Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist
Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist
Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist
Audiobook9 hours

Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist

Written by Bill McKibben

Narrated by Kevin T. Collins

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

About this audiobook

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.

Includes a bonus interview with the author

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 17, 2013
ISBN9781427233479
Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist
Author

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is the author of more than a dozen books, including the best sellers Falter, Deep Economy, and The End of Nature, which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and the winner of the Gandhi Prize, the Thomas Merton Prize, and the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called “the alternate Nobel.” He lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern. He founded the global grassroots climate campaign 350.org; his new project, organizing people over sixty for progressive change, is called Third Act.

More audiobooks from Bill Mc Kibben

Related to Oil and Honey

Related audiobooks

Environmental Science For You

View More

Related articles

Related categories

Reviews for Oil and Honey

Rating: 3.9553570642857143 out of 5 stars
4/5

56 ratings17 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    While to some extent I appreciate McKibben's work, and he can write fairly well, this book makes clear he isn't an environmentalist at all. Rather, he is a sort of humanist reformer working to reconcile human domination of the earth with the reality of global warming.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I first met Bill at Slow Money in 2010 at Shelburne Farms at the Second Slow Money National Gathering. His reputation preceded him. My cousin was a UVM student, and had recently participated in some of the Step It Up actions prefacing the creation of 350.org. Over the next year, I bumped into Bill two more times—once at Warren Wilson, and once at the San Francisco Green Festival.McKibben is a voracious reader. Pretty much every book I pick up has a thoughtful review plastered across it of his penning. He's a phenomenally versed intellectual, who is aware of what's going on in such areas as the local agriculture and local economies movement, but has chosen to pursue a single-minded objective via his 350.org platform.The book reads as a personal reflection on Bill's shift from author to activist. He's sacrificed a lot with his grueling compassion. Half of the book is spent on the road, delivering mean stump speeches. The other half is about his relationