Oil and Honey

by Bill McKibben

  There’s another problem, too: raising farmers is just as hard as raising any other crop. Maybe harder. Kirk and I sat in the sunshine, eating lunch. “I think about it all the time—it’s what I want to do more than anything else: have some apprentices that I can really teach to do this work,” he said. “But I’m afraid I’m also somewhat jaded and cynical. Our culture has kind of abandoned farming.” This is indisputably true—America has twice as many full-time prisoners as full-time farmers. Once farmers made up half the population; now it’s under 1 percent. It’s true that young people are starting to return to the soil, and often with fine technical skills gained at a growing network of college gardens or working as “WWOOFers” (from the volunteer-linking organization Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms) on organic farms. But the hard part, Kirk said, is the culture, not the agriculture.

  “I think about the few farmers I know of who have really been successful over long periods of time: the Amish, the French market gardeners outside Paris. Both decided they had to remain a little separate from the rest of society. That’s the huge challenge for all of us who grew up here, in regular society. How do we do this job and still have friends, families? Take time: scheduling five days a week is what we’re used to, but it doesn’t work that way with farming. You have to go with the schedule of nature and the weather. And the conception of money is completely different. Last year in this beeyard, there was nothing in those honey supers—no income at all because the weather was so bad. This year may be different—but you can’t say how much money you’re going to be making. I can’t say, ‘I make a salary and it’s this much.’

  “Where a lot of farmers fail is in trying to make farming fit into the time and economic parameters of the rest of society,” he said. “I love the kids at the Middlebury college garden, but I don’t know how many can make that transition.” There’s a better chance with people who already have a trade—like Pat Whitley, the homebuilder who’d been helping us in the beeyard near his house the week before. “They know sometimes you have to work when it’s time even on Sunday,” Kirk said. “You have to be skillful with your hands, and kind of an athlete—at the moment, given our society, it’s only the most determined individuals who can really succeed at it.” And even that success comes at a price—as I’ve said, I know for a fact that one sadness in Kirk’s life is that he never found a wife willing to share his work. It can be hard.

  But not today. Not in the sun, with the flash of white in every super that means honey. On a continent currently baking—a continent that feels like a giant never-ending disaster film—this is the closest thing to a sweet spot.

  * * *

  Ten days later I was in the beeyards again, with Kirk and with my fourteen-year-old niece, Ellie, who was staying with us while her mother underwent chemotherapy for breast cancer. Kirk’s a gentle soul and Ellie a brave one—he helped her into a slightly oversized bee suit and veil, and within minutes she was carrying boxes through the small cloud of bees. She’d seen a moose earlier that day near the house, so it was a good day for creatures.

  Kirk wasn’t quite as high as he’d been in late June. It hadn’t really rained across the Champlain Valley since, and the lushness was abating, replaced with a slightly dusty aspect, like a car that hasn’t been washed in weeks. It wasn’t a drought, by any means. The rest of the country was definitely in a drought, the worst since the 1930s. The USDA had just announced that a thousand counties in twenty-two states were in a state of disaster, the largest declaration in its history. A year after record rainfall had flooded the Mississippi so badly that engineers had to blow up levees to save cities, farmers were now finding twenty-eight-inch cracks in the soil. The New York Times reported that across the grain belt corn plants looked “like house plants better suited for the windowsill.” Plant tassels were shedding pollen, but without water it wasn’t fertilizing kernels. “You couldn’t choreograph worse conditions for pollination,” a University of Illinois agronomist explained.

  That alarmist left-wing rag Bloomberg Businessweek ran a story under the headline “U.S. Corn Growers Farming in Hell as Midwest Heat Spreads.” The price of corn and soybeans were setting new records daily, as a hoped-for bumper crop turned into a slow-motion disaster—farmers estimated that some fields were losing five bushels per acre per day of potential yield as the heat wore on. In hard-hit Missouri, where farmers were recalling the Dust Bowl years, one grower told the local paper, “Bumper crops are totally out of the question. Average crops are totally out of the question. Let’s just go and see what we can salvage.”

