Being hard-nosed is what farming requires—the Amish have been America’s only consistently profitable farmers. “I’ve got pretty much the same approach in a lot of ways,” Kirk said. “There’s the focus on being productive, and there’s also the job of keeping expenditures low. It’s half and half.” He’d clearly enjoyed the visit. “They’re not cloistered or closeted minds,” he said. “They were both doing a lot of reading, a lot of thinking about things.” The difference, of course, is that they had a supportive community around them, who understood exactly what they were doing: a table full of people at every meal and farmer neighbors to call on. Kirk has mostly been alone. But with the honey flowing golden through the tubes it’s hard not to be in a good mood. Kirk looked up at me and grinned. “After I do this for a week or two, honey doesn’t taste too good anymore. The first year I did it, I didn’t get halfway through the harvest when I said to myself, ‘This honey tastes terrible. No one’s going to buy this.’ I rushed out to take it to someone else to taste. ‘What’s wrong with this?’ I asked. ‘That’s the best honey I ever had,’ she said. And she was right—a few days after the harvest was over I could taste it again, and it was delicious.”
* * *
I drove north from Kirk’s house to Burlington for a meeting with Vermont’s stalwart senator Bernie Sanders, who was hosting EPA administrator Lisa Jackson. It’s not like I’ve met many cabinet-level officers, but it’s hard for me to imagine liking any of them as much as her; an African American woman from New Jersey, she’d fought tirelessly not only against polluters, but against those within the Obama administration who were only too willing to give the fossil fuel industry what it wanted. Sometimes she’d lost—the fall before, while we were in jail, Obama had shamefully postponed a new smog regulation after utility executives had come to the Oval Office and shown him the congressional districts where they’d clobber him with ads if he approved the law. And just in the past week, while Kirk was starting the honey harvest, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit had struck down EPA rules aimed at limiting pollution by coal-fired power plants—in the minutes after the ruling, coal stocks had soared.
Jackson sat graciously and listened to many of Vermont’s leading environmental officials bring her up to date on state plans for reducing carbon emissions. Vermont’s doing nowhere near enough, but quite a bit more than most places. When it was her turn, she spoke bluntly: unless something extraordinary happened in the upcoming election, Congress was unlikely to approve sweeping legislation on climate. The judiciary, filled with Republican appointees, was more and more hostile. Action would come at the state and local level; the EPA would do its best to hold up good local examples and spread them around the country. She sounded tired—not defeated, but a little sad. By any measure the country’s environment was unraveling: that morning had come word that the drought had grown so deep that barge traffic on the Mississippi had ground to a halt. (Bloomberg Businessweek reported that a Burger King restaurant submerged in last year’s flood was now poking up above the waterline.) And yet Jackson spent most of her time in front of hostile congressional committees, battling House leaders who refused even to acknowledge climate change.
I felt—as strongly as I had all year—the desire to retreat to precisely the local work she described; hell, I’d been reluctant to leave Kirk’s barn, warm with the smell of flowing honey, to come to the meeting. But they call it global warming for a reason—if we can’t figure out a way to tackle it at the top, we haven’t got a chance. If Washington was closed off—and our experience with Keystone made me trust Jackson’s judgment—then it was all the more important to go after the real problem, the fossil fuel companies themselves. In a way, every time I went to D.C. I felt like I was visiting the cashier at the front of the store. That’s the obvious place to start when you’ve got a problem—maybe she can solve it for you. But if not, going to her for help year after year is just perverse; at a certain point you’ve got to take your problem to the manager in the backroom and demand what you need. Congress is the cashier. Exxon-Mobil, the Koch brothers, and Peabody Energy are the big boys. That’s who we were gearing up to go after now.
We weren’t, obviously, going to outspend them. We would need to find other currencies to work in—passion, spirit, creativity. We’d probably have to put our bodies on the line. But what we lacked in cash, we could make up in numbers—that’s what organizing was about. If enough bees could fill a fifty-gallon drum with honey, it was worth a try.
