Oil and Honey

by Bill McKibben

  After fifteen years my wife and my daughter and I moved fifty miles across the lake to Vermont, sacrificing a little of the wildness for the strong sense of community that defines the Green Mountain State: the town meeting, the farmer’s market, the microbrewery. These are places that might be made to work: the Adirondacks is the best example of a wilderness with people living in and among it; Vermont the best example of an earlier American state of mind, before the hyper-individualism of the TV age completely took over.

  There’s so much to be done here at home; you can sense the new world coming into embryonic form, with its own sources of everything from seeds to capital. And for me, even more, it’s the landscape that fits with jigsaw precision into the hole in my heart. I’m happy when I’m home, when I can see the sun shining through the winter-bare ridge at dusk, when I can swat the blackflies come June. My thirties were essentially an extended early retirement; I spent those years—the 1990s—writing and wandering, and watching my daughter grow. Her first word was “birch,” which pleased me more than I can say; by the time she was fifteen she’d climbed all forty-six of the high peaks in her native Adirondacks, which made me at least as proud as her college admissions letter did a few years later.

  Which is why it’s so odd that I’ve spent more nights away than home these past years. I’ve been to every continent since 2008, and once I hit four of them in six days. At 350.org we’ve organized, in the words of Outside magazine, “more rallies than Lenin and Gandhi and Martin Luther King combined.” It’s been the most satisfying work of my life, endlessly difficult and endlessly interesting. But asleep in some Days Inn or Courtyard by Marriott, I dreamed of the Champlain Valley, with the Adirondacks towering to the west and its growing web of organic dairies and community-supported agriculture (CSA) farms; I woke up to eat at the breakfast bar (non-Vermont non-maple syrup) and do rhetorical battle with retrograde congressmen. But I did that battle in the name of my place, remembering what it felt like. I can try to imagine “unborn generations” and the “suffering poor” and the other huge reasons to fight climate change, but I never have the slightest trouble conjuring up the tang of the first frosty morning in the Adirondack fall, the evening breeze that stirs as the sun drops below the ridge.

  And, of course, if I knew my place, Kirk really knew it—felt its every change not only with his own senses but with the extended vision of the many million bees in his charge. Through them he knew each new development in the wider world; they were scouts, and he could read their dispatches with ease. I know no one more connected, which is why it has been a privilege just to follow him around.

  So when I say activism didn’t come naturally to me, it’s not simply because I’m a writer; it’s because the need to stay close to home was very nearly biological. If I missed a week wandering the woods, it meant not seeing those flowers that year—the trillium would have to wait till next spring. But I’d turned fifty, and the “next springs” were now fewer than the springs I’d known. At night, on the road, distracted by worry, I’d say those names: Camel’s Hump, Breadloaf Mountain, Otter Creek. I’m a mediocre meditator, but the one mantra that could lull me to sleep in some lonely Hilton was the list of Lake Champlain’s many tributaries, north to south along the Vermont shore, then back down on the New York side. It hurt, physically, to leave; flying back into Burlington airport, winging past Whiteface and Giant Mountain, wheeling over Missisquoi Bay, calmed me down like nothing else.

  That the two sides of my life were so at odds bothered me no end, far more than the jet fuel my travels burned. I couldn’t quite make them connect.

  2

  STORMS

  We weren’t really planning to actually go to jail.

  Our advance team had been on the ground in Washington for three weeks. It turns out that in a market society there are people equipped to fill every need, including organizing civil disobedience. The crew we’d found, and who would soon become close colleagues, was headed by Matt Leonard. With his shaved head and earring, he bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Clean. But he was more like Mr. Calm; in what became a rapidly mounting storm he never lost his cool. His posse included Rae Breaux, Linda Capato, Duncan Meisel, and Josh Kahn Russell, each the veteran of many such actions.

  But because of that history, they were pretty sure only a small number of people would turn up—it had been at least thirty years since people had been hauled away in the thousands. (That had occurred during protests at the Rocky Flats nuclear test site in the Western desert.) Matt kept saying that we’d be fine with five or ten arrestees a day over our two-week protest; even as the number of people signing up kept mounting, he cautioned that many would melt away. The D.C. police must have felt the same way, because it was next to impossible to get their attention—our team was bounced from one sergeant to another, and none seemed to take the whole thing very seriously. I began to worry they’d just let us sit there, that we wouldn’t get arrested at all.

  We’d told each daily wave of potential arrestees to gather the night before at a Washington church for training. So it wasn’t until five p.m. on Friday, August 19, 2011, when we convened the first of these sessions at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in the Columbia Heights neighborhood, that we got to find out if anyone would really show. People started streaming in early; soon there were more than eighty people planning to risk arrest the next day, which was more than we’d anticipated—many more. We practiced for an hour, walking in columns down the center aisle and fanning out in front of the altar as if it were the White House lawn. A procession of lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild answered questions (“What if I have a green card?” “Will they take my medicine?”) and assured us that the routine for arrests was well established. We’d sit down on the sidewalk directly in front of the White House in a fifty-yard zone called the “postcard window” reserved for people taking snapshots. The police would handcuff us, load us in paddy wagons, drive us to the police station, process us, fine us a hundred dollars apiece, and release us that afternoon: we even handed out slips of paper with subway directions from the police station back to the airports and train stations, because most people were planning to travel home that evening.

