Oil and Honey Read online

  Gary gave me another gift that afternoon, one he couldn’t have anticipated. We went to visit the local farmers, John Tecklin and Angie Tomey, who run Mountain Bounty Farm, a community-supported-agriculture farm, or CSA. (Angie even has a floral CSA—she showed us newly cut bunches of heirloom narcissus, their yellow centers like yolks.) And we met their crew of apprentice farmers, ruddy from a day of planting tomatoes. But as we were following John’s truck out to the fields where they do most of their growing, he suddenly pulled over and waved for us to follow suit. We got out, and I could hear it first: the buzzing of a beeyard. There were 120 hives spread out around us, but better yet there were six or seven swarms hanging in the branches above, looking just like the pictures in Tom Seeley’s book. I knew there was some serious democracy under way, but the swarms looked for all the world like sloths hanging from the trees, masses of ten thousand bees clinging to one another.

  I was deeply happy to see the bees drooping from the branches. I hadn’t realized, I think, how much they were getting into my blood. Just the buzzing was soothing; I wished I had my bee suit so I could go closer and check the color of the pollen from the manzanitas all around us. But we couldn’t tarry long: Gary drove us into town for a sound check for the evening’s talk at a converted foundry. Nevada City is an old mining center, and the main street manages to look historic without being quaint. Gary had promised a good restaurant, but not until we were walking in did he add the other surprise—his old friend Jerry Brown would be joining us.

  Thirty years before I’d spent an afternoon with the California governor when he was running for president. I was a college journalist and he was in the thick of the New Hampshire primary, but that didn’t stop him from spending an hour with me explaining how we’d soon be communicating via wristwatch phones. Governor Moonbeam, they called him then, but damned if there wasn’t an iPhone in my pocket today. We’d talked once or twice by phone about environmental issues over the years, but this was much more fun, the perfect remedy for a day when I was despairing about politics. Clearly he’s a good politician—you don’t get reelected governor of the nation’s most populous state for nothing—but he’s also a curious human being. He reminds me of my home-state senator Bernie Sanders, another practical man who acknowledges the pressures of the moment but also understands that those pressures don’t excuse risking the future. That’s precisely the calculation most politicians—including, I fear, Barack Obama—get backward.

  After dinner we walked together back to the venue, where people were actually scalping tickets outside, something I’m not sure I’ve ever seen at a talk of mine. I gave it my best, partly because the governor and his wife were in the front row, each of them scribbling notes like graduate students, and partly because Gary had introduced me, vouching for me to this throng of neighbors. You might think it’s a waste to preach to the choir, but the truth is, you need to get the choir fired up, singing loudly, all out of the same hymnal. The choir is always there, but most of the time it’s just humming in the background, or singing so many different tunes that no distinct harmony emerges.

  And when I was done, the first question came from a ninety-five-year-old woman. It wasn’t a question for me—it was a question for the overflow crowd. “What are we going to do to help on this Connect the Dots day?” she asked. “Who’s going to help me organize it?” Lots of the audience recognized her, and they made her tell the story of the time now fifty years in the past when she’d joined the Freedom Riders on the trip south. “I was glad you made people wear dresses and ties to your protest,” she told me. “I wore my white gloves and my hat and even my veil when I went down south. And it—well, it confused the policeman a little, and he talked to me, and asked me about California.” It was the perfect cap to the day—the perfect reminder that movements can work, that if we care enough we really can make massive change. I gave her a hug and went back to the ridge to sleep on my tatami mat, the best sleep in weeks.

  * * *

  So, of course, the next morning, as soon as we were far enough down the hill for the cell phone to begin to work, the news came that the Republicans in the House, on the first day back from their recess, had yet again attached approval of Keystone to the transportation bill. They hadn’t held exhaustive hearings or advanced new arguments; they’d just done as their paymasters had demanded. And this time they’d carried seventy Democrats, giving them a veto-proof majority. The action was back in the Senate, and my contact at the White House was calling with a grave tone—we needed, he said, to go back to work on key senators. Even Barbara Boxer, the liberal California Democrat, was wavering. Meanwhile, Naomi Klein called with the news that the Canadian government—dismayed by the public protest over the Northern Gateway pipeline to the Pacific—was planning to shut down the public comment process, effectively ending independent review. From the democratic honeybees and the Freedom Rides back to the petrostate—I wanted to tell Jamie to turn around and head back to the hills.