* * *
As we began to gear up for the road show we’d launch the night after the election, everyone had a job. Someone was booking venues and trying to persuade musicians to pitch in for a night; someone else was designing logos; there were pamphlets to print and videos to shoot. My main job was writing the script for the evening—to take the math I’d laid out in that Rolling Stone piece and try to turn it into a bit of theater, which I knew, after years of speaking, meant getting a little personal. You need to offer up a bit of yourself; night after night I’d told the story of how I’d slowly turned from writer to activist, maybe the tale of how I’d come down with dengue fever in Bangladesh and suddenly saw, viscerally, how unfair climate change really was. But the account was always in the same key: I was an accidental activist, making it up as I went along, and kind of sorry to be having to bother anyone; it had the advantage of being at least half true, and it let other people see that they, too, could be leaders. (“If that guy can do it, I sure can.”)
So that’s how I cast the first draft of the script. But I’m used to speaking extempore; it’s rare for me even to have an outline. So normally I can’t ask people what they think of a speech until it’s done, at which point they may be too polite to say. This time I e-mailed the draft to a few friends to get reactions. The most dramatic response came from one of my oldest friends, someone I’d known since my freshman year at college, and she—quietly—read me the riot act. It was time, she said, to stop pretending I wasn’t a leader and to accept that, through no fault of my own, that’s what I’d become. The past eighteen months had turned me from a gee-whiz tyro into something else, even if I wasn’t quite ready to own up to it. If I was going to ask people to do something hard (and spending a year in a difficult divestment campaign, giving up their time and money and perhaps their freedom for a few jailhouse nights, definitely counts as hard), then I’d better be ready to take charge. “You’ve always won by being passive,” she said. “Right from the start. I mean, the New Yorker called you up for a job out of the blue when you were a senior; you didn’t have to fight for it. It’s time to start taking responsibility.”
As I read her words, part of me knew she was right. I resisted for several reasons, none especially noble. For one, as I’ve said, I’m a bit of a coward. I can usually beat down my fear in the end—in most of the truly important moments of my life, I’ve actually done the right thing. (When Si Newhouse bought the New Yorker and fired the editor, William Shawn, who was only the greatest editor who’d ever lived, I quit the best job in journalism and walked away. So, okay, gut check and I passed.) But day to day I’m conflict averse; out in the tranquil forests of Vermont I can go very long stretches without rancor or bile, and I like it that way. The Internet, of course, means acid can come your way wherever you are, and that’s taken a little getting used to. I delete most of the death threats and insane assaults, saving only the ones with some particularly baroque twist:
You cocksucking, motherfucking, assfucking, Harvard Nazi scumbag moron climatebicile!
You are the ugliest assfucking moron in the whole rogues gallery. You certainly belong in the new Nuremberg, Pennsylvania Nazi Prison camp for your crimes against humanity!
Asshole! Shitstain! Harvard Grad!
I knew that the more I identified myself with the battle, the more such craziness would come my way. And it could easily grow scarier, because it would come straight from the fossil fuel industry itself. The year before, a bunch of documents released on the
Web by WikiLeaks had shown the oil industry and its front groups dealing with security firms that specialized in trying to “discredit” journalists with every manner of attack, right up to planting fake documents. Not long after that, I had dinner with a friend, an investigative reporter who’d spent years covering the industry. “There is more money here than anywhere on earth,” he said. “If you threaten it, they’ll come after you in every possible way. If a pretty girl shows up at your hotel door, thank her politely and close it in her face.”
