Oil and Honey Read online

  How they do that figuring is something of a mystery, as is their ability to navigate. These ladies had likely traveled a mile to the red maple trees, and then navigated back to their particular hive, one of eighty strewn across this small beeyard. They’d coped with wind and with the sun winking in and out behind clouds; their GPS was wonderfully precise. Or—and here comes the first part of the metaphor—comically precise. “Watch this,” said Kirk, and he turned one box ninety degrees, so that the small slit door on the bottom was about eight inches away from where it had been before. Instantly, bees began stacking up like airplanes above O’Hare on a rainy day—they were lining up at exactly the spot where the slit should have been, and when it wasn’t there they had no way of finding it. All they could do was hover desperately; it was hard for both of us to watch, and after about thirty seconds we relented and turned the box back around. The machine resumed operations immediately.

  This doesn’t mean bees are stupid. But as individuals they are simple—capable of prodigious feats of navigation, strong enough to carry great loads all day every day, but simple in their approach. They do one thing and do it well.

  I thought of those bees that night in a lecture hall at Middlebury. A freshman, Kate Hamilton, had reserved a hall to show a new documentary about the Koch brothers, and she asked me to speak afterward, since I appeared briefly in the film. It was not a subtle movie: the Kochs, it insisted with lurid graphics and sad vignettes, are destroying the planet, trying to resegregate schools, suppressing the voting rights of minorities, and warping democracy with massive donations. (All, from my experience, exactly correct.) In fact, that day the Koch brothers’ front group, Americans for Prosperity, had announced a $3.6 million swing-state ad campaign targeting the Democrats for slowing down the Keystone pipeline. It fired the usual volley of complete untruths—the pipeline would create zillions of jobs, free America from dependence on countries where the leaders wear bathrobes, and so on. If you run an ad like this enough times (and $3.6 million buys a lot of times) people believe it; I’d been getting calls from panicked senatorial candidates saying they were losing big on the issue. I did what I could—I spent the afternoon writing op-eds carefully laying out the facts. But I was under no illusion that they would count as much as the endless ads.

  So I was a little frustrated even before I watched the movie, and realizing that the Koch brothers were doing the same thing on a dozen other issues made me surlier still. When the movie was over and the house lights came up, another professor and I took the stage for a discussion. A student asked what we thought of the Citizens United decision, and whether corporations should have the same rights as people. My colleague answered first, saying that more speech was always better, that companies were, in fact, composed of people, and so on. I could have answered empirically—by that point it was clear that the 2012 election was already turning into a battle of billionaires.

  But I was thinking of the bees still. And so I said something a little more philosophical. “The reason we shouldn’t count corporations as humans isn’t that they’re bad, it’s that they’re simple,” I began. “They do the thing they do with great power—if you need a car built or an oil well drilled, a corporation is an amazing tool. It can gather resources from great distances, carry them exactly where they’re needed, and combine various skills to produce something of great value from crude raw materials.” It can, that is, gather grains of pollen and produce honey. But being powerful is not the same as being complex. Human beings are complicated. We have instinctual desires and cravings that drive much of our behavior, just like bees. But those are tempered by strange and wonderful forces outside ourselves, such as art—the making of something of significance out of nothing. Or religion, which as far back at least as the Buddha has taught us to suspect some of our instincts and cravings.

  We can remember our ancestors, and we can imagine our grandchildren, and so sometimes we act in odd and counterinstinctual ways. We may cry when we see a hungry person, and even empty our pockets to feed him; in extreme cases we may give our lives over to that kind of service. Or we sometimes vote for politicians who will raise our taxes and give the money to the poor. Or we go to jail because we worry about global warming. The precise glory of humans is that we’re complicated, and those complications are what rein us in—what might still, say, keep us from deciding to tap the tar sands of Canada or cut down the rain forests of the Amazon.