  Instead we made our way back to San Francisco and a long-planned meeting with the staff at CREDO, one of the most effective allies we’d had all year long. An offshoot of Working Assets, the credit card company that donates a chunk of its profits to progressive causes, CREDO is a mix of MoveOn and a cell phone company. I don’t completely understand the business model, but I do understand that all year long they’d fired out one powerful e-mail blast after another, finding hundreds of thousands of people to help with the fight. Their webmaster, Elijah Zarlin, had performed the same task for the Obama campaign in 2008, so chances are you’ve read his writing—but instead of taking the government job that normally comes with that kind of résumé he’d gone to jail with us the summer before. Indeed, half the people around the table that afternoon had been arrested. An anti-Keystone banner hung on the wall, suspended by handcuffs. So we talked and plotted—how were we going to keep Senator Boxer on our side, and more important, win or lose, what would we do next? They were smart people—before me, I think, they’d figured out we weren’t going to beat global warming one pipeline at a time.

  And from there we had time for one more quick stop on the way to the airport—the old warehouse down by the ship docks where our actions team was busy painting banners for Connect the Dots day. They were hard at work on the giant black banner destined for the High Sierras, the one with huge white letters that said “I’m Melting.” Hugs all around, and then to the terminal. I boarded the plane knowing that by the time I landed the Senate might have acted and the Keystone battle might be lost, but I was at least a little confident that we were building our forces for the bigger war.

  * * *

  But we didn’t lose, at least not yet. When I got off the plane in Portland, Maine, our crew was already hard at work pushing phone calls to Barbara Boxer’s office—she got 1,800 over the next couple of days and then issued a statement pointing out that “the Senate has already said no to Keystone,” and adding, “We would like to keep off anything controversial that has nothing to do with this bill.” Not exactly ironclad, but you take what you can get.

  So I spoke to the Earth Day festival at the University of Maine, then moved on to D.C. in time to speak at Earth Day on the National Mall—which, given a steady downpour, meant about forty people standing in ankle-deep mud in front of a vast stage. But there was also a speech at the National Cathedral, where I got to see my hero Wendell Berry win an award, and then a talk to the young Democrats at Georgetown (all of whom wore three-piece suits!), and a sunrise speech at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and a sermon of sorts at the Orthodox cathedral, then another at Swarthmore College the same evening. The next day it was on to Boston University to preach at Marsh Chapel, and then to New York for a benefit for a land trust at an Upper East Side women’s club (there were excellent photos of past member Eleanor Roosevelt); the next morning out to Kingsborough Community College in far Brooklyn, where students come from 142 countries, back by evening to Boston for an interfaith gathering, and then a hurried trip
to Albany, where hundreds of students had gathered to fight fracking, and then … This is what organizing is. You talk to people and try to get them engaged. You tell them about what people are doing elsewhere, so they can glimpse what they could do. It is—wait for it—a kind of pollination.

  A tiring kind, and eventually you need to go home for a week and do the laundry and play with your dog and pay the bills and check in with the real world. The first day I got back (after a short trip to Burlington to help dedicate a field of new solar panels at the headquarters of the Episcopal diocese), I found Kirk in the beeyards gathering queens. He’d open a hive and start pulling out the eight frames, one after another, looking for the slightly larger queen so he could pluck her out. “It gets easier by the time you’ve caught thousands,” he said, as I stared helplessly at the writhing clump of bees on each frame.

  “The secret is, when you’re catching queens don’t look at anything else. Don’t look at the brood and how it’s doing, or the color of the bees, or admire any of the other miraculous things about the hive. Just look for the queen, and if she’s not there move on to the next frame.” He plucked one out of the mass, just like that, holding it by the wings. “Sometimes it’s just how she moves. She waddles more than the others do. But you can just spot them, until you get tired. The way fatigue works is, you start to see queens where they aren’t, and you start looking longer and longer at each frame, thinking she must be there somewhere. But she almost never is, unless you saw her the first time.”

