Oil and Honey

by Bill McKibben

  Oh, and I especially enjoyed the reaction at the main climate-denier Web site, run by Anthony Watts and called Watts Up With That? Normally devoted to spreading every pseudoscientific talking point discounting physics and chemistry, its devotees spent much of the day taking me to task. “Moron,” “fool,” “low-life jerk.” My favorite remark, though, came late in the evening, near the bottom of a comment thread:

  They collected money specifically for the ice sculpture. How are they allowed to reappropriate those specific funds for something else? They should be returned to the donors or else it should be investigated as fraud. If they’re allowed to use designated donations for “whatever” they think is suitable, they could be using their “Hoax?” money on hookers and blow.

  And with that I made my way to bed, to dream of swarming bees and dripping combs. The learning curve is still pretty steep in this movement business; you don’t know how the story’s going to come out. If the stakes weren’t so high it would be kind of fun.

  6

  THE WISDOM OF THE HIVE

  First of all, I got to drive the tractor. In case you think that there’s any essential difference between a nine-year-old boy and his gray-haired fifty-one-year-old descendant, forget it. I mean, I got to drive the tractor.

  I’d been dropping hints ever since Kirk bought his shiny orange Kubota (one of the constants of rural life is the color scheme of your major implement makers—John Deere, green with yellow wheels; International Harvester, red; Caterpillar, yellow) but there’d always been too much bee work to do. By late July, though, the hives were mostly on their own. Each colony had a super or two on top where the bees could store excess honey—until extraction started in mid-August it was mostly up to the weather, and the worker bees patrolling the fields looking for nectar.

  This meant Kirk had some time to think about the rest of the farm—really for the first time, since the summer before had been one long construction project. Now that the house and barn were built, he could contemplate the fields. Which, as fields will do, were growing high with grass. Vermont’s soils, even in the Champlain Valley, are not especially fertile (that’s why the state’s population dropped in half when the Erie Canal provided an easy way to get to the Midwest and its deep black loam); you can raise corn or wheat or, in the best spots, row crops, but the thing you really want to grow is grass. If you don’t have animals pastured on the land, you need to cut the hay; indeed, the cycle of the agricultural season moves through first cutting, second cutting, and, in a good year, third cutting. The weather report on the radio every day forecasts the predicted rainfall for the next three days—you need that solid stretch of clear weather to let the hay dry in the field before you bale it, or else it will rot. And bale it is what almost every farmer does—if you don’t have your own cows to feed it to, you can sell it to someone who does. “I could let someone come in and mow these fifty acres, and they’d pay me a few thousand dollars for the grass,” said Kirk. “But for now I want to return those nutrients to the soil.” He was planning, in other words, to do something kind of odd in these parts: simply cut the grass and let it lie where it fell; he’d take the few thousand dollars in the form of a healthier field, which would increase his options in the years ahead.

  I live fifteen miles from Kirk—but a thousand feet above him, which in this part of the planet is a world away. I’ve spent my life in the forest; I’ve driven by mown fields my whole life, but my clock is set to sugar season, blackfly season, and the orgasmic autumn color. So it was novel fun to stand on the back of the tractor and watch Kirk mow for a few rows—to see the grasshoppers jumping by the thousands, and the occasional field mouse or vole or skunk scurrying out of the way. I got off and walked ahead a few times—the grass was over my head and I’m six foot three. Since he wasn’t trying to produce the maximum amount of winter feed, Kirk had waited weeks longer than the other farmers to mow, and the grass was so thick that at points he had to back up and go over the same patch twice. “Now you know why they needed a special plow to cut through that prairie the first time,” he said. “This stuff is strong.” (In fact, John Deere himself grew up in the town next to mine; he learned the blacksmithing trade at a shop in downtown Middlebury, and took his craft with him to Illinois, where he designed “the plow that broke the plains.”) After a couple of passes, Kirk turned the tractor over to me and headed off to his vegetable garden.