  A corporation, far more wonderful in its abilities to execute a plan than any of us individuals, is nonetheless uncomplicated. It doesn’t care much about the past and can’t think very far into the future. If it does, its shareholders will rebel. It’s less like a person than like a bee, at least in this regard. Given the power of speech like a human, it won’t use it to reflect, to check itself, or to think about the larger good. It will simply put this new power to work on its single-minded goal of amassing wealth, just as, the Koch brothers did, sublimely unconcerned that their tar sands investments were threatening the planet.

  In other words, if your goal is to efficiently tap the tar sands, you need a corporation. But to decide if tapping the tar sands is a good idea, you need to keep corporations out of it. Their relentless simplicity will combine with their wealth to overwhelm reason, science, love. If you want honey you need a hive of bees. But if you were trying to decide if making honey was a good idea, bees would be the last creatures to ask. You know what their answer is going to be. In fact, if you get in their way they’ll be a little perplexed for a while, trying to find the door. And if you persist in getting in their way, they’re eventually going to get mad and sting. That’s just how it works.

  * * *

  If you’re curious about what a week of campaigning looks like, it looks a little like this: Friday night, I arrived in San Jose, slightly groggy, and found a strip mall Japanese restaurant via Yelp. (Yelp is excuse enough for the Internet—instead of bad hotel food, I had some kind of noodles in spicy broth in a storefront I would never have found on my own.) Woke up bright and early, and then traveled to a nearby high school for the “Green Teen Summit.” Since I get maybe ten speaking invitations a day, too much of every day is spent saying no, but it’s hardest to say no to kids, and I’m glad I was able to fit this in; a trio of girls introduced me, alternating sentences from a script they’d clearly spent hours polishing, and I did my best.

  Then it was into the passenger seat of a biology teacher’s Prius, and on to Berkeley, where I’d promised to speak to the City College. It was a few blocks and a world away from the famous University of California campus where I’ve given big speeches many a time—this was in a basement auditorium, improbably filled on a Saturday afternoon. My hosts were the Global Studies Club; my audience almost all first-generation college students, most the children of immigrants. I could tell that they’d spent little time thinking about climate change, but when I showed them pictures from around the world of people joining 350.org events, they understood their connection. Most of the people we work with around the world are poor and black and brown and Asian and young, because that’s what most of the world is made up of. These kids, I knew, would help.

  Because I was already there, I agreed to speak to a group of activists who’d hired a hall a few blocks away. Berkeley activists are a breed apart—someone parked near the entrance was handing out a leaflet of small type accusing me of being an agent of the Obama administration. The introduction lasted a long time because the emcee was engaged in a full-throated attack on imperialism, corporatism, and some other things. “We are socialists,” he shouted. I apologized in my opening remarks for being more of a Methodist myself, and managed to get through my talk, which was, after all, an account of the ways in which the biggest corporations on Earth are indeed undermining its most basic systems. I received polite applause—but the first question I took was about the Rockefellers. They’re oil barons, and aren’t you an agent of them? I patiently explained that yes, 350.org has taken money from the Rockefeller Fami
ly Fund, which is where some of the heirs, many generations removed from John D. and his derricks, have put their money to philanthropic use, funding everything from Planned Parenthood to Clean Air Watch to MomsRising to the Alliance for Justice to Citizens Against Voter Intimidation.

  Okay, my interlocutor continued, but what about chemtrails—shouldn’t 350.org be fighting them instead? Chemtrails are an ongoing conspiracy theory, something about how government planes are seeding the atmosphere with chemicals to control our minds or change the weather. Or something.

  I know this town was the birthplace of the Left—I’ve seen the pictures of Mario Savio leading the Free Speech Movement in 1964, and most of the people in the audience seemed sane and supportive. But, yikes, there really were a few crazies. Look, I finally said, you don’t need to search high and low for a conspiracy. It’s right in front of you. The most powerful industry on Earth is using that power to make sure it can keep dumping its waste in the atmosphere for free. There’s no secret conspiracy required, no unmarked airplanes. Regular old airplanes will do the trick, and cars, and furnaces.