  As he talked, Kirk stuffed the monarch into a tiny wire cage, along with three workers who would feed her. He sealed the cage with a plug made of honey mixed with confectioners sugar—when he stuck her in a new hive, the bees in that colony would eat their way through the candy to free her, a process that would take enough hours for the whole hive to get used to the idea that they had a new leader.

  The queen’s important, of course, but replaceable. And so easily; it made me think of the way European monarchs would marry off their children across the continent, and suddenly Britain would find itself ruled by someone who spoke German.

  And so with organizing. I suppose, in some sense, I’m the queen bee at 350.org, but my influence is by comparison minuscule; in fact, none of the thirty or so of us who work there really “organize” our campaigns. It’s a great planetary hive, less an organization than a loose campaign designed to mesh with the Internet ethos of distributed action. This was clearer than usual that week, as we careened toward the Connect the Dots day of action on May 5, 2012. We’d seen the polls indicating that more Americans were worrying about climate change because they were making the connection to extreme weather, and we figured the same was true around the globe. We wanted people to see the emerging pattern.

  As it turned out, our friends in the fossil fuel industry didn’t want people to connect those dots, and so they did their best to throw up some smoke. Friday morning, a few hours before Saturday would dawn in the Pacific and our rallies would begin, a fossil fuel booster club called the Heartland Institute erected a billboard in downtown Chicago. It featured an enormous image of the mug shot of Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” looking bleary-eyed and appropriately murderous. Next to it, in giant letters, were the words “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” Apparently, Kaczynski had mentioned climate change in a manifesto after his arrest years before, and thus, according to Heartland’s press release, the logic went like this: “The most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are Charles Manson, a mass murderer; Fidel Castro, a tyrant; and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Global warming alarmists include Osama bin Laden.… The leaders of the global warming movement have one thing in common: They are willing to use force and fraud to advance their fringe theory.” Subtle it wasn’t. (Nor logical—Hitler himself had probably believed in gravity.) But if you’ve got chemistry and physics working against you, what are you going to do?

  It seemed to us, though, that far from throwing the intended wrench in the works, it set up our Connect the Dots day more or less perfectly. We quickly released a letter addressed to Joseph Bast, the president of the Heartland Institute:

  Dear Mr. Bast,

  Earlier today you and the companies that support you announced a set of billboards suggesting that serial killers were pretty much the only people who feared climate change.

  I’d like to thank you for doing that. The billboards are ugly, but they convey with graphic intensity the desperation of those who have fought on the side of the fossil fuel companies for a quarter century. I know you’d like your opponents to be murderers and crazed fanatics—that would make your job easier. But as it happens, this weekend will see rallies in most countries of the planet, arranged by entirely ordinary people who have already felt the sting of climate change. You can watch the pictures at 350.org—we’ll be blogging them as fast as we can. What you’ll see are people of every race and creed, united in the hope that the floods and droughts we’ve already suffered will be enough to sway the hearts and minds of our leaders.

  Given the frantic and reckless nature of those billboards, I think it’s safe to conclude we’re making headway fast.

  Best,

  Bill McKibben

  P.S. Oh, and we’ll be writing to your sponsors, too, along these lines: Dear State Farm: Thanks for sponsoring the Heartland Institute, and its billboards insisting that those who fight against global warming are mass murderers. We’re always more inclined to do business with those who call us serial killers!