  In certain ways this was just a bigger version of what you see in a million suburban yards, where the squire on his lawn tractor cuts his weekly swath. The clutch was a little more complicated, you had to raise and lower the mower off the power take-off, and you needed to keep glancing forward and backward to make sure the hay wasn’t bunching as it fell—but it was the same basic idea. When you’re mowing a lawn, though, the whole idea is negative; you’re removing something you don’t want. When you’re in a field, you’re playing with energy—with fertility, with potential. Take it and make some money; leave it and there could be more money in the soil if you can figure out how to harness it. The sun shone hot and the afternoon wore on, and I was totally absorbed, just me and the column of tall grass disappearing as I drove by. I was sorry when the last stand fell—not an emotion I ever remembered in a life of lawn mowing. But I shut the orange beast down and ambled the few hundred yards over to the vegetable patch by the barn, where Kirk was still at work. The cherry tomatoes were ripe and the string beans were ready, so we picked as we talked.

  “Now that I’ve mowed it all once, I feel like I know the farm better,” he said. “I’m learning where the grass comes in thick—where it’s wet, where the soil is rich. And all the time I’m thinking about the shape of the farm I want to build.” As we hunched our way down the rows of peas, he described the vision that was growing in his head for these fifty acres. He planned first to run some beef cattle, once he’d figured out a steady water source and had time to build some fence. “The relationship between cow and grass and soil,” he said, “that’s what we need to figure out. The energy that grass is trapping from the sun has got to be the basis of things.” He sketched out a series of islands amid the fields, which he’d plant with perennials—nut and fruit trees, berry bushes. In between, the cows and eventually sheep and pigs would graze on the grass. As they ate it down, he’d broadcast clover on the grazed patches to diversify the field (and to please the bees). When the apples fell, he could turn the stock into the islands for a while; the manure would always be returning fertility to the soil. “I want to move from a system that works off sun and petroleum to one that works off sun and animals,” he said. “I’m glad I’ve got the tractor, and I imagine I’ll have it the rest of my life, but that’s the direction I want to go.” I could see him imagining a team of oxen coming through the field, hay rake behind them. For me, though, I was deeply happy with the tractor.

  * * *

  The morning I’d gone out to work with Kirk, Rolling Stone published the longest magazine piece I’d written in years. Called “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” it laid out the argument I described earlier—the stuff about how 565 gigatons of carbon would take us past two degrees, but the fossil fuel industry had 2,795 gigatons on hand. The editors didn’t make me pull any punches. “We have met the enemy and they is Shell,” I’d written, and they hadn’t blanched—in fact, they’d even designed a big chart titled “Enemies List,” showing all the major fossil fuel players and how close each of them was bringing us to the edge. I was glad to get it in print; I wanted to lay down a marker, something we could refer to as we campaigned in the year ahead. But I didn’t expect much of a reaction.

  For whatever reason—the crazy weather, most likely—I was wrong. Not since The End of Nature had I struck quite the same kind of nerve. Within a day five hundred thousand people had read it on the Web, and the numbers kept climbing way past two million. By the time the week was out, it had been “liked” 100,000 times on Facebook—since I’m not a Facebook user, that didn’t mean much to me, but it
clearly elevated my stock with my younger colleagues. Daniel Kessler, an ace part of our communications staff, wrote to say that ExxonMobil, the top company on the Fortune 500, had but 8,800 “likes.” Twelve times more likable than ExxonMobil!

  As a writer, I found the reaction fascinating—the piece was long and technical, and it broke most of the rules of “messaging” that communications gurus were always laying out. But I’d always found that people can deal with reality—we’d named 350.org after a scientific data point, after all. And we’re in an interesting moment journalistically, when the intersection of old media such as Rolling Stone and new media such as Facebook can combine to move something across the culture in ways neither could have done by themselves. More to the point, it made me think we had a chance as we looked ahead to the fall—we were making preliminary plans for our postelection road show, laying out the twenty-five cities, trying to line up musicians and speakers. The e-mail was piling up—people wanted to help with the divestment campaign on their campuses and in their churches. The actor Leonardo DiCaprio tweeted the piece out, and suddenly I had a skein of fourteen-year-old girls eager to pitch in. Brave new world!

