Oil and Honey

by Bill McKibben

  And one way he put it to use was by writing a letter to the Middlebury trustees. I couldn’t resist introducing it with a bit of a flourish. “This is someone who’s a better investor than anyone in this room,” I said. “How do I know that? He’s made more money.” Indeed, his net worth was half again as large as the college’s $900 million endowment. And Steyer explained not only that divestment made moral sense, and not only that it would enhance the college’s brand and image, but also something else that hadn’t really occurred to me. “I believe a fossil fuel free portfolio is a good investment strategy,” he wrote. “The data on climate change makes it clear something has changed, and as the rest of the world realizes this, fossil fuel stocks will come under increasing pressure. At the moment, other investors have not fully realized the risk that carbon reserves will become a stranded asset; if you acknowledge what your own science departments are telling you, this give you an edge relative to those investors. I can tell you that in my own investments, I have directed my financial team to divest my holdings of fossil fuel investments—in part because I am convinced it will outperform the market.”

  Playing that card felt good—in fact, I had my friend Jon Isham, an economics professor who’d worked for years on climate questions, hand out copies of the letter to the whole overflow crowd. People went away understanding that the college could, in fact, divest without facing ruin. But, as successful as it was, the evening was a reminder that we were asking people across the country to do something difficult—making demands on the people who pay your salary or your scholarship, and who you like and respect, is psychologically harder than making demands on your government.

  Harder still was knowing that a small but vocal portion of my Vermont neighbors were really angry at me. If Vermont is going to produce renewable energy, some of the power will need to come from wind; we’re far enough north that solar panels alone (though I have them across my roof) won’t provide year-round power. And on this edge of the continent, the wind blows hardest at higher altitudes, which is why the country’s first commercial wind turbine went up on a Vermont ridgeline during World War II. But recent attempts to put wind farms on a few of the state’s ridges have met with vociferous opposition—the towns with the turbines have supported them, in part because of the tax payments, but surrounding neighbors have complained loudly: about the sight, about damage to birds, about effects on human health from the sound of windmill blades. That winter they were mounting an effort to put a three-year moratorium on new windmill construction—the installations, they said, were simply out of scale with Vermont’s landscape.

  Since I’d been named Vermonter of the Year on New Year’s Day, the Speaker of the House summoned me to the legislature in mid-January to address the whole body, a rare honor. And having the podium, I said what I felt about the moratorium plan: it was well-intentioned, and it was a mistake. We were desperately fighting the Republicans in Congress to maintain any kind of funding for renewable energy; if Vermont declared it was too precious for windmills, that fight would get impossibly hard. Mostly, of course, I talked about climate change in general, and the impact of Irene, and the need to weatherize homes. But the paragraph on wind turbines was what made the news the next day:

  I recall, last year, when the leading opponents of “big wind” in Vermont told reporters that “they are making climate-change victims out of the people who live around the projects,” and that it was akin to “burning villages in order to save them.” Let me say that I think such statements are incorrect. Climate change victims are, say, the 150,000 displaced from their homes on Monday in chaotic flooding in Mozambique. We know the devastation that came with Irene—imagine a quarter of the population of Vermont displaced. Burning villages can actually be found, in places like Tasmania or Colorado, where record wildfires in the last year have taken lives and wrecked communities. So I think we should plan carefully but quickly to minimize the ecological footprint and maximize the energy gain. That energy gain is real: every spin of that windmill blade reduces the need, somewhere, for burning coal or gas or oil; in New England, first of all, where we still have lots of fossil-powered electricity being generated. But it also reduces by some small amount the pressure on a Bangladeshi peasant farmer or a doctor fighting the spread of dengue fever. We do not need them, as I say, on every ridgeline, but I continue to hope for the day when I see them on top of Middlebury Gap, the ridgeline above my home, turning with slow and stately beauty, the breeze made visible and the future illuminated.

  It didn’t surprise me when I got a slew of nasty e-mails—as nasty, some of them, as I was used to getting from right-wing climate deniers. But it did shock me a little when I went to the library one town over to give a little book talk and found the mother of one of my daughter’s former junior high school classmates distributing flyers accusing me of having too large a carbon footprint because I travel around the world organizing 350.org. I knew most of my neighbors didn’t feel the same way—in a poll, I’d have done okay. But polls are for politicians, who don’t seem to mind having 49 percent of people angry at them if 51 percent feel the other way. Most normal people, me included, don’t really enjoy controversy.