  My colleague Jamie Henn picked me up at the wheel of a rental Nissan the next morning—Jamie was one of the original seven young people that founded 350.org alongside me, and during its first semester of operation his work earned him a grade. A good one, because he was a crackerjack organizer even at twenty-one. When we’d divvied up the whole planet, Jamie took charge of East Asia. He’d somehow managed to coordinate three hundred demonstrations across China for our first big day of action, while handling Japan, Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia (huge banners were hung from the ruins of Angkor Wat) as well. He also coordinated our “press office” and spearheaded our “development office.” He’s twenty-eight now, a seasoned veteran and an old friend, and we happily tooled east, making plans and sharing movement gossip.

  We’d taken this Sunday mostly off from speaking because we wanted to visit a friend—Tim DeChristopher, an activist from Utah sent to prison for two years for civil disobedience at an auction for oil and gas leases. His protest was inspired—on the spur of the moment he bid on and won several of the leases, letting the government assume he was an oilman. Alas, he lacked the millions required to actually pay; in a classic overreaction, the same Justice Department that charged no one with perpetrating our banking meltdown accused Tim of financial fraud and sent him off to the pen. FCI Herlong is in California, but only kind of. We drove the long, straight route up to the crest of the Sierras, and then all the way down the other side into Nevada. When we reached Reno, we turned left, and headed up a two-lane road that eventually reentered California in a dusty desert. Herlong was not much of a town, its chief attractions being an army depot where they used to dismantle nerve gas shells, and the prison. I’d written the authorities weeks earlier, and after filling out many forms I received permission to visit.

  I was glad I’d come because it set my mind at ease a little. Tim looked good—he also looked enormous, working out being the main way to pass the time. He’d survived a stint in solitary and was back in the general population at the minimum security unit, where he could spend most of the day outdoors. His fellow inmates were mostly there on drug charges or for white-collar crimes, so it wasn’t too scary, and he had a large pile of books he was working through. Mostly, though, he seemed to be thinking about the movement he’d helped build. His bold action had drawn in many new activists and pointed all of us in the direction of civil disobedience. Now he was wondering what the next steps would look like; he’d be out by the next winter at the latest and was already looking forward to it. I filled him in on the latest in the Keystone fight—the way it had gone from a huge public battle to the subterranean fight boiling away behind closed doors in Congress, and my frustration at not being able to answer the millions of dollars in ads. Truth be told, there were moments I felt nearly as impotent out in the open as he did behind bars. We had to somehow make climate change a visible fight or we’d lose almost every time to the fossil-industrial complex.

  I took one last look around the prison, with a faint shudder at the not entirely impossible thought that I’d end up someplace like it myself someday, and gave Tim another hug, and then Jamie and I set off back down the desert, over the mountains, and most of the way back to the Bay, stopping short at the university town of Davis, where I’d agreed to give a big talk the next day. Our hosts took us to the best restaurant in town, and I tried not to think about what Tim was eating.

  The next morning, bright and early, I talked to a packed lecture hall at the John Muir Institute of the Environment, five hundred residents of one of the most eco-friendly towns in the country. Davis is the bike capital of America, its streets laid out to make cycling easier than driving, and I saw helmets resting under half the chairs in the auditorium—but people seemed to understand the fundamental point: that we can’t actually solve global warming one bike path at a time. Setting an example is vitally important, and we have a moral duty to live the right way, but I’d left my solar panels at home and gotten on the airplane because addition alone isn’t going to work.