  There was nothing like that in Vermont; by any standard we were the luckiest corner of the country that summer. The epic heat wave had passed to the south, and we’d had temperate, beautiful days. But very little rain. The hives we were opening were more hit or miss than the ones we’d worked those few days before. A few were fat with honey, the glistening white combs overflowing the frames; we stuck more supers on top. As many were just holding on: to Kirk’s eye, it looked as if they’d swarmed sometime in the last month, with two-thirds of the bees abandoning the hive and heading off with a queen into the wild. “I don’t know if it’s changing conditions or what, but it seems like bees swarm now at times when they wouldn’t have dreamed of doing it before,” he said. If he visited every beeyard every few days, he probably could prevent some of the swarming, but that would use up the time he needed for breeding queens. “Anyway, part of what I’m trying to breed is a bee that doesn’t swarm too much, so it’s a fine line,” he said. “And it’s also true that what’s left of these colonies, starting over after they’ve swarmed, have a better chance of making it through the winter. They’ll be concentrating from the start on overwintering. And for my system, having bees next spring is as valuable as having honey right now.” Kirk was smiling; Ellie and I, driving off, agreed that, whatever the long-term meaning, we liked those frames dripping with honey.

  * * *

  Still, taking some short-term lumps for long-term gain was a good image to have in mind that night, when things turned a little dark at 350.org. The endless heat wave had been wearing on—Washington, D.C., had just passed its ninth straight day above 95 degrees, the longest in its history, but exactly the kind of stretch scientists say will become ever more common as the planet warms. Our American organizers had more than enough work battling fossil fuel subsidies, but we decided to take a couple of days and try to pull off a stunt. Two years earlier, in the midst of record D.C. snowstorms, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma had his staff build an igloo on Capitol Hill, with a sign that said, “Al Gore’s New House.” It was witless (the reason we get record snows is precisely because a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor—as long as it’s below 32 degrees, the flood will be a blizzard) but effective, with remarkable press coverage. We decided to return the favor, and in the brutal heat melt an ice sculpture with Inhofe’s most famous declaration—that climate change was a “hoax”—on Capitol Hill.

  Capitalism being the strange thing that it is, our D.C. crew quickly found an ice sculptor who could carve the words out of blocks of ice, and deliver them just where they were needed. And so we sent out one e-mail blast asking people to come up with his $5,000 price tag, and raise an equal amount for heat wave relief. Within an hour we had the money, and three times more to help people across the region. We wrote press releases and contacted the U.S. Capitol Police. But at eleven on Friday night I was getting ready for bed when an e-mail arrived from a fellow named Bob Kincaid, a West Virginia activist who’d worked for years to end mountaintop removal coal mining.

  Dear Bill,

  I hope this email reaches you.

  As someone who, like other Appalachian people beset by Mountaintop Removal, has stood with 350’s efforts and understands the dire necessity of them, I implore you to PLEASE stop this ice sculpture shenanigan in DC tomorrow.

  People in WV are genuinely suffering from the after-effects of a climate-change-driven storm that knocked out power to m
ost of the state last Friday. Tens of thousands of us yet remain without it in life-threatening heat.

  That 350 would mock our plight by fund-raising for, and then deliberately melting, a giant ice sculpture on Capitol Hill is the most insincere, elitist blindness to the very real trouble we suffer. Countless Appalachian people would give dearly for that ice; melting it is a direct slap in their faces.

  I know the plan is to donate half the funds raised to the Red Cross, but that doesn’t mitigate the profundity of the insult.

  Our work in Appalachia is hard enough as it is, since we must ever contend with the well-funded coal industry PR machine. Your action tomorrow stands the likelihood of making our efforts here nigh impossible.

  It is bad to be down, but we hillbillies are fighting against the ten-count. Please, I implore you, don’t let your folks go to DC and kick us back to the canvas. Please.