  But it turned out that the police were not as pleased by our turnout as we were. When we arrived the next morning at Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House, there were a scattering of police cars—but as the crowd swelled, more and more cops kept arriving, too. And though the rest of us didn’t know it at the time, an angry lieutenant was giving Matt the first indication that the arrests might be anything but routine.

  I made a short speech through a bullhorn, and then, as we’d practiced the night before, we walked toward the White House, spreading out into a long line three deep, with our banner at the center. We sat on the sidewalk, the president’s front porch behind us, and then we waited. People tried a few chants, but they didn’t fit the mood, which seemed solemn, but also joyful. To me at least it felt like I was finally taking action on a scale that began to match the scale of the problem—that if the planet was at stake, handcuffs made more sense than lightbulbs. I was grinning, I think.

  Three times a police officer read out an order to leave: “Attention. This is Lieutenant Phelps of the U.S. Park Police. Because of violations of park laws and regulations applicable to this area, your permit to demonstrate on the White House sidewalk has been revoked by the ranking supervisory U.S. Park Police official in charge. Due to these violations the sidewalk is closed. All persons remaining on the closed portion of the White House sidewalk will be arrested. This is your third warning.” With that, they closed metal barricades around us, shooed away the onlookers and camera crews, and began arresting us, one by one. It took a long time (which, as it turned out, would be the basic operating principle for the next few days). Beginning with the women, officers in full body armor hauled us one by one to our feet, cuffed our hands behind our backs, and then led us to a small tent, where they photographed us and g
ave us each a number. From there we were escorted to the back of a paddy wagon, which was stifling hot and claustrophobic once it filled with the requisite ten bodies. And from there we took a ten-minute drive to the U.S. Park Police station in Anacostia.

  We sat on the ground outside the station for an hour or two, hands still cuffed behind our backs—after a while, it’s painful. And then, one by one, we were led inside, where an officer emptied our pockets and wrote out in laborious longhand a receipt for each of us. (The Park Police seem not to have been informed about the advent of the digital age—I did see a couple of IBM Selectrics on a desk, but they were unplugged. It was pure Bic and carbon paper for us.) That’s when my wedding ring went, along with my ID, my hundred dollars, my belt, my shoelaces, and my necktie. But I really only cared about the wedding ring—it’s amazing how much you suddenly miss something that normally you don’t even know you’re wearing.

  “Why are you taking it?” I asked.

  “Because where we’re sending you they’ll cut your finger off to get it,” one cop explained.

  That was a pretty good clue, but we still didn’t fully understand we were headed for jail. The lawyers had been so sure it would be just a matter of hours before we’d be released back out into the sweltering Washington afternoon—everyone still had their slips of paper with the directions to the airport. But as the afternoon dragged on, the police broke us into groups of ten or fifteen and ushered us into small holding cells, small enough that only one or two could sit on the floor at a time while the rest stood around them. (There was a stainless steel toilet in each cell, too, and it took a while before we overcame our reluctance to use it while surrounded by a dozen others.) We stood for hours, and it gradually began to dawn on us that we were not, in fact, going anywhere soon. They let us out one at a time to make our single phone calls, just like in the movies—I called our support team working out of a borrowed office in D.C. and learned the bad news: we were almost certainly going to be held overnight, and probably the next night, too. The police had told Matt they didn’t want to deal with two weeks of demonstrations of this size, so they were upping the price to try to deter those planning to come.

  This scared me—not the jail part (well, a little), but the deterrence part. What if it worked? I mean, we’d been telling people that the most likely outcome was a few hours in a police station, not a few days in jail. Would the protest just fizzle now? I asked our communications coordinator, Jamie Henn, if he could spread around a one-sentence message: “We don’t need sympathy; we need company.” And that was the last message I’d manage to get out for the duration.

  I’d spent all summer plotting to get us arrested, so there was no point in complaining. About ten o’clock that Saturday night they loaded us back into the paddy wagon and took us to D.C.’s Central Cell Block. They put me in a holding room and shackled my ankle to a bolt in the floor, then fingerprinted me and led me to a cell: a small steel cage with two steel bunks and a steel toilet/sink. There are, one hears, “country club prisons,” but not, I think, country club jails—this one lacked mattresses, pillows, even sheets. Just stainless steel. My cell mate—Curt, a real estate salesman and blogger from Louisville, Kentucky, who had driven east for the protest—was on the upper bunk, a much tougher spot since the light shone all night in his face. We chatted, and we talked through the bars to find out who was nearby: Gus Speth, one of the great heroes of the environmental movement, was in the next cell; Jim Antal, conference minister for the United Church of Christ in Massachusetts, was a few doors down; next to him was Chris Shaw, one of my oldest hiking and paddling and writing friends from the woods of home. There were about sixty of us in all—the women had been taken somewhere else; no one knew where. Everyone seemed mildly amazed to be there, but no one was too freaked out, or at least they weren’t saying so. I tucked my shoes under my head for a pillow, did my best to sleep, and failed.

