Oil and Honey

by Bill McKibben

  But a few weeks later, in the summer of 2007, the Arctic began to melt, breaking all previous records. Clearly climate change was coming faster than even the most pessimistic scientists had thought, and 2050 was no longer all that relevant. We’d need to work faster, on a larger scale. NASA’s James Hansen, the planet’s premier climate scientist, provided us with a number: in January 2008, his team published a paper showing that if the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose above 350 parts per million, we couldn’t have a planet “similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” (Five years later we’re closing in on 400 parts per million—that’s why the Arctic is melting.) We took 350.org for our name, reasoning that we wanted to work all over the world (they don’t call it global warming for nothing) and that Arabic numerals crossed linguistic boundaries. And then we took a leap of faith that in retrospect seems ludicrous—since there were seven continents, each of those seven young people working with me took a chunk of one and we set to work: Kelly Blynn on South America, Jeremy Osborn in Europe, Phil Aroneanu in Africa, Will Bates on the Indian subcontinent, Jamie Henn in the rest of Asia, May Boeve at home in North America, and Jon Warnow on the antipodes (he also got the Internet). Our success the year before meant that a couple of foundations (the Rockefellers, the Schumanns) were willing to help fund our work, and so the rest of the team was getting paid small salaries, and they had money to travel. But how do you just land in, say, Vietnam or Peru or Kazakhstan and start “organizing”? We found out.

  The seven kids did endless work—literally endless, since going global meant there was always someone awake somewhere to e-mail. Mostly we found people like ourselves—there aren’t “environmentalists” everywhere, but there’s always someone worried about public health or hunger or war and peace. (Worried, that is, about all the hopes that will be wrecked if the planet starts to fail.) Though most of them were poor, and hence living lives a world apart from that of New England college students, they were natural allies, quick to understand both the science and the politics. And so by the fall of 2009, we were ready to hold our first global day of action. It was beyond exciting watching the pictures pour in—there were 5,200 rallies in 181 countries, what CNN called “the most widespread day of action in the planet’s history.” We followed it up with three more big global extravaganzas—thousands of demonstrations everywhere, save North Korea. There are forty thousand images in the Flickr account—I can show you pictures from Mongolia and Mumbai and Mozambique, from Montreal and Mombasa and Mauritania. From almost everywhere. We did our part to educate the world about what was coming at it.

  But if you’ve built a movement, you’ve eventually got to put it to work. And now “eventually” had come. Education needed to yield to action.

  So while Kirk was starting to build his barn in that early summer of 2011, I was stepping off a small cliff into the next phase of my life. To this point I’d been able to pretend that I was mostly a writer who happened to be helping with some activism—that our global climate education project was a natural extension of the work I’d spent my life doing. But now I was getting ready to do something different: to pick a tough, visible fight with the strongest possible adversaries on the biggest political stage in the world. Global warming was accelerating—2010 had just set the new record for the hottest year ever recorded. It was time to pick up the pace and move from engagement to resistance.

  And so, at least for the two years described here, I’ve made the transition, however reluctantly, from author-activist to activist. Except for a few blessed interludes in the beeyards, I’ve spent my time on the computer and the airplane and the phone, giving speeches and leading marches. I’ve willed myself to be someone other than who I had been. The strain has told; I’ve changed, and not always for the best. This is the story of that education.

  I miss, sometimes desperately, the other me: the one who knew lots about reason and beauty and very little about the way power works; the one with time to think. But time, as I say, is what we’re lacking.

  * * *

  As it happened, I’d spent the spring of 2011 teaching a course at Middlebury. “Social Movements, Theory and Practice,” it was called—but since these were the opening months of the Arab Spring it was mostly practice. We watched YouTube videos of young Egyptians organizing epic marches, and brave Libyans standing up to their tyrant Muammar Gadhafi. And we read Taylor Branch’s classic three-volume biography of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights years, which might as well be a handbook for organizers—it’s so full of behind-the-scenes details that you could see exactly how Dr. King had dealt with every problem we’d face, from stubborn presidents to (far harder) stubborn colleagues from the large civil rights organizations.

  By the time I was done with the semester, I’d decided that 350.org should organize the first major civil disobedience action for the climate movement. I sensed, from the speeches I was giving and the e-mail that flowed in hourly, that people were ready for a deeper challenge—it was time to stop changing lightbulbs and start changing systems. If we were going to shake things up, we’d need to use the power King had tapped: the power of direct action and unearned suffering. We’d need to go to jail.

  And at precisely that moment, an issue materialized out of thin, if dirty, air. In the spring of 2011 Jim Hansen published a small paper pointing out that “peak oil” was not, in fact, happening quite as expected—that though we were indeed running out of easy-to-tap sweet crude, the newly emerging category of “unconventional oil,” and in particular the tar sands of Canada, contained huge amounts of carbon. Those Albertan tar sands, he wrote, were so gigantic that if we burned them in addition to everything else we were burning, it would be “game over for the climate.”

