Oil and Honey

by Bill McKibben

  We watched this drama all day long, about twelve hours of lying on the cement floor or standing and holding the bars. No food. Finally, late in the afternoon, we saw the women from our team emerge from behind a door, waving at us as they were led to the exits. Half an hour after that we were let out of the cell, one by one, uncuffed, and then sent down the hall, through one more set of barred doors and out into the world, where there was fresh air, boxes of bagels on the courthouse steps, and lots of friends. And of course cell phones, with reporters on the other end. Back to work. On message. We won’t talk much about the jail, we’d decided. Keep the focus on the Keystone pipeline. By the second or third interview I had my talking points: “People are willing to get arrested because this is a big deal. The second biggest pool of carbon on earth. Our numbers are growing.”

  And by nightfall, after a shower, a good meal, and—best of all—after I’d brushed my teeth, I could feel the jailhouse falling away behind me. We’d gotten though okay. It was a marker, a way to rally people—not the end of the world. The end of the world is the end of the world, which is why we’d sat down in the first place.

  * * *

  One other thing made me feel like I was back in the real world, of course: plugging into the Web. I read lots of congratulatory and sympathetic e-mails, and the requisite list of angry and abusive ones, but I also took a moment to glance at the news sites—which were starting to carry ominous stories about a tropical storm forming in the Atlantic. On the morning we were arrested the National Hurricane Center had reported that a cyclone was forming in the Lesser Antilles; by that night, as we were settling down in jail, its winds were strong enough that they had bestowed upon it a name: Irene. By late Monday afternoon, as we got out of jail, it had strengthened to near hurricane force and was clobbering Puerto Rico.

  At that point, with forecast maps showing the storm heading up the East Coast, it was time for cable news to go to DEFCON 1, with all the usual array of weathercasters standing on beaches pointing at surfers on waves and describing the carnage that might come in ninety-six hours: the usual run on Lowe’s and Home Depot for plywood to cover windows, the usual stories about people who were going “to ride the storm out,” the usual stories about mayors mad at people who were going to “ride the storm out,” the usual over-the-top graphics. We didn’t pay much attention to the forecast because we were too busy getting folks arrested each morning, but as the week wore on it became clear that the coming Sunday—halfway through our planned two-week siege of civil disobedience—would be the critical moment. The U.S. Park Police had already been asking if we’d suspend things that day because they needed all their officers to patrol the opening of the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. Suspending civil disobedience to honor the man who brought it to these shores seemed odd, but the impending storm gave us a reasonable excuse to be nice to the cops, who were, after all, kind of our partners in this arrest business. So we agreed.

  Eventually organizers called off the King ceremonies, too—the coming storm seemed too scary. As it turned out, though, Irene mostly skipped D.C. We had a windy party at St. Stephen’s Church, with my friend DJ Spooky spinning records and telling stories about his trip to the Antarctic; outside the wind didn’t exactly howl, but some tree limbs did fall, and the lights flickered once or twice. The same less-than-apocalyptic conditions prevailed northward to New York, where commentators had been awaiting a particularly juicy landfall only to be disappointed by a windy rainstorm. The media critic Howard Kurtz, for instance, offered a rant about how “the relentless tsunami of hype on this story” had been a sick joke “now that the apocalypse that cable television had been trumpeting had failed to materialize.” Google, if you want, the words “Irene” and “fizzle”; it goes on for pages, largely climate-change deniers filling blog posts with sermons along the lines of “if they can’t even forecast a hurricane, how can they tell us what the weather’s going to be like in fifty years?”

