Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.
Title details for Oil and Honey by Bill McKibben - Available

Oil and Honey

The Education of an Unlikely Activist

by Bill McKibben
ebook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Read a sample Read a sample
1 of 1 copy available
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 hand-cuffed in the city jail in Washington, D.C. But that's where he spent three days in the summer of 2011, after leading the largest civil disobedience in thirty years to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. A few months later the protesters would see their efforts rewarded when President Obama agreed to put the project on hold.
And yet McKibben realized that this small and temporary victory was at best a stepping-stone. With the Arctic melting, the Midwest in drought, and Hurricane Sandy scouring the Atlantic, the need for much deeper solutions was obvious. Some of those would come at the local level, and McKibben recounts a year he spends in the company of a 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 absolute centre of the maelstrom and from the growing hive of small-scale local answers to the climate crisis. With characteristic empathy and passion, he reveals the imperative to work on both levels, telling the story of raising one year's honey crop and building a social movement that's still cresting.
'McKibben is the most effective environmental activist of our age. Anyone interested in making a difference to our world can learn from him.'— Tim Flannery
'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
Bill McKibben is the author of more than a dozen books, including The End of Nature, Eaarth, and Deep Economy. He is the founder of the environmental organization 350.org and was among the first to warn of the dangers of global warming.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 17, 2013

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781922231109

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781922231109
      • File size: 1025 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Loading