  I’d slowly sucked myself in, going from writer to global educator to unlikely and somewhat reluctant activist. At every step the controversies multiplied. No complaints—if you’re going to hit, you’re going to get hit back. But I didn’t thrive on the combat—it made me a little sick to my stomach. Adulation was a little easier, but not a lot. Real politicians, I’ve noticed, love to work a crowd, drawing energy from everyone they met. I’m a writer; left to my own devices, I’ll retreat to my room and type. I wasn’t cut out to be a leader.

  Still, I was one. And since one of the things leaders do is rally people, it was time to head back to Washington, where this story began. We’d been planning, with our friends at the Sierra Club, for a big D.C. action, and we knew that with a Keystone decision looming we’d have to somehow organize in midwinter. There’s a reason that big Washington rallies come in the spring, summer, and fall. And for a global warming rally there’s also the question of optics; nothing like a good snowstorm to cover up the message. But it was a risk we had to take.

  In some ways, simply involving the Sierra Club was the biggest victory. From the start at 350.org, we’d said we weren’t trying to create a big organization—we wanted to build a movement, create campaigns where everyone could play, and break down the walls between groups, and between insiders and the grass roots. That’s easier said than done—the Sierra Club and other large outfits come with their own internal politics and histories; they need to keep a separate profile to raise money; every group is proud of its own distinctiveness. But from the first day of the Keystone arrests, the key big environmental groups had started coming slowly together in a new way. And Michael Brune of the Sierra Club was moving particularly fast. Among other things, he’d been urging the group to drop its 120-year prohibition on engaging in civil disobedience, and early in January he persuaded the board to grant a trial run. So we scheduled a week of climate action for mid-February—a small and controlled day of arrests outside the White House, and then a massive (we hoped) march for President’s Day weekend.

  Our friends at the Hip Hop Caucus joined in the call. Their leader, Rev. Lennox Yearwood, had been a huge help on the Do the Math tour. He was the opposite of the traditional environmentalist. (Forget John Denver; think Frank Ocean.) He and his crew brought a special focus on people of color, 350.org provided youthful energy, and the Sierra Club gave us the link all the way back to John Muir. And so we went to work, doing the grinding task of making sure there were buses and permits and sound systems and porta-potties.

  One of my jobs was helping round up prominent people to go to jail. The U.S. Park Police were clear: if we came with more than fifty, there’d be no arrests. We knew we wanted to highlight some of the folks who’d been blockading the Texas segment of the pipeline, and some Nebraska ranchers, and some survivors
of Sandy, and some leaders of the spreading divestment movement, and that left us about twenty-five spots to fill. It was enlightening to watch some prominent people squirm when we asked; they were eager to do something—just not something that would get them in trouble with the administration, whose representatives were working the phones themselves, trying to persuade us to call off the whole affair. But when we gathered that morning in Lafayette Square, the park where I’d spent those two tumultuous weeks in August 2011, we had a pretty fine crew. There was a billionaire, and there was a Kennedy (two, actually—Bobby Jr. brought his son Conor, who because he had dated the pop star Taylor Swift got us all kinds of coverage in unlikely outlets). There were preachers and environmental leaders, a former poet laureate and a solar pioneer and a prize-winning climate scientist. For many of us, though, the biggest thrill came when we were joined by Julian Bond, the former head of the NAACP. I was handcuffed across from him in the paddy wagon, and got to listen as he told of the days in 1960 when as a young college student he went to jail for helping to desegregate the lunch counters of Atlanta. You could feel the movement broadening, deepening, joining the current of change that has always run through the country when it needed it most.

  And you could feel it even more three days later, when we rallied on the National Mall. The day dawned cold—well below freezing, and with a twenty-mile-an-hour wind that I knew would sap people standing in the open. We weren’t going to get any casual passersby to this event—it would be a real test of what kind of movement we’d built.

  By noon, when I got up on stage to open the rally, I knew we’d passed. Buses had been rolling in all morning, from thirty states stretching all the way to Minnesota (in cities across the West, meanwhile, big solidarity rallies were getting under way). The Mall was filled as far as the Washington Monument in the distance, a sea of people far larger than had ever assembled for a climate rally before. The U.S. Park Police don’t actually estimate crowds, but I overheard one sergeant arguing with our police liaison that we’d exceeded our 50,000-person permit; the press, which gave the rally wall-to-wall coverage, settled on “at least 40,000” as the best guess.