  His calculations put a sudden spotlight on a previously little-known pipeline proposal called Keystone XL that was designed to carry almost a million barrels a day of that tar sands oil south from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Native leaders in Canada had been fighting tar sands mining for years, because it had wrecked their lands—only 3 percent of the oil had been pumped out, but already the world’s biggest bulldozers and dump trucks had moved more earth than was moved building the planet’s ten biggest dams, the Great Wall of China, and the Suez Canal combined. And some ranchers in the United States had begun to rally along the planned route of the pipeline itself, particularly in Nebraska, where it was destined to run straight across the iconic Sandhills and atop the Ogallala Aquifer that irrigates the Great Plains. But these protests hadn’t gained enough traction to stop the plan. Keystone XL awaited only a presidential permit.

  That was the part that interested me. An old law, mainly used for things such as building a bridge between New Brunswick and Maine, required presidents to declare that any infrastructure crossing our country’s border was “in the national interest.” Congress didn’t need to act, which was good since I knew there was no possible way to even think about convincing the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to block the pipeline. But this decision would be made by Barack Obama, and Barack Obama was fifteen months away from an election. Maybe we had an opening to apply some pressure—an opening to see if we’d nurtured a climate movement strong enough to make a difference.

  And so I called the native leaders, who’d been fighting the longest, and asked if it was okay if we joined in. They graciously refrained from pointing out we were late to the game, and promised to collaborate (a promise they would keep in spectacular fashion in the year ahead). And then I called the small but hardy band of environmental campaigners in Nebraska and in Washington, D.C., who had been trying to block the pipeline. If we demanded more dramatic action, I asked, would it somehow damage their efforts? “We’re losing,” they said. “We have no deal for you to damage. Going to jail can’t hurt.”

  Our small crew at 350.org—still run by those seven young people, now fully grown and highly able organizers—talked it through. We knew it was a gambl
e, but when you’re behind, you take risks. (The slow, easy, sensible trajectories for dealing with climate change were in the past now; sometimes I had to restrain myself from saying to some “moderate” politician, “If only you’d listened to me a quarter century ago.…”) And when you’re losing you take personal risks, too; I sensed I was stepping over a line. With no idea how it would all come out, I sat down and wrote a letter, which I circulated to a few of my friends to cosign. It went out into the far reaches of the Web in June 2011, and it was as blunt as I could make it.

  Dear Friends,

  This will be a slightly longer letter than common for the Internet age—it’s serious stuff.

  The short version is we want you to consider doing something hard: coming to Washington in the hottest and stickiest weeks of the summer and engaging in civil disobedience that will quite possibly get you arrested.

  The full version goes like this:

  As you know, the planet is steadily warming: 2010 was the warmest year on record, and we’ve seen the resulting chaos in almost every corner of the earth.

  And as you also know, our democracy is increasingly controlled by special interests interested only in their short-term profit.

  These two trends collide this summer in Washington, where the State Department and the White House have to decide whether to grant a certificate of “national interest” to some of the biggest fossil fuel players on Earth. These corporations want to build the so-called Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s tar sands to Texas refineries.

  To call this project a horror is serious understatement. The tar sands have wrecked huge parts of Alberta, disrupting ways of life in indigenous communities—First Nations communities in Canada and tribes along the pipeline route in the U.S. have demanded the destruction cease. The pipeline crosses crucial areas like the Ogallala Aquifer where a spill would be disastrous—and though the pipeline companies insist they are using “state of the art” technologies that should leak only once every seven years, the precursor pipeline and its pumping stations have leaked a dozen times in the past year. These local impacts alone would be cause enough to block such a plan. But the Keystone pipeline would also be a fifteen hundred mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet, the one place to which we are all indigenous.

  As the climatologist Jim Hansen (one of the signatories to this letter) explained, if we have any chance of getting back to a stable climate “the principal requirement is that coal emissions must be phased out by 2030 and unconventional fossil fuels, such as tar sands, must be left in the ground.” In other words, he added, “if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over.” The Keystone pipeline is an essential part of the game. “Unless we get increased market access, like with Keystone XL, we’re going to be stuck,” Ralph Glass, an economist and vice president at AJM Petroleum Consultants in Calgary, told a Canadian newspaper last week.

  Given all that, you’d suspect that there’s no way the Obama administration would ever permit this pipeline. But in the last few months the administration has signed pieces of paper opening much of Alaska to oil drilling, and permitting coal mining on federal land in Wyoming that will produce as much CO2 as three hundred power plants operating at full bore.

  And Secretary of State Clinton has already said she’s “inclined” to recommend the pipeline go forward. Partly it’s because of the political commotion over high gas prices, though more tar sands oil would do nothing to change that picture. But it’s also because of intense pressure from industry.

  So we’re pretty sure that without serious pressure the Keystone pipeline will get its permit from Washington. A wonderful coalition of environmental groups has built a strong campaign across the continent—from Cree and Déné indigenous leaders to Nebraska farmers, they’ve spoken out strongly against the destruction of their land. We need to join them, and to say even if our own homes won’t be crossed by this pipeline, our joint home—the earth—will be wrecked by the carbon that pours down it.