But something else scared me more, I think. As long as I was the somewhat bumbling accidental author-activist who’d stumbled into this work, then failure was okay; if you’re not expecting to win, then any victory is a bonus. If you’re willing to declare yourself a leader, however, then the failure is on you. I didn’t care what others thought, so much, but I’d lose my own emotional cover—at some level it would become my responsibility. It wasn’t just what I was doing for a few years until normal life could resume—it would be who I was. And since our odds were slim at best (did I mention that this is the richest industry on earth?), that didn’t seem so appealing. Still, I’d told hundreds of crowds: “I don’t know if we can win. But I know we can change the odds some. And given the stakes, that’s worth throwing yourself into this fight.” Maybe I should take my own advice.
My clearheaded friend wrote again. No one will blame you if you lose, she said. “No one will see it as anything but the most valiant effort.” She quoted from the end of a recent profile of me in Outside magazine:
If, as is far more likely, he has zero impact, and we become Venus 2, and all those pixels of snowflakes and sand castles and little girls holding signs are nothing but melting chips of silicon on a dead server, then it won’t be because William Ernest McKibben didn’t give it a shot.
She finished her upbraiding like this:
If you make any mental adjustment, I wish it would be to move away from the self-description that you’re a “mild mannered Methodist Sunday school teacher.” You’re not. You’re a fighter and a hero. That’s how others see you. So really the only one you’re now fooling with the Sunday school line is yourself.
Maybe it’s time to shift from being Clark Kent to being Superman.
Superman was clearly beyond me—I mean, I’m afraid of bee stings. But it was probably time to stop being Jimmy Olsen anyway.
All this dithering got less theoretical over two days in Brooklyn, in an upstairs room overlooking a gelato factory and a Hasidic-owned auto body repair shop not far from Myrtle Avenue. Such was the headquarters of International WOW, the theater company formed a decade earlier by a young refugee from rural Pennsylvania named Josh Fox who’d come to the city, gotten himself a pair of those cool round glasses and a Yankees cap, and become an early (and actually cool) subtype of the hipster. Actually, he was not a hipster, because he cared a lot about justice and refused to escape into irony. Some kind of karma gave him his shot in 2008, when a gas company tried to lease the farm he’d grown up on along the New York–Pennsylvania line; he began to investigate this novel “fracking” technology and soon turned into its principal scourge, producing a documentary called Gasland that showed the land rape and water pillage that followed the industry wherever it went. Our paths inevitably converged, as I started to understand the climate implications of a huge new store of hydrocarbons beneath our soil and he began to figure out that the fracking wells of Appalachia were just one sign of the drive for extreme energy that was breaking the planet. Mountaintop removal, tar sands mining—and ultimately the global warming they all fed—were the enemy; fighting them one by one wouldn’t work, and so he’d come to D.C. and gotten arrested in our Keystone fight, just as 350.org had helped organize the drive to convince Governor Andrew Cuomo to ban fracking in the Empire State.
Anyway, we were allies. And so he offered to turn his talent for theater to our service, opening up his headquarters for early rehearsals. Fueled by bagels from down the street and soda from the machine at the car rental place around the corner, we got to work. I read what I’d written, standing at a podium, and a mix of environmental campaigners and theater pros offered reviews, hour after hour. Nellie McKay, a beautiful singer with an even more beautiful voice, dropped by for an hour; Omar Metwally, who’d starred in Rendition and was about to play a vampire in the next Twilight film, stayed half a day.
We worked on lights and cues; we divided the two hours of script into sections; we tried to figure out what images to project and where it made the most sense to stop for music. At every break I’d disappear through the trapdoor in the stage to Josh’s office below and tap out a new set of revisions—it’s the closest I’ll ever get to the experience of a lyricist trying to repair songs out on the road before a Broadway opening. I was coming up with scenes I liked (pouring one can of beer after another into a giant vat to depict just how far the industry was willing to overshoot the carbon-holding capacity of the atmosphere), but I was also fighting my own wimpy demons. The prologue went from me saying, “For the past few years I’ve been an activist—a reluctant and not especially skillful one” to something a little stronger:
I feel as if, for me, this may be the start of the last campaign I get to fight. Not because I’m too tired to go on. But because the planet’s getting tired; the moment’s come to make the stand. We’re reaching the limits, running out of time. But that doesn’t depress me—I’m more excited than I’ve ever been, because I think we know what we need to do. I think we’ve peeled away the layers of the onion and gotten to the heart of things.