  The speakers were admirably brief in the cold, and fierce: Van Jones, who had worked in a high-profile White House job, told his old boss that Keystone was the most important decision he’d ever make, and that if he approved it, “the first thing that pipeline will run over is the credibility of the president of the United States”; Tom Steyer explained that he was an investor and that Keystone was a bad investment; a delegation of Alberta native leaders led by Crystal Lameman, who, after all, had fought this fight longest of all, explained once more the stakes for their people and for the planet. Senators and celebrities, singers and scientists—everyone was swaying happily in the cold as Reverend Yearwood rocked the mic, reminding us that this was “our Birmingham, our lunch counter moment.”

  When it was my turn to talk, I did my best to focus on Keystone, too—that was the issue at hand, the fight I’d chosen. But looking out over the vast crowd, the largest I’d ever addressed, I knew it represented much more than anger at a single pipeline. I knew the size of the crowd meant that people in large numbers had finally managed to overcome the numbing sense that there was nothing to do about global warming. “All I ever wanted to see was a movement of people to stop climate change, and now I’ve seen it,” I said as I began to talk. “You are the antibodies kicking in, as the planet tries to fight its fever.”

  As I talked, I thought of the young man many years before who’d first read and written about climate change—a young man who was now much older. I thought of the young people I’d started 350.org with—they were older, too, and I could see them scattered around the stage smiling up at me, and that made it easier to speak in front of this vast throng. And I thought of Kirk, doing his work patiently back home, and I thought even of the bees, doing their work for countless millennia. There’d been stories in the paper the past few days about how 2012’s crazy weather had wrecked the honey crop around the world—record rainfalls in the United Kingdom had cut British harvests by 72 percent, while drought had produced the worst results ever in Australia, New Zealand, and Spain. There were no flowers, and hence no nectar. Too much oil, too little honey. We’d waited so long to get started with this fight—maybe too long.

  But we were started, and looking out on that field I realized one reason, maybe the main reason, that I’d worked so hard. I didn’t particularly want to lead a movement, but I wanted to join one, and so I’d helped to build it.

  “I can’t promise you we’re going to win,” I finished. “But I’ve waited a quarter century, since I wrote the first book about all of this, to see if we were going to fight. And now, today, at the biggest climate rally in U.S. history, I know we will. The battle—the most fateful battle in human history—is finally joined. And we will fight it together.”

  I got home the next morning, flying in over those mountains that have bordered my life—the Dixes, and Giant with her long steep slides, and Mount Mansfield hovering to the east. The ground in the valley was white on that February morning, and spring was still a ways away, at least in the old order of things. I knew the hives I flew above were full of resting bees, and I knew they’d soon be in flight. The old cycle we’ve always known is very nearly gone, but not quite. It lingers yet, and while it does the fight is worth the cost.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  The problem with writing a book of this sort is that, being a kind of memoir, it focuses on one person’s experiences to the exclusion of so many who played as large a role or larger. I feel this particularly in the sections of this book that describe the Keystone Pipeline fight and the rise of the divestment movement. Those battles have become so broad, and are being fought so ably by so many people, that they would be better served by a real history, which I hope someone will someday write. I’ll play a small part in those stories, but it’s one I’ll always look back on with (tired) fondness because of the remarkable people I met along the way.

  ALSO BY BILL MCKIBBEN

  Eaarth

  The Bill McKibben Reader

  Fight Global Warming Now

  Deep Economy

  Wandering Home

  Enough

  Long Distance

  Hundred Dollar Holiday

  Maybe One

  The Comforting Whirlwind

  Hope, Human and Wild

  The Age of Missing Information

  The End of Nature

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BILL MCKIBBEN is the author of more than a dozen books, including The End of Nature, Eaarth, and Deep Economy. He is the founder of the environmental organization 350.org and was among the first to warn of the dangers of global warming. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the 2013 winner of the Gandhi Peace Award.

  Copyright © 2013 by Bill McKibben.

  All rights reserved.

  For information, address Henry Holt and Co.,

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.henryholt.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  McKibben, Bill.

  Oil and honey: the education of an unlikely activist / Bill McKibben.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-8050-9284-4 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8050-9838-9 (electronic book)

  1. McKibben, Bill. 2. Environmentalism—United States. 3. Climatic changes—Environmental aspects. 4. Petroleum industry and trade—Environmental aspects. 5. Petroleum industry and trade—Political aspects—United States. 6. Environmentalists—United States—Biography. 7. Beekeepers—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  GE197.M356 2013

  363.70092—dc23

  [B] 2013010995

  e-ISBN 9780805098389

  First Edition: September 2013

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