  And we need to say something else, too: it’s time to stop letting corporate power make the most important decisions our planet faces. We don’t have the money to compete with those corporations, but we do have our bodies, and beginning in mid-August many of us will use them. We will, each day, march on the White House, risking arrest with our trespass. We will do it in dignified fashion, demonstrating that in this case we are the conservatives, and that our foes—who would change the composition of the atmosphere—are dangerous radicals. Come dressed as if for a business meeting—this is, in fact, serious business.

  And another sartorial tip—if you wore an Obama button during the 2008 campaign, why not wear it again? We very much still want to believe in the promise of that young senator who told us that with his election the “rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet start to heal.” We don’t understand what combination of bureaucratic obstinacy and insider dealing has derailed those efforts, but we remember his request that his supporters continue on after the election to pressure his government for change. We’ll do what we can.

  One more thing: we don’t just want college kids to be the participants in this fight. They’ve led the way so far on climate change—ten thousand came to D.C. for the Power Shift gathering earlier this spring. They’ve marched this month in West Virginia to protest mountaintop removal; a young man named Tim DeChristopher faces sentencing this summer in Utah for his creative protest.

  Now it’s time for people who’ve spent their lives pouring carbon into the atmosphere to step up, too, just as many of us did in earlier battles for civil rights or for peace. Most of us signing this letter are veterans of this work, and we think it’s past time for elders to behave like elders. One thing we don’t want is a smash up: if you can’t control your passions, this action is not for you.

  This won’t be a one-shot day of action. We plan for it to continue for several weeks, till the administration understands we won’t go away. Not all of us can actually get arrested—half the signatories to this letter live in Canada, and might well find our entry into the U.S. barred. But we will be making plans for sympathy demonstrations outside Canadian consulates in the U.S., and U.S. consulates in Canada—the decision makers need to know they’re being watched.

  Twenty years of patiently explaining the climate crisis to our leaders hasn’t worked. Maybe moral witness will help. You have to start somewhere, and we choose here and now.

  We know we’re asking a lot. You should think long and hard on it, and pray if you’re the praying type. But to us, it’s as much privilege as burden to get to join this fight in the most serious possible way. We hope you’ll join us.

  Maude Barlow—Chair, Council of Canadians

  Wendell Berry—Author and Farmer

  Danny Glover—Actor

  Tom Goldtooth—Director, Indigenous Environmental Network

  James Hansen—Climate Scientist

  Wes Jackson—Agronomist, President of the Land Institute

  Naomi Klein—Author and Journalist

  Bill McKibben—Writer and Environmentalist

  George Poitras—Mikisew Cree First Nation

  Gus Speth—Environmental Lawyer and Activist

  David Suzuki—Scientist, Environmentalist, and Broadcaster

  Joseph B. Uehlein—Labor Organizer and Environmentalist

  It’s the kind of letter where you sit there with your hand above the send button and just kind of wonder how much your life is going to change. As it turned out, a lot.

  * * *

  One reason I find it hard to ask people to come to D.C. and get arrested: part of me thinks, strongly, we should stay home. Or at least that I should.

  Yes, because it takes energy to travel. Yes, it has, in fact, occurred to me that there’s something remarkably ironic about my flying around the world to build a climate movement. I do it because I think the math works: if we can stop Keystone, that
’s nine hundred thousand barrels a day for the fifty-year life of the pipeline. But it always nags at me, that surge of power at the top of the runway as the jet engines guzzle fuel to get us aloft. I tell myself that we fight this fight in the world we live in, not the one we hope to build.

  But we do need to build that world, and that’s even more why we should stay home; it’s why Kirk’s project attracts me. It’s clear to me that we can’t have precisely the same economy that we’ve grown up with, not the globe-spanning anything-at-any-time consumerism, not the starter-castles-for-entry-level-monarchs housing stock, not the every-man-a-Denali/Tahoe/Escalade driveway. We’re going to have to change our patterns, our laws, our economies, our expectations. My last few books have focused on the possibilities for local food, local energy, local currency—and the appeal for me is not just or even mainly intellectual.

  I found the mountains surrounding Lake Champlain as a fairly young man. I’d moved to the Adirondacks at the age of twenty-six, falling in love with the sheer wildness of the place, a bigger tract of protected land than Glacier, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite combined. A child of the suburbs, I was knocked over by the contact with hot, cold, wet; it was no different than any other incandescent young love, except that it has burned on for years. Hemlock bowing across the stream, red pine needles baking in the August sun high on the ridge, coyotes yipping in the night, sky so black the Milky Way stretches to each horizon; all of it was a revelation. (In fact, the dominant emotion of The End of Nature was not fear but sadness—a lament for the wildness that climate change threatened to leach away.) Just to say the names calms me down: Ampersand Mountain, Thirteenth Lake, Raquette River.