  I called home that afternoon to Vermont, and the neighbors said, “It’s raining hard.” I called back again that night, and they said, “It’s still raining hard.” Long after everyone at the cable news stations had stopped paying attention, Irene became a threat to my valley, maybe the greatest in its history. When Irene crossed open ocean off New York and New Jersey, the seawater was warmer than had ever been measured, and that let the storm clouds soak up great quantities of moisture; its winds hadn’t done that much damage, but when it dropped that rain on the steep, narrow valleys of Vermont, all hell broke loose. Our house was high enough on the slope that it didn’t suffer too badly—the power was out for days, but that’s not entirely unusual. (We’d actually been hit far harder by record thunderstorms a few years earlier, whose devastation I described in my previous book Eaarth.) The worst rain was coming down just a few miles to the east, in the valleys of the Mad and White Rivers, which are isolated to begin with. There were no TV crews, no manic weathermen; while the media critics along the coast were debating whether the storm had been overplayed, the water was cascading down small streams and turning them into rivers; the rivers along the valley floors were raging as no one had ever seen them rage before. No TV crews arrived to document the destruction, but there were a few folks with cell phones—if you go to YouTube, you can watch 150-year-old covered bridges washing away in a matter of seconds. Those bridges had stood there since Abraham Lincoln’s time, patiently taking everything nature could throw at them. But this was not the old nature—this was the new one we’d unleashed, that hybrid of natural and unnatural that is the distinctive mark of our time. More than eleven inches of rain fell in Mendon, Vermont, the greatest one-day rainfall in the state’s long history. In an average year, Mendon gets thirty-seven inches of rain, which, in turn, is exactly the average for the whole United States. But that day it got a third of it all at once. That’s what can happen now—it’s what does happen, almost every day someplace around the world. Warm air holds more water vapor than cold—the atmosphere is 5 percent moister than it was when I was born. We’ve left the Holocene, and we’ve loaded the dice for both drought and flood, and on this particular day it happened to be Vermont that crapped out.

  I could glean pretty quickly from the Web what was going on—I knew every stream now out of its banks, every bridge now washed away. Not going straight home was almost the hardest thing I’d ever done, far harder than going to jail, because I knew Vermont well enough to know exactly what would happen after the storm.

  David Goodman described the events in the foreword to his small book When the River Rose, about Irene in the town of Waterbury, thirty miles north of my home. There Thatcher Brook and the Winooski River overtopped their banks, inundating dozens of homes, not to mention the state’s psychiatric hospital. But never fear: “Vermonters were soon streaming into our community to help—the streets were so clogged with traffic that town officials went on the radio to ask the army of volunteers to park outside of the downtown. I ran into a dozen members of the Green Mountain Club Trail Patrol who came down from the mountains to help dig out homes on Main Street.” The CEO of Ben and Jerry’s was mucking out the basement next door. At the elementary school, Marni Martens had volunteered for the task of greeting other volunteers as they arrived. Partway through the afternoon the second day, she reported, there was a momentary lull in the flow of new shovelers. “I was left with one homeowner standing alone in tears because there were no volunteers left,” she recalled. “Here was Sonja—a mom, a parent of kids I teach—crying in my arms because she just couldn’t do it herself. I told her we would get volunteers. So I did what anyone in Waterbury would do: I ran down the street to WDEV and asked them to announce that we still needed volunteers at the school.” Right away two large groups phoned to say they were on their way.

  WDEV by the way, is one of Vermont’s greatest resources. I wrote an essay about it once for Harper’s Magazine—it’s a true community radio station that carries the Red Sox and the stock car races, and has its own in-house bl
uegrass band (the Radio Rangers). And in times of crisis—well, everyone at the station, from the ad salesmen to the owner Ken Squier, heads out to find out what’s happening so they can tell their neighbors. The Internet was no use those first days, because the power was gone; but if you had a battery in your transistor radio, you were in touch with WDEV, except for the few moments when the station was shut down in order to pour more gas into the emergency generator. Announcer Eric Michaels was up all night as the water was rising, taking cell phone calls from people in every kind of emergency. “I read stories of sheds passing by in the floodwaters,” he said. “I read texts that cows were floating past. And cars. And homes. And caskets ripped from flooded graveyards.”

