Oil And Honey: The Education Of An Unlikely Activist (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
Two parallel stories: McKibben helping an apiarist in Vermont set up a permanent home for his beekeeping operation and learning lots about small scale agriculture and bees in particular; and McKibben deciding that he had to move beyond writing about environmental issues — and global warning in particular — to social activism aimed at focusing public and governmental attention of the crisis our unbridled consumption of fossil fuels has created, and to take on the fossil fuel Goliath by creating a "divestment movement" that would — if it was successful — see colleges and universities and other institutional investors taking their dollars out of the dirty pockets of the oil and coal companies and putting it other places.Well written, engaging. Frightening. Depressing. And probably too little too late.We were somewhat chagrined that we had heard nothing about the Washington marches and the big rallies he was writing about. Part of that gap — a large part, probably — can be accounted for by our lack of engagement with media, but, I suspect, there probably wasn't a lot of media coverage here to miss.McKibben is the first environmental writer I've come across to acknowledge that by flying all over the world to organize rallies, attend conferences and do research, he is burning A HELL OF A LOT OF FOSSIL FUEL!!! He acknowledges the irony of that scenario, but decides that he can do more good than harm by getting out there and beating the drum. Maybe...We had to shake our heads over one story... McKibben is taking a much welcome break from travelling, tweeting, emailing, marching, going to jail and exhorting the masses to help his beekeeper friend on his farm. His friend owns a big tractor that he uses to cut hay, and Bill is VERY excited that he is going to GET TO DRIVE THE TRACTOR. Boys and their toys... Motorcycle, SUV's, jet skis, snowmobiles, tractors, quads... gotta love 'em.30. MemoryWalk: outside Spicer's Baker in Fort St. John, BC people in giant bee costumes are marching up and down 100th Avenue carrying placards and chanting: "Make Honey NOT Oil!" "Honey is golden. Oil is crude!" A tanker truck stops at the intersection of Mackenzie and !00th Ave., oil workers in tin hats and overalls roll out big hoses and spray the marchers with crude oil. "we wanted to send the message: There's nothing radical about what we're doing here." "We're just Americans interested in preserving a country""I've never confused dissent with a lack of patriotism"I read this as part of my ongoing research on KXL. this is the kind of book that I'd give to my parents to try to help them understand what's going on in the world right now. lots of clarity, but at this point mckibben is who he is. his supposed transformation from a nature writer into an "unlikely activist" is pretty underwhelming; i mean, divestment and 'civil disobedience' are pretty basic liberal tactics that hardly result in systemic change, and what makes McKibben so 'unlikely'? I get that there's a significant amount of messaging and pandering going on, but i worry that mckibben's constant and consistent attempts to appeal to populism and centrism (cf die grunen - 'not left nor right but forwrad') rather than anything that could be seen as 'radical' are doing some damage. logically, i don't even understand the tactics...US quasi-left activist fears of "corporations" and "the fossil fuel industry" fail to recognize, for example, that most (~90% I think) of the world's oil reserves are owned by states, not firms. the disjunction between the recognition of corporate bad guys versus systemic problems (ie problems with capitalism as such) continues to plague anything approaching the political in the US. It's weird because he several times refers to "my friend Naomi Klein" and so on, and she at the very least is excellent at naming capitalism as root cause and the big green NGOs as collusive, not oppositional.i'm afraid the parts on honey are pretty blah too and reek of localism, romanticism, and small business capitalism.
What do You think about Oil And Honey: The Education Of An Unlikely Activist (2013)?
I feel better in the prescence of this writing.
—mani
