’t a happy call—Sophie was reporting that, hours before her last final exams, an ambulance was en route to take her to the hospital because she’d been throwing up for hours. I jumped in the car and made the long drive to Providence. By the time I got there she’d been released and was ready to head home. A few days later, on New Year’s Eve, surgeons removed a tumor from her belly. One cares about saving the world, but one cares about one’s daughter; it was a long day in the hospital, exactly none of it spent worrying about Shell or Obama or Keystone.
For the next few weeks it was hard to get my head back in the game; once the holidays had passed and normal life resumed and the e-mail in-box was filling with its typical four hundred missives a day, I found myself shaky. Unnerved by it all. Overwhelmed. Frustrated and a little resentful. I was receiving a great deal of attention, and much of it was kind: the state’s biggest paper named me “Vermonter of the Year,” which was an honor that meant something to me. But my life didn’t feel like my life. It was something I’d been sensing for the past couple of years, roughly the span covered by this book; I felt like the marble in the pinball machine, bouncing off one flipper after another. Or maybe I was the one playing the game, shaking the machine. I was good at this, after all; we were on about our fourth extra ball with Keystone. But it wasn’t me, or at least it wasn’t the me that used to be, the one that wrote difficult books, that had the time to figure things out instead of just reacting.
My reactions, as I say, were pretty good. There were plenty of moments when I felt as if I knew where to plant my foot next—I’d known how to scare the White House for a season, and the game plan for divestment was on schedule. The right words came at the right time. Maybe a lifetime of thinking was paying off in a few years of action. But some part of me was desperately thirsty for that older way of being. I felt unanchored, tossed on the tides of the heaving Internet. I understand that I could have lashed myself to the mast—either that or stopped up my ears; there’s even software (“Freedom”) that lets you block the Web from your computer. But successful activism seems to demand immersion in the moment, with small battles at every turn. It’s hard to turn off the news cycle, at least for me; engagement is engagement. I’d never fixated on weekends before, because for a writer the “workday” is a fluid concept—but now the weekend meant that blissful period when e-mail dropped off to an almost manageable level. Real politicians, I think, thrive on this kind of stimulus, but I’m not a politician. A writer, if you think about it, is someone who has decided their nature requires them to hole up in a room and type. You can violate your nature for a while, but eventually it takes a toll.
Which is why I kept finding excuses to hang out at the farm with Kirk. He was in winter hiatus, mostly just resting, gathering strength. There’d been some more bear attacks on some of the distant beeyards (“I’m just going to have to electric-fence them all”), and a wild windstorm had blown over some of the colonies next to his house. But basically he was calmly reading, touring the woodlot on his old cross-country skis, and looking through seed catalogs. I’ve said before that he lives outside the world of the Internet, the TV, the cell phone—that’s doubtless the oddest thing about him, statistically. He’s a solid human being, attractively and somewhat dauntingly solid.
Months before he’d sent me home with a book to read, a well-thumbed copy of The Still Forest Pool by the Thai Buddhist monk Achaan Chah, one of the people who’d brought insight meditation to the West. Kirk had bookmarked a small section titled “The Spiral of Virtue, Concentration, and Wisdom.” “Virtue” and “wisdom” seemed unlikely, but “concentration” sounded seductive. And so one day after the new year, with Sophie recuperating nicely, I went by the farm for a ski and a long lunch of roast beef from one of the neighbor’s cows. And I asked Kirk, quite directly, about his spiritual life.
“What you need to know is that I was very sick some years ago,” he said. “As it turned out, I had mercury poisoning, but I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was that I couldn’t sleep. I mean, one or two hours out of twenty-four. And I can’t tell you how hard that is, how gray and horrible the world gets when you’re that deprived of sleep. I called up one other guy who I’d heard had serious sleep trouble, and he sent me a book by Joseph Goldstein called The Experience of Insight. I think I’d heard about meditation before, I think I had a little book about yoga. But this was new—it was clear to me that it was not a way to make yourself feel better, but a way to know things about yourself. I recall reading in Epstein’s book, or maybe Achaan Chah’s book, the advice that you should ‘try to stay awake longer and longer so you could meditate more.’ And I remember thinking to myself, ‘I’ve got that part already—I can’t go to sleep.’ That little piece of humor coming into my mind was important. You can’t imagine how terrible sleep deprivation is, and when I was able to make that little teeny joke to myself, I think I kind of started to turn the corner.”