  With best regards,

  Bob Kincaid

  Board President

  Coal River Mountain Watch

  That’s not the message you want to get before you go to bed. I confess I didn’t completely understand the objection, so I wrote him back to say I thought it was too late to stop the plan, and that anyway it wasn’t designed to insult—just the opposite. Not everyone supports every project, of course, and so I went off to bed. But something kept me from sleeping very soundly; by four a.m. on Saturday morning I was back at the keyboard and found another message from Kincaid.

  Thanks for the courtesy of the reply. I genuinely appreciate it. I would have not written had the disdain and insult not been real.…

  These are the people who swelter in misery without electricity, without water and some without food, and have done so for over a week.

  How can you hope to have them join this humanity-saving effort after you have mocked them in tomorrow’s publicity stunt?

  Best regards,

  Bob

  I sat there staring at the screen. On the one hand, calling it off would be hard. I’d had three of my colleagues—Janina Klimas, Jason Kowalski, Phil Aroneanu—dashing around Washington in the heat for three days, scouting sites and rounding up permits. And we’d sent out an e-mail to every American who supported 350.org—you don’t want people thinking you’re shaky. On the other hand, I could tell Kincaid’s pain was real. West Virginia had been harder hit by the heat, storm, and electric outage than any other state—the state had literally been sweltering. If the criticism wasn’t entirely rational, it felt emotionally true.

  And I thought about my own emotions for a moment. Calling this thing off wouldn’t really damage the cause—indeed, it was important to keep everyone on board, and to respect especially the people living in the hardest-hit places. My reluctance came, I feared, from embarrassment. To me. I’d have to say I’d made a mistake—which isn’t a very good reason not to do something.

  One great advantage of working with younger colleagues is that they’re likely to be awake—I called Jon Warnow, one of my original collaborators, at his house in San Francisco, where he was indeed still up at two a.m.; in fact, he was hanging out with Josh Kahn Russell, a newer colleague but one deeply tied into the world of anti-coal organizing. I ran my reasoning by them, they agreed, and so I tapped out a new e-mail blast.

  Dear Friends,

  I think I screwed up.

  Yesterday 350.org sent out an e-mail, telling people that we were going to melt a big hunk of ice in the form of the word “Hoax?” in front of Capitol Hill. We asked for money for it, and also for relief efforts for victims of the heat wave. The idea was simple enough: if this epic heat wave gripping the nation has one small silver lining, it’s that it’s reminding people that global warming is very very real. And the response was strong—we raised the $5,000 it would have taken to pull off the event, and far more than that for relief efforts.

  But we also heard from old friends, especially in nearby West Virginia, who asked us not to do it. The sight of ice melting while they sweltered would be too hard to take; their region, they pointed out, is as hard hit as any in the country by the heat wave, and it would make people feel like their plight wasn’t being taken seriously. Bob Kincaid, at Coal River Mountain Watch, said: “Our work in Appalachia is hard enough as it is, since we must ever contend with the well-funded coal industry PR machine.” They’d use, he said, the sight of that melting ice to make people feel disrespected.

  That makes sense to me.

  It’s sometimes hard to balance what we should do in one place with what we should be doing around the globe. Climate denial in the U.S. has huge implications for, say, the two million people in Assam, India, currently flooded out of house and home—it’s really important to fight people who deny science and hold up needed action. But it’s not worth causing trouble to our friends in the process. And the people who fight mountaintop removal in Appalachia are some of our oldest friends; we’ve been, as it were, up and down the mountain with them. Movements only really work when they move together.

  So: no ice melting in DC this morning. We’re sending out whatever the reverse of a press release is called. The money we collected will all go for heat and drought relief, and we hope it will do some good. If you’d like your contribution back, let us know (and we’ll send a separate mailing to everyone who contributed to make sure they get that chance).

  It’s been a long, hot, tough week everywhere east of the Rockies; let’s hope the heat breaks soon.