  My mind was running fast: things I needed to tweet or blog, messages to get to the media. The oddest, most disconcerting thing about jail was being cut off from the flow of information, silenced. But it was also liberating—I’d spent the past two months in overdrive, endless conference calls, obsessing over messaging and framing, and … now I couldn’t do anything. For the moment my only use was as one of a few dozen symbols, sitting behind bars. I couldn’t help with what were clearly going to be crucial decisions: most important, if another wave of people showed up for the evening training, would we send them out to the White House knowing now that it might mean jail? The rest of the crew would have to figure it all out. I could relax, in a way I hadn’t for weeks, and wouldn’t for months to come. My body was uncomfortable—there really is no way to curl up on a steel slab that doesn’t leave you bruised—but my mind was oddly at ease.

  No one had a watch, and when we asked the guards what time it was they enjoyed messing with us, giving answers hours apart. As far as we could tell, mealtimes were about three a.m. and three p.m., when someone shuffled down the hall handing out a bologna sandwich and filling your cup with a few inches of water if you held it out between the bars. (“Feeding time at the zoo,” the guard would shout.) Eventually Saturday’s adrenaline fully drained away, and I was tired, though falling asleep on steel was tough. After a while I woke up, sure that it was Sunday morning. Since I was feeling at least a little guilty (this was, after all, my idea), I was doing my best to keep people’s spirits up. I knew there weren’t that many churchgoers on hand, but people seemed to enjoy singing the old civil rights call-and-response hymn “Certainly Lord.” (“Have you been to the jailhouse? Certainly, certainly, certainly Lord.”) I asked Gus Speth to shout out a half-hour synopsis of his next book to the whole cell block, and when that was done—well, not much.

  The guards had laughed when we asked them if we could see our lawyer. “Not on the weekend,” one explained, which isn’t exactly what the Constitution specifies, I think. So we had no idea of what they were charging us with, nor any way of knowing what was going on outside. Or, we wouldn’t have, except for our secret weapon. And here I need to say a bit more about my next-door cell mate.

  Gus Speth was a veteran of the first Earth Day in 1970. He’d helped found the Natural Resources Defense Council, then had gone on to head President Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality, before running the United Nations Development Program and serving as a dean at Yale. At seventy he’d “retired” to Vermont but was now a faculty member at the state’s law school. Oh, and his son was a high-powered D.C. corporate attorney, who, it turned out, had been papering the jailhouse with one writ after another to try to find out what was going on with his dad. So it didn’t completely surprise me when word filtered down the cell block midafternoon that Gus would indeed be meeting with his lawyer, weekend be damned. It was our sole connection to the outside world—what message should he send out to the media? This was my only chance to write so I set my mind to making suggestions, not that Gus really needed the help. Still, we were pretty pleased with what we eventually came up with. His message to the press read in its entirety: “I’ve held a lot of important positions in this town, but none seem as important as this one.”

  I held my breath while Gus was off in the interview cell with his son, waiting for the news—which, as it turned out, couldn’t have been better. Day two of the protest had been, he reported with a smile, even bigger than day one, with nearly a hundred people getting arrested. The logic of the police, which probably works with criminals, seemed to have had the reverse effect on idealists: faced with more serious consequences, more people had come to the fore.

  And with that I knew that the weekend really was a turning point: the moment when establishment, insider environmentalism found itself a little overtaken by grassroots power. We’d gone beyond education to resistance; the movement we’d long needed, and that had been glimpsed in environmental justice efforts around the country, was starting to emerge on a national scale. The spirit of that long-ago first Earth Day, when I was nine an
d Gus was a young man, seemed renewed—it was, I hoped, a portent of larger hope for the movement, a sign that people were finally willing to step up.

  Since no one new was appearing in our cell block, we guessed (correctly as it turned out) that we’d filled the jailhouse and the police had given up on their deterrence campaign and started treating the next waves of protesters in the usual way, with a trip to the station house and a hundred-dollar fine. With that thought I relaxed, and I think that second night I got a few hours sleep before the three a.m. bologna call. And since it was now Monday morning, the legal mill could resume its grinding—at five a.m. we were cuffed again and back in the wagon, bound just a few hundred yards for the holding cells at the city’s central courthouse. The new wrinkle was that they shackled us to one another at the ankle—a chain gang, again just like the movies. Put your hand on the shoulder of the guy in front and shuffle along. Also, we got to meet many of the weekend’s other criminals, some of whom seemed to find it worth a wry chuckle that we were there on the charge of “failure to yield.”

  “Sheeit,” explained one veteran of the system. “That’s not even a misdemeanor. That’s a traffic.”

  We knew we were going to get out eventually. But it was sobering to see the justice system from the inside—to watch, for instance, as court-appointed lawyers appeared at the side of the cage, clutching a folder and bellowing the last name of their next assignment: “McClendon.” Someone would shuffle sleepily toward the bars. “Attempted murder,” the lawyer would say. A minute or two of conversation would ensue, and then the lawyer would wander off.