  In other towns, newspapers became the organizing principle—Vermont still has some fine local papers—relics, like WDEV, of another age (or maybe precursors of the next one). In Randolph, at the northern end of the next valley over, it was the Herald and its editor, Dickey Drysdale, who told the stories of men on ATVs catching bags of prescriptions thrown across the canyon at the foot of Camp Brook Road and somehow making it over the Bethel Mountain Road to the cutoff village of Rochester. Or of the Mighty Mud Brigade, thirty strong, going from house to house with shovels and buckets till everyone was mucked out. The Herald had great pictures, too, including one of a woman standing next to her wrecked farmhouse with a huge sign that just said, “Irene You Bitch.”

  It’s not like this huge effort lasted a few days—it went on for weeks and months, as volunteers and government officials did all they could to put the state back together. It wasn’t always pretty: the governor waived various environmental laws, allowing bulldozers into rivers, and in the process doing damage that will probably make the aftermath of the next storm worse. But his highway department worked at a feverish pace—and though it took till January 2012, every mile of state road eventually reopened, and the crucial bridges were replaced. (Replaced with longer spans, in the expensive hope they’ll deal with larger floods.) The state legislature spent the next session figuring out how to account for it all, with fingers crossed that the next disaster would wait till the bonds were paid off. Plenty of people will never completely recover—as usual, the poorest were the hardest hit, because there were a lot of trailer parks on flood plains. But I think David Goodman put it best at the end of his slim book: “The raging rivers of Irene revealed something more beautiful and durable than the wood and steel it tore away: the incredibly generous spirit of Vermonters, and the ties that bind our communities.”

  The ultimate triumph of community over crisis: it is as hopeful a note as I know how to strike. When people ask me where they should move to be safe from climate change, I always tell them anyplace with a strong community. Neighbors were optional the past fifty years, but they’ll be essential in the decades to come.

  Still, there comes a point past which neighbors are no longer sufficient, a point we are fast approaching. What if it had rained fifteen inches on Mendon instead of eleven? Across the United States, in the five decades I’ve been alive, the number of extreme downpours a year has increased 30 percent. Across New England, it’s gone up 85 percent. Across Vermont, it’s literally doubled. The intensity of the largest rainstorm each year has grown by more than a fifth.

  And all of this is with one degree of temperature increase.

  The same climatologists who told us that this would happen now tell us we’re likely to see temperatures rise five degrees this century unless we get off coal and gas and oil far faster than any government now plans. There’s no adapting to that, not even in relatively rich places such as America. And in poor places? In Pakistan, a year before Irene, flooding forced twenty million people from their homes. Twenty million people is thirty-five times the population of Vermont.

  So that’s why I stayed in Washington. I was constantly on the phone with family and friends. But I wasn’t shoveling out basements, I was shoveling folks off to jail. And for me the most moving moment of the whole long siege came the following Tuesday morning, when I got to Lafayette Square and found a busload of Vermonters lined up waiting to get arrested. They told me the story of their trip—an odyssey of driving endlessly to find intact bridges and roads so they could get out of Vermont and down to D.C. “It’s too late to stop Irene,” one woman said. “Maybe it’s not too late to stop the next one.”

  It didn’t move me just because these were my neighbors. It was more because they helped me bridge, with their trek, the gulf in my mind between home and away—that sense that the halves of my life didn’t connect. I described earlier how much I wanted to be home, free from the ceaseless wandering, building the kind of local economies the planet badly needed. But in the rains of Irene, the contradictions seemed to dissolve and melt. The global implied the local and vice versa, and it was my particular fate to straddle the two.

  Though I trust Robert Frost on most things, these two paths were converging. If we couldn’t win this fight at the global level—if we couldn’t bring climate change under some kind of control—there was no use even trying to make local economies work. So far we’ve only raised the temperature a single degree, and yet that’s been enough to melt the Arctic. And the same scientists who told us that this would happen are firm in their consensus that unless we get off coal and oil and gas with great haste, that one degree will be four or five: enough to turn farm belts into deserts, make humid New England a swamp, and reduce Irene to just another link in an endless chain of disasters that will turn civilization into a never-ending emergency response drill. They don’t call it global warming for nothing. We have to work at the scale of the planet.