Kirk learned to meditate. “I even went to a meditation retreat once,” he said. “But one of my insights is that the way I live is a little like being on a retreat all the time.” Indeed, he doesn’t do much formal sitting anymore. “When I was, the meditation was like an island in me. It occupied a niche. But eventually it grew, it spread to the other parts of my life. And it felt like those other parts of my life became a more powerful form of meditation.”
This set me up to ask the question that had been in the back of my mind all year: “But don’t you get bored?” I mean, he spends his whole life dealing with his apiary. He lives in one large room; there are perhaps two hundred books along the wall. It’s the Spartan opposite of the life I’d been leading these past months.
“I never get bored,” he said after a moment’s thought. “Sometimes I don’t feel great, but I never get bored. The purpose of meditation, I think, is to be able to see the incredible beauty of life in every little aspect of it—so boredom is not my problem. My problem is not being overwhelmed by the amazing diversity of the world. I mean, one little piece of wood here on the wall of the house. I can remember the board it came from, and I think of my friend’s sawmill, where I’ve bought all the wood for my c
olonies for years. The couple that runs it are in their seventies, but each winter they’re out in their woodlot cutting the trees they’ll need for the year. So I’m thinking of them, and of the forest. It’s about stories. The real challenge of doing something like farming is to string all these stories together so they end up making sense. Farming is like playing a continuous game of 3-D chess. There are an innumerable number of moves, so many things are going on at so many different levels. A great farmer is one who can see what the right moves are and make them at the right time. It’s completely absorbing. I try to figure out, every single day, what is the optimum purpose of this day? What is its best use?
“Take a single day from the year, just pick one from the calendar,” he said.
“May fifteen,” I said, for no good reason.
“Good choice,” he said. “Spring has come, in fact it might be summer. Any day during May if I don’t go to the beeyards I probably lose two thousand dollars in potential income. So much of the way the apiary produces honey depends on May—the honey-producing colonies, that’s right when their population is growing the fastest, and when they’re most likely to swarm. So it’s really important to shepherd that population growth so you’ll have a big colony to produce honey with. And it’s right at the moment when customers are likely to be calling. But at the same time, it’s a really key stretch for planting a garden crop or doing the first weeding. If you hoe a row of vegetables at the right moment, it will take a tiny fraction of the time it would to weed them two weeks later. I don’t like to work six days on and take one off; I like to work when the weather is conducive. There are many times in the spring and fall when if you don’t work on Saturday and Sunday it can take weeks to catch up. And so you have to weigh everything. The point is, it’s not my schedule. It’s the schedule of living things, what they need.”
This isn’t “farming” in the modern sense, of course; it’s farming in an older way of looking at things. “I like the way the Japanese farmer and writer Masanobu Fukuoka put it,” said Kirk. “‘Farming is the cultivation of better human beings.’ In another sense, there’s really only one measure of good farming, and that’s to leave the land better than you found it. If what you’re doing is leaving the land more fertile, that’s a pretty good guide for being a better human being. But it’s so completely foreign to our cultural idea of using up resources, of mining the world and moving on to the next place, the next thing, of moving on to find some more.”
It’s this culture that Kirk, at some early point, decided to keep at bay—the one that seemed too confusing, too out of control. The very same culture that, in 2012, had managed to create the hottest year America had ever seen. The one that depends on more, on faster, on ambition, on a kind of generalized horniness for accumulation and sensation and novelty, novelty, novelty—novelty being the stock in trade especially of the Internet, the idea that at every second something new might be filtering into your in-box or onto Twitter, that something new might be showing up on YouTube or attaching itself to your Facebook timeline. And so he’s kept it out, and concentrated on what was important.
And that calm has come at a cost in companionship. A high cost. “With most people, I feel like they’d bring in some of that craziness from the outside world,” he said. “I mean, I’ve made a choice not to pursue material things, or recognition, or to try to fit in because everyone else was fitting in. And those are difficult things for people to do. I think most people in society are oriented around those things even if they don’t want to be. And I’ve got no desire to impose my sense on others.” It’s not that there’s no one he might have settled down with; doubtless there are some women who might have made his home a less lonely place without inviting in the whole culture. But maybe not so many—the odds weren’t great, and he hadn’t, so far, lucked out. It’s not like he was going to go on eHarmony, after all. And the need had grown less urgent. “I used to say I was no more cut out to live by myself than anyone else, but I’ve definitely gotten better at it.”
