Oil and Honey

August 12, 2013
Since 2007, former New Yorker writer McKibben (The End of Nature), has been at the forefront of the grassroots movement to fight global warming. With his organization, 350.org, McKibben has encouraged people all over the world to commit acts of civil disobedience in order to publicize the way climate change had affected their way of life. He has also worked to challenge the Keystone XL Pipeline project, endorsed by the Obama administration, but excoriated by environmentalists. Here, McKibben's accounts of activism are punctuated with visits to a friend's farm, and discussions of small-scale farming techniques and bee husbandry. Although he was harnessing the power of politicians, scientists, billionaires, and celebrities and speaking through the loudest megaphone of his career, McKibben kept returning to the beehives flourishing in the Vermont woods. What lessons in organization, adaptation, and endurance could be gleaned from the way bees work together and interact with their environment? Tracking the emotional and intellectual journey that took McKibben from Vermont to picket lines in Washington, D.C. to town halls, universities, and arenas, the book is a call to action and an inspiring playbook for making changeâboth locally and globallyâin the 21st century.

May 1, 2013
From the founder of the environmental organization 350.org, a chatty, warm memoir of his double life as globe-trotting activist and part-time novice beekeeper. For the past couple of years, McKibben (Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, 2010, etc.) has juggled two careers: organizing campaigns to halt the degradation of the planet and working with Kirk Webster, a beekeeper whose farm in the Champlain Valley of Vermont the author helped finance. Fighting the Keystone XL pipeline has been a top priority, and the author writes with humor of the three days he spent in jail in Washington, D.C., as the leader of a major demonstration against it. He also writes from the heart about the disastrous recent floods that struck his beloved Vermont and New York City, giving the country a look at the increasing devastation of climate change. McKibben, who asserts that the fossil fuel industry is poisoning the planet and that its donations have turned one of our political parties into climate deniers and the other into cowards, advocates that what has been a political fight must now take a new economic direction: divestment in these companies. In the latter part of the book, the author focuses on his efforts to take this message to colleges across the country, whose portfolios have large investments in the fossil fuel industry. McKibben intersperses his accounts of his intense and wide-ranging efforts as an environmental activist with his sometimes-humbling experiences as a novice beekeeper, learning from Webster the art and science of raising bees and making honey. The author's clear message: Hard work is required on both the local level and the larger scale if the fight to protect our planet is not to be lost. A personal, enjoyably rancor-free account, filled with praise for his colleagues and some pokes at opponents but void of harangues.

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April 1, 2013

Environmental activist and New York Times best-selling author McKibben spent three days in jail in summer 2011 for leading a massive protest against the Keystone XL pipeline in Washington, DC. Here he argues for a thoroughgoing approach to preserving the planet, encompassing the large (combatting the fossil-fuel industry) and the small (he profiles a beekeeper dedicated to the local food movement). A key topic, and high-profile McKibben will attract readers.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2013
As global warming accelerates, McKibben, who has been writing about climate change and fossil fuels for 25 years, has stepped up his innovative activism even though all he really wants to do is stay home in Vermont and appreciate nature's magnificent choreography. The title of his fifteenth book encapsulates the two lives he juxtaposes in this confiding and dramatic chronicle of environmental action in the Internet age, especially his founding of the nimble and impactful organization 350.org. On the oil front, McKibben illuminates the thinking behind and courage involved in protests against the Keystone XL pipeline, including his time in jail. Honey refers to his collaboration with beekeeper Kirk Webster, whose dream was to establish a chemical-free apiary and share his sustainable bee-raising techniques. McKibben eloquently contrasts the deep benefits of Webster's work with the unconscionable risks of tar-sands oil production and the toxicity of Washington politics. In this moving, wryly amusing account set against the heated presidential campaign of 2012, McKibben describes his extraordinary world travels and what it took to launch gutsy, creative, and effective protests, and shares invaluable information and such intriguing insights as what bees can teach us about reaching consensus. Galvanizing and inspiring.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)