  At the same time, we’ve already changed that planet. And no matter how well campaigners like me do our job, we are going to change it some more. Climatologists insist that even if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the temperature and the damage would increase for decades to come. So we need new local economies if for no other reason than that they’ll weather the coming storms a little better. In place of our too-big-to-fail systems of banking and energy and agriculture, we need squat, hardy, scaled-down versions. Small enough to succeed.

  * * *

  In that second and final week, the protests just kept growing. Every morning, in the strangest commute of my life, I’d walk down Connecticut Avenue to Lafayette Square and give much the same short talk: “You’re very brave. It’s hard for normal people not to move when a policeman says ‘Move.’ We’re not built that way—it feels uncomfortable, psychologically uncomfortable. You’re brave, really brave.” And they were, day after day. Some days a busload would arrive from one of the states along the pipeline route: Nebraskans, Texans. Some days our friends at the Indigenous Environmental Network were in charge—sage burning, drums pounding. A few movie stars took part: Margot Kidder, who’d played Lois Lane, and was from northern Canada. Tantoo Cardinal, a Cree actress born in Fort McMurray in the heart of the tar sands—you saw her in Dances with Wolves. Darryl Hannah. But participants were mostly just ordinary people who had decided to do the extraordinary, arriving from every state in the union.

  The last day, while the arrests were under way, we held a rally in Lafayette Square. A band played, and a hundred people carrying a four-hundred-foot-long inflatable black pipeline snake-danced through the area—it was a three-ring circus that went on for hours because more than 200 people insisted on getting arrested. They brought the two-week total to 1,253, the biggest civil disobedience action since the protests against nuclear testing in the 1980s—even much bigger events, including the protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization, hadn’t yielded as many arrestees. And not perhaps since the civil rights movement had there been a crowd of protesters quite as diverse.

  We’d asked, you’ll recall, that college students not have to bear the burden of this particular fight. And people had taken the message to heart. We didn’t actually ask how old people were, since that would have been rude, but we did ask who was president when they were born, an
d the largest cohorts had been babies in the Truman and FDR administrations. Not many things get easier as you age, but getting arrested is one—an arrest record for a twenty-one-year-old might cost you a job, but past a certain age, what are they going to do to you? On the last day, eighty-six-year-old Roy Ingham was loaded into the paddy wagon with a sign around his neck, “World War II Vet, handle with care.” We’d also asked people to show up wearing their Sunday best, and that’s what happened—lots of sundresses, neckties, sports jackets. It wasn’t because we were a formal bunch, but because, as I’d said in that initial letter, we wanted to send a visual signal to everyone looking on: There’s nothing radical about what we’re doing here. We’re just Americans, interested in preserving a country and a planet that looks and feels something like the ones we were born on.

  Radicals? They work at oil companies and coal companies and gas companies. They’re willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere to make money. No one has ever done anything more radical than that.

  * * *

  As the sit-in swelled, and as the logistics became a little more routine (after a while, organizing crime is just another job), we started to think about what would happen next. We hadn’t given it much thought before—after all, if the civil disobedience had fizzled, there wouldn’t have been any real campaign.

  But now—well, now 1,253 people had anted up with their bodies to get us in the game. And it had worked. We hadn’t gotten much press coverage, but enough—for those paying attention to environmental issues or presidential politics, Keystone was now on the mental map. I confess we were a little stunned at how well it had gone—and, having bought our chips, it was time to play our hand.

  Official Washington was wired to approve the pipeline. The State Department was conducting the official review, and Hillary Clinton had said even before it began that she was “inclined” to approve the permit. There was a good reason for that (the Canadians wanted it badly, and they’re our closest ally), but there were also several bad reasons—as Freedom of Information Act requests were beginning to show, lobbyists from the pipeline’s builders, TransCanada, had successfully infiltrated the department, paying heavily for the lobbying services of many of Clinton’s biggest campaign donation “bundlers.” Everyone who followed this kind of thing said our case was hopeless—indeed, when the Capitol Hill magazine National Journal polled three hundred energy insiders that fall, 91 percent of them said the permit would be granted. Bad odds.