His house is, in fact, a slightly monkish cell, in the best sense of that word—the monk who looks out, engaged with but not overwhelmed by the world, the monk who stands solidly on his two feet, hard to shake. The one who comes from a tradition that he is carrying on. “I miss the old people so badly, the ones who lived before things like electronics were affecting our minds so much,” he said. “They accomplished so much more on a personal basis, and they thought nothing of it. Think of all the small farmers in the late nineteenth century who figured out modern beekeeping, all of the things we still do.” His order is the order of farmers, true farmers, the people who stay at home and make home better. “When I was in the middle of those health problems, when I couldn’t sleep—I really thought the little flame of my life was about to go out. I just asked, if I could recover, I said I’d devote the rest of my life to helping restore the world of nature. That was my sincere desire from that place, and I really have felt since that I’ve had to keep that promise.”
As it turned out, of course, the cause he wanted to devote himself to was not just what he needed to make a meaningful life, it was what the planet requires if we’re going to make it through against greater and greater odds. It’s what, I suppose, I’ve devoted my own life to, as different as that life has been in recent years. My constant motion and his fixed gravity grow from something similar. Or I hope they do. “For us to survive now we really have to put other living things ahead of ourselves,” he said, as we ate the last of the beef and the last of the cabbage slaw, and drank the last of the beer. “That goes back to meditation, to the idea that we’re not really a self, that we’re connected to the world in so many ways. Since everything’s connected, maybe that’s why I can live on my own. Because my life makes sense to me, because it adds up.”
* * *
As for me, the sense that I was living an unnatural life deepened as the winter wore on. I’m not prone to depression, but I found myself often blue, in part, I think, because home was not the refuge I remembered. I spent more time than usual in Vermont in the winter of 2013, and I’d been counting on it to restore me. But fights seemed to follow me back home.
I’d helped launch divestment campaigns across the country, but the one that mattered to me was at Middlebury, the school where I’d taught for a decade, and whose ways I’d come to love. It’s on the short list of truly great small liberal arts colleges in the country: the kids are relentlessly smart and highly engaged. And because it’s perched between the Green Mountains and the broad farm valley that stretches to Lake Champlain, it attracts students with a bent toward the outdoors. It’s no accident, I think, that it has the oldest environmental studies department in the nation, and no surprise that its students quickly mounted a powerful divestment campaign, convincing two-thirds of the student body to back divestment. The president, who had led the college ably for years, moved quickly to engage the topic, inviting me to speak on a panel discussion shortly after Christmas break.
I trusted him completely, and I was impressed by the discipline and hard work of the kids leading the divestment charge. But I also knew that Middlebury, like many institutions, had a board dominated by professional investors; since that’s where the money is now, Wall Streeters tend to dominate most high-powered boards. (Middlebury has had rough luck, in fact, with some of its high-profile trustees: Dennis Kozlowski, the CEO of Tyco, for instance, went from the Middlebury board to a New York State prison, after he had his company help pay for a fortieth-birthday party for his second wife where an ice sculpture of Michelangelo’s David peed vodka for happy guests.) The trustees I knew personally were terrific—not just generous, but remarkably engaged in trying to push the college forward. They mentored students, designed green buildings, and played a larger role in campus life than at most schools. But I also knew they’d take “fiduciary duty” with the Gospel seriousness of lifetime investors.
So I prepped hard for the panel and didn’t spend overmuch time harping on the da
ngers of global warming. I spoke last, after four investment professionals, and so we may have been behind on points—but I had a couple of aces in my sleeve. One was a brand-new report from a research firm, Aperio Consulting, that had done a thorough study of just how much divestment would have cost the average portfolio over the past decades. The “theoretical return penalty” of excluding fossil fuel stocks, they concluded, was 0.0034 percent, or about as close to zero as one could get.
Better yet, I had a letter from a guy I’d met the summer before. His name was Tom Steyer, and he’d called me out of the blue after reading the Rolling Stone piece, introducing himself as an investor deeply concerned about climate change. He insisted on flying across the country from his San Francisco home to talk about it. He’d mentioned he was a hiker, so I agreed to go for a climb with him—if he was a rich bore, at least we’d be up a mountain and the day wouldn’t be entirely wasted. As it turned out, he could hike as fast as I could, and he was pretty interesting. He’d founded Farallon Capital Management, one of the country’s richest hedge funds, in the process making himself enough money to qualify for the Forbes 400 list. But somehow he’d remained a progressive, and a passionate one. His wife, Kat Taylor, who I’d meet later, ran a community development bank in Oakland; they’d given small fortunes to Stanford and Harvard and Yale; he’d paid for and run several ballot initiatives in California to help push green causes; he’d just given a speech at the Democratic National Convention; he was being talked about as a possible secretary of energy in the second Obama administration. He had, that is, something more important than money for our fight, which was credibility among the financial elite. And he was willing to put it to use.
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