  And, of course, dangerous new world. I got another e-mail in the midst of all this, from my friend Jason Box, the scientist who has spent more time than any American of his generation up on the Greenland ice. He was in Reykjavik, Iceland, fresh back from weeks on the glacier, and he sent a graph of the albedo, or reflectivity, of the ice. We know snow is white—when sunlight hits a glacier, most of it bounces back out to space, instead of being absorbed, as it is by dark blue ocean or green forest. But not all ice shines with the same brightness—even before it melts, warmer snow crystals lose their jagged edges, becoming more like spheres, which reflect far less light.

  “You can see it with your naked eye,” Jason said when I called him. “Think of the way wet sand is darker than dry.” Fresh snow bounces back 84 percent of the light that hits it; even before it melts, rounded crystals can reflect as little as 70 percent. Pure slushy snow saturated by water—which gives it a dark-gray cast, or even a bluish tint—is as little as 60 percent reflective. Add dust or soot impurities and the albedo drops below 40 percent.

  Jason’s satellite data has shown a steady deterioration in Greenland’s albedo in the past decade, from a July average of 74 percent when the century began to about 65 percent in 2011. And then came 2012—suddenly the line on the chart dropped right off the bottom, showing that at certain altitudes the albedo had fallen by four percentage points in a single season, down to 61 percent.

  “I confess my heart skipped a beat when I saw how steep the drop was,” Jason told me when I called. “I thought it meant the satellite sensor might have degraded.” Instead, weeks of “ground truthing,” or collecting data on location, showed it was the ice sheet that was degrading—that the heat accumulating in the ice sheet year after warm, sunny year was making it easier and easier to melt the surface. It’s also ominously possible that soot from wildfires in Colorado and Siberia, themselves spurred by climate change, were helping to darken the surface of the Greenland ice—so far he hadn’t been able to raise the funds to send a graduate student to do the sampling that would provide the answer.

  Looking at the numbers, Jason had written a paper predicting that within a decade the whole sheet might start to melt at once—instead it actually took just a few weeks. Two days after he’d e-mailed me from Reykjavik, NASA satellites showed that at least for a few hours the whole surface of the world’s largest island had turned liquid, as temperatures atop the ice sheet reached record levels. “Greenland Melt Baffles Scientists,” the Wall Street Journal reported. But, in fact, scientists weren’t baffled—they knew only too well what was up. “Greenland is a sleeping giant that’s waking,” Jason said. “In this climate trajectory, the ice sheet is doomed—the only question is how fast it goes.”

  That fact matters for every corner of the planet, of course. Water pouring from the Greenland ice sheet into the North Atlantic will not only raise sea levels; it will probably also modify the weather. “If the world allows a substantial fraction of the Greenland ice sheet to disintegrate, all hell breaks loose for eastern North America and Europe,” Jim Hansen told me. He’d been talking about this very possibility just a few weeks before, when we were powering through the Sea of Marmara back to Istanbul.

  But the future, as pressing as it is, sometimes gives way to sheer awe at the scale of what we’ve already done. Simply by changing the albedo of the Greenland ice sheet, Jason calculated, the island now absorbs more extra energy each summer than the U.S. consumes each year—the shape and color of the ice sheet’s crystals are trapping more heat than all the cars and factories and furnaces in the world’s biggest economy.

  I didn’t know, in other words, whether we’d waited too long for divestment movements and road shows. I didn’t know if the fields of grass in the lovely Vermont summer we were enjoying would soon look more like Iowa’s parched deserts. I just knew—buoyed by all the people who wrote to say they were up for it—that we were going to fight.