  Thanks,

  Bill McKibben for 350.org

  P.S. The note announcing this thing yesterday came from Jamie Henn, our communications director. But the idea was mine, not his. I’m a volunteer in this effort, and there are days when it definitely feels like you get what you pay for.

  By now it was nearing dawn on the East Coast, so once we’d checked with Jason in D.C. to make sure he could actually call it off, Jon pressed the button and sent out the new e-mail blast. It’s not fun to tell a couple of hundred thousand people you’d screwed up. On the other hand, one point we’d been trying to make since we’d started 350.org is that we were different—not an environmental organization but a campaign, not a group of slick professionals but a homemade effort that relied on everyone doing what they could. This would be a pretty good test of how far that message had penetrated. (And homemade was completely apropos in this case, since I was still sitting in my boxer shorts at the kitchen table as the sun rose above the line of pines around the meadow.)

  The first good omen came from Kincaid. I’d written to him to say that our crew had managed to pull the kill switch at the last minute, and he (probably up at his kitchen table, too) replied immediately:

  Your team has proven nimble, indeed, not only within their prodigious skillsets, but in the quality of their hearts. Nimble hearts coupled to nimble minds are what it will take to prevail in this struggle.

  As Saturday wore on, our executive director May Boeve wrote to board members and donors to explain why we’d pulled the plug; one of our communications experts, Dan Kessler, handled media; and my colleague Jean Altomare compiled the responses pouring into our main e-mail dump—1,500 people wrote back, a pretty remarkable tide of feedback. Some, not surprisingly, were upset we’d pulled back; it was in many ways a golden opportunity missed.

  “The sight of ice melting would be hard to take”? Seriously Bill, you couldn’t get past that simple means to the end? The message and the media picking that melting ice up would certainly draw more attention to the issue—especially to the deniers. How in the world could you let this one slip by you, and not explain to the Virginians that there are ice caps melting too and this was meant to help stop it?

  I don’t get why viewing a symbolic hunk of melting ice would make them feel dissed. It is for them and for all of us that we do creative CD. Oh well. Onward.

  The idea was great—the screw up was pulling out. I’m really sorry to say it.

  Please don’t get weak on us and fold to silly things like this—honestly, “The sight of melting ice�
��” It really seems that something else is going on here because how could you not get people past that one. That kind of caving vs. the fossil fuel machine? I’m actually concerned over this cave-in, seems we stand less of a chance against them now.

  But Jean said about three-quarters of the responses were positive. We’d offered to return the money they’d donated; almost no one took us up on the offer, and many sent new contributions to be used toward heat relief in West Virginia. People were not necessarily convinced we’d made the right call, but they seemed to appreciate the gesture toward movement—toward the idea we needed to go forward together.

  Compassion and integrity are priceless in this broken-hearted world, and are a part of the treasure of humanity that will see us all through this hard time.

  One of my favorite activist emails ever! You guys rock!

  Couldn’t put up any of the money, but I respect y’all for reversing the intention and considering the effect of this. The reversal could have a bigger impact than the ice melting!

  It meaningfully increases my faith in an organization when its leadership truly listens to those around them and can admit with clarity and honesty what they now see as a mistake, even when it means changing a publicly announced course of action.

  I’m sweltering in Berlin along with all of Europe and I admit this looked pretty wasteful and insensitive all the way over here, tho I understood where you were coming from. Hang in there and I’m glad you could switch gears at the last minute. Ooops, another blast of heat lighting, signing off quick.

  I probably should have been able to figure out in advance that the ice stunt was a bad idea. But I was almost glad I hadn’t—by day’s end the movement felt stronger, not weaker. If anyone had been laboring under the delusion that we were an infallible team of super-organizers, they now had a clearer sense of the truth—and with it the knowledge that they were going to have to do most of the work going forward. Since I was gearing up in my mind for the big push around the new math of carbon—I had begun to hope it might turn into our most important campaign yet—that heartened me. We’d have no honey today, but we could look forward to strong colonies come spring when we’d need them.