OIL AND HONEY: The Education of an Unlikely Activist by Bill McKibben
Times Books, September, 2013
Bestselling author and environmental activist Bill McKibben recounts the personal and global story of the fight to build and preserve a sustainable planet
Bill McKibben is not a person you'd expect to find handcuffed and behind bars, but that's where he found himself in the summer of 2011 after leading the largest civil disobedience in thirty years, protesting the Keystone XL pipeline in front of the White House.
With the Arctic melting, the Midwest in drought, and Irene scouring the Atlantic, McKibben recognized that action was needed if solutions were to be found. Some of those would come at the local level, where McKibben joins forces with a Vermont beekeeper raising his hives as part of the growing trend toward local food. Other solutions would come from a much larger fight against the fossil-fuel industry as a whole.
Oil and Honey is McKibben's account of these two necessary and mutually reinforcing sides of the global climate fight―from the center of the maelstrom and from the growing hive of small-scale local answers to climate change. With empathy and passion he makes the case for a renewed commitment on both levels of the fight to stop global warming, telling the story of raising one year's honey crop and building a social movement that's still cresting.
“In this elegant and deeply inspiring book, Bill McKibben has given us something remarkable: a front row seat in the global battle against the fossil companies that are wrecking the planet, and an intimate glimpse into the intensely local life and landscape for which McKibben himself is fighting. This is the balance--between big and small, between rage and love, between resistance and alternatives--that we all must find if we are to transform in time to prevent catastrophe. A gift.” ―Naomi Klein