That sounded more confident than I actually felt—but maybe that’s one definition of a leader.
We agreed to reconvene in mid-October for a grand dress rehearsal, open to the public, in the hopefully friendly surroundings of Burlington, Vermont. And I went out on the road for several weeks of speeches that drew big crowds. I could tell that the Rolling Stone article had hit a real nerve, and I was able to test-market some of the ideas for the divestment campaign at Amherst, Madison, Ann Arbor, and New Haven. But I knew that even a huge, enthusiastic crowd guaranteed little; for now, I wasn’t asking anyone to actually do anything. That would come soon enough.
* * *
When I left home in late September, I knew I wouldn’t be back under my own roof for more than a night till mid-December. So in the midst of hectic preparations, I gave myself a vacation and spent a morning with Kirk, helping feed beehives so they’d be set for winter. This was the payback for the honey he’d taken in the weeks before. He’d just finished totting up the season’s total: twenty-six fifty-gallon drums at 620 pounds per drum equals 16,120 pounds, or a little more than he’d predicted early in the harvest—at three dollars a pound, which is what he was expecting for his untreated honey, that’s a reasonable haul. He’d stirred up a few five-gallon pails of sugar syrup in the barn that morning, and now he was using a galvanized watering can to pour some into the feeding troughs of many of the hives. Not all—some had made so much honey that he deemed them safe from starvation. But the rest were going to need a little help to make it through the seven months till plants began to bloom again. “See those purple asters over there? They’ll still bloom even after the first frost. But that’s really all they’ve got left to work with,” Kirk said.
It was chilly when we began, though the sun soon warmed past the magic 50 degree mark and the bees began to fly. But the maples were turning fast, with flashes of red all around us. And overhead, above the buzz, I heard a flock of geese trumpeting by on their way south. As he started hunkering down for the winter, Kirk was experimenting with high technology—he had four solar-powered “Nite Guard” lights attached to the four corners of one box. When night came and the sun went down, their white lights would flash irregularly all night, which was supposed to be enough to ward off bears.
“Do you know those Mullah Nasruddin stories they tell in the Middle East, about the smart guy who might be a fool?” said Kirk. “One day a man saw Mullah Nasrudd
in sprinkling white powder in his garden, and asked him what it was for.
“‘Oh, that’s to keep away the tigers,’ he said.
“‘But Mullah, there are no tigers for hundreds of miles,’ the man said.
“‘Oh, it’s highly effective,’ said Nasruddin.”
As we talked, we poured sugar syrup patiently into the hives. The bees were remarkably calm. “The last generation of bees for the winter is different, though you can’t tell by looking,” said Kirk. “They don’t want to waste any energy stinging unless they absolutely have to. They’re very mellow ladies.”
The feeling of fall approaching—with hay in the barn or honey in the drum or wood in the shed—is one of the finest feelings there is. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never quite understood the rush for gain and increase. In a linear calendar, the third quarter of 2012 is very different from the third quarter of 2011, and the only acceptable description for that difference is “more.” But in the actual, cyclical, seasonal world, the fall of 2012 is much like the fall of 2011, and what you need is pretty much what you had the year before. Kirk handed me a pound jar of pure gold, the first he’d bottled from this year’s crop. “This is good honey this year,” he said. “There’s a lot of basswood in here; it’s got a herby aftertaste. So good.”
In the new world we’d inadvertently built, of course, the difference between the fall of 2012 and the fall of 2011 was that in the interim a lot more of the Arctic had melted, and the ocean had grown more acidic, and we’d come through a gruesome drought. So I went back to work, back on the road, but at least I had that sweet taste in my mouth.
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ADRENALINE AND MEDITATION
Oil and Honey Page 19