  * * *

  Kirk and I were sitting on an old slab of marble, eating lunch above the waterfall that dominates the center of Middlebury. It’s a creamy, churning cataract, maybe eighteen feet high. “For the first settlers who came through here, that must have looked like an atomic reactor would to us,” he said. “Endless unlimited power. That’s why they made a town here.” At the moment, it’s used differently—when college is in session, sometimes you’ll see kids taking their kayaks down the plunge. An art gallery and a high-end restaurant hug its edge in a postindustrial embrace.

  But here’s the good news—the old penstock that sent water through a spinning wheel is still intact, and within a year or two local officials hope the waterfall will, for the first time in a hundred years, be generating electricity again—enough to power the entire downtown. After a long era of getting big and distant, our economy, and maybe our culture, has started to make a halting turn toward the small and local. Some of it is jazzy, high-tech. Half a mile west, the college had just finished installing a “solar farm,” forty big panels on steel stalks, with motors that reorient them toward the sun throughout the day. A couple of my former students were on the team that negotiated the contract; a local company, AllEarth Renewables, did the work. There’s a path that winds through that installation, en route to the college’s farm garden, which I helped start more than a decade ago; it’s growing steadily bigger, and another of my old students, Sophie Esser, had come back to campus to manage the operation.

  I first got to know Sophie almost fifteen years ago, when I taught that college course on local food production, the one where Kirk came to lecture. We spent much of our time planning a garden for the college. It wasn’t a plan embraced by every administrator. “We wouldn’t want people thinking Middlebury was an agricultural college,” one dean told me, which I thought was kind of funny, since the college was happy with people studying every other form of culture on the planet. But we persevered—in fact, we broke ground without official approval, but with the chair of the board of trustees picking rocks from the first furrows. In the decade since, the garden had become both beautiful and beloved. Student volunteers under a green-thumbed garden steward named Jay Leshinsky had grown ever more bountiful beds of vegetables, and the garden became a steady supplier of food not only for the dining hall but also for the development office, which discovered that alumni loved the idea of food raised by students—at reunion time the garden was a favorite stop for tours.

  When Jay retired last year, Sophie returned to campus. She’d helped start the small farm (planting a children’s garden one summer, with kids from local elementary schools), had gone on to earn a master’s degree in “gastronomic culture and communication” from an Italian university, and helped run her family’s Napa vineyard. Now she was back in Vermont with her seventh-generation Vermont farmer husband, her two-year-old son, and her flowing blond hair tucked
up under a Johnny’s Selected Seeds ball cap. And she was full of plans: a barn that could do double duty as a classroom (and triple duty as a kitchen for hosting dinners of farm produce), new orchards, a meditation garden, and maybe chickens. Middlebury was getting ready to launch a food studies minor; there was talk of converting one dining hall to strictly local food. All were exciting developments—a recognition from a school renowned for its international studies program that the world was localizing at least as fast as it was globalizing. Two hundred years ago, when Middlebury began, its mission was to give some polish to people who knew how to grow their own food; it was apt that the school was now eager to take our highly polished suburban youth and give them a little grit.

  * * *

  If you want to think about the way farming has changed, and the way it hasn’t, there’s no better place than a fair. The drought had dampened the annual festivities across much of the grain belt—in Wisconsin, the pigs at the state fair were about fifteen pounds lighter than usual. “The heat is affecting their virility and appetites,” one farmer explained to a reporter. “We’ve had a hard time getting them to eat enough to get that condition on them.” The heat had sapped vegetables and flowers, too—at the Dane County Fair outside Madison, there was only one gladiola in the whole competition. The head judge said that most years when she asked children to describe their projects, “they usually say what they liked best about the plant.” This year, “the first thing they mentioned was how much they watered them.” At the Johnson County Fair in Iowa, the New York Times reported, “attendance fell, four rabbits perished in heat that passed 100 degrees, and a beloved, final fireworks display was canceled for fear of setting off a fire in the bone-dry county.”