  You can weatherize your house, and your brother-in-law may see it and decide to follow suit, and then maybe he’d buy a Prius and his neighbor would.… If we had a hundred years, that’s how it should work, the slow graceful cultural evolution to a new world. But chemistry and physics aren’t giving us a hundred years. So we’ll have to work by multiplication, too, by changing the ground rules, putting a stiff price on carbon so we change much more quickly than is comfortable. That implies politics, which implies movements, and we needed the folks in the audience to take part: I told them about Connect the Dots day, three weeks away, when around the world people would rally to demonstrate the toll global warming was already taking. We’d be raising banners on thawing Sierra glaciers (“I’m Melting”) and staging underwater demonstrations on the dying coral reefs of the Pacific, all in an effort to conjure a movement that could make political change.

  After the speech it was back in the car and a trip to Sacramento, for a lunch with the editorial board at the local public radio station, which was doing remarkable environmental reporting, and then an on-air interview for an hour. The host was engaging and engaged, but there was no chance of saying something new—the trick is to say something for the hundredth time and have it sound fresh, to mean it as you say it. And I did. Back in the car, west again to the crest of the Sierras. Jamie was at the wheel, and I had my iPhone set up to provide a personal hotspot so I could answer the day’s accumulating e-mails as he drove. More reporters, more speaking invitations, and before long we were over the pass again and at the mountain town of Truckee, where the Sierra Business Council had asked me to visit. They’d just come through the worst winter in many years, the ski business off by 60 or 70 percent as brown January turned into brown February. It had been just as dismaying as our Vermont winter, and so they were receptive to my message. But maybe I pushed too hard—the first question came from a man who said he sold million-dollar software systems. “I try never to have an argument,” he said. “I try to figure out how to make what I’m selling seem good for the other side. That’s what you guys should be trying to do: make the oil companies understand that they can make money selling the sun.”

  At some level, of course, he was right. The sensible way out of this mess is for Shell and BP and Peabody Coal to become true energy companies, not oil and coal companies, and to devote their expertise and their incredible capital flow to building the next energy system on the fly. But scientists and policy wonks have been making that suggestion for a generation and it hasn’t gotten through—yes, BP had promised in 2000 to transform itself to “Beyond Petroleum,” and it had unveiled a nifty new sunflower logo. But it never invested very much in renewables, and in 2011 it shut down or sold off its solar and wind divisions, returning to its “core business.” And the reason is simple: the oil companies are making so much money now that they can’t quit. Unless we win the political fight to put
a price on carbon they’ll just keep doing what they’re doing; I mean, these were companies that had melted the Arctic and then decided to drill it for more oil.

  I don’t think I convinced my questioner, though—he just kept saying he hated the way politics was “always about fighting.” I hated it, too, especially at the end of a long day.

  But the next day was a treat. We drove once more down the west side of the Sierras and toward the foothill town of Nevada City. This whole weeklong trip had begun because an old friend, the poet Gary Snyder, had asked me to come and talk to his community. Gary was one of the original Beats—he’d read a poem himself at City Lights Bookstore that night in October 1955 when Allen Ginsberg first recited “Howl,” and he’d been the model for Japhy Ryder, the most intriguing character in Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. But he’d escaped the wreckage of that scene, and the craziest parts of the ’60s, by moving to Japan to live in a Zen monastery, returning around 1970 to publish Turtle Island, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Around that time he’d moved to a ridge above Nevada City, working with friends to build a Zendo (a space for meditating) and above it a house so singularly charming it was easy to see how he’d spent four decades there. I’d visited once before, years ago, and I could remember every detail: the way each room opened onto the outside world, the pond full of honking frogs, the summer study, the cherry tree in full bloom above the room with the tatami-covered floor where I laid down my suitcase.

  We drank tea and talked—about fellow writers we both loved, such as Wendell Berry and Terry Tempest Williams; about the woods east and west, about words and gods and hopes and fears. For an afternoon—and it was the greatest present he could possibly have given me—I felt like a writer again, the thing I most wanted to be and at least for the moment really couldn’t. We walked the neighborhood—about fifty people live along the ridge and meditate at the Zendo, and there are also mountain lions and bears and bobcats, and Emmi, the excellent apricot standard poodle who accompanied us wherever we went.