  Almost as soon as I’d pressed the send button on that letter, the pictures indeed began arriving. The first were from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, where the sun crosses the international date line. Our crew there was underwater, all in scuba gear, holding a giant banner above a dying reef: “Your Carbon Emissions Kills Our Coral.” After that the images poured into our Flickr photo stream faster than I could post the best of them on the blog. An early picture arrived from Rajasthan in India, where the wells in four villages around the Ranthambore National Park tiger sanctuary have gone dry; women in saris, holding black umbrellas against the heat, circled the empty cement hole. The next came from a sailor who’d just set a world record for solo circumnavigation of the planet—a task made easier, as he pointed out, by the fact that he’d had no problem getting through the Arctic Northwest Passage, a feat that would have been a fantasy a decade before. A series of truly striking images arrived from southern Sindh in Pakistan, where the International Organization for Migration was still trying to cope with the millions left homeless by epic flooding in 2010 and 2011—bearded men, veiled women, and small kids standing in front of the sandy barrens left behind by rushing rivers. Parched tea estates in Assam; survivors of the forest fires that claimed 173 lives in the suburbs of Melbourne; a group on a dry lake bed in Garissa, Kenya, where one man’s sign simply said “Drought Is Killing Me.” A throng along the shores of the Dead Sea in Jordan used helium balloons to illustrate the twenty-six-meter drop in water levels since the 1960s, while a big crowd on the beach of Tel Aviv used placards to proclaim their solidarity with low-lying island nations the world over. Micronesia checked in, as did the Maldives, where people turned out even though a military coup had sidelined the island country’s democracy just weeks before. On Cape Town’s Table Mountain climbers rappelled down from the top to hang a giant red dot above the nearly sea-level flats where hundreds of thousands of poor people live in shanty towns. At the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, the largest church in the hemisphere, the priests blessed hundreds of bikes; in Bangkok monks gathered forlornly around a Buddhist temple wrecked by the previous December’s flooding, which did damage equivalent to 18 percent of Thailand’s GDP.

  I could go on all day, because this went on all day—much longer, really, since we were following the sun. In London, hundreds played huge games of Climate Twister, connecting the dots between disasters with their bodies; in Boston, a squad of people in improvised uniforms, the “Metro Ci
vil Defense Corps,” stood outside subway stations handing out new maps that showed which lines would have to be converted to ferries as the seas rose. Sometimes the notes that came with the pictures were as poignant as the images. Organizers in Kampala apologized for the poor turnout at their rally, but their excuse seemed sound: “Yesterday the floods were at the peoples knees and crossing to the other side of the road was 5000/ (2$) to be carried on the shoulders.” Azerbaijan, Iraq, Adelaide. In Aspen, it was skiers who staged a downhill race on grass to mark their nearly snowless winter. Pictures arrived from indigenous communities high in the Andes. One showed a mother in one of those distinctive bowler hats, standing with her daughter, a brown mountain in the backdrop. “In the Andes, mountain snow caps are receding. There are less and less glaciers and snow, which is affecting the runoff. No water, no life.” Not far away, Bolivians rallied at Chacaltaya, the glacier which used to be the continent’s highest ski area. Now it’s not a ski area—it’s just a pile of rocks with a rope tow. Activists gathered outside the Bank of America in Charlotte, North Carolina, to demand that it stop financing coal mines, and in Bellingham, Washington, to protest plans for a giant coal port; a few miles away, just across the Canadian border, protesters stopped five of Warren Buffett’s coal trains before they could unload their cargo on ships bound for China. Eventually the protesters were hauled away to jail—but meanwhile in Portland, Maine, their allies were rallying on the site of the proposed terminus for a tar sands pipeline.

  I sat there transfixed at the computer, hour after hour. Samoa, Mauritius, Bogota, Oberlin. It was like eating salted peanuts—it was hard to stop hitting refresh, even for a minute, especially since I could begin to make patterns out of the confusion. Dozens of rallies were happening along the path of Hurricane Irene, for instance, which had brought devastation to regions accustomed to thinking they were immune. I hopped in the car and drove over the spine of the Green Mountains and up Route 100, the corridor of maximum devastation in Vermont; it took me about forty-five minutes to get to the little ski town of Waitsfield, where huge piles of gravel were still washed up along the Mad River. Six hundred people had gathered for the rally—they cheered Senator Sanders and sat patiently through my talk before we gathered in the field to make our giant dot. A drone helicopter about the size of a microwave hovered overhead, taking pictures—by the time I got home the best of them was up on the Web, a shot that managed to show not just our gathering but the wrecked farm fields on all sides. And there it was, our tragedy, up next to pictures from Burma, where floods had destroyed thousands of hectares of rice paddies; from Cairo, where the rising price of grain was one of many triggers for the Arab Spring; from La Paz and Entebbe and Harlem and Ho Chi Minh City, where people gathered trash to make a giant mural. From Tajikistan and then from Michigan, where the freak winter heat had forced the fruit trees to bloom, setting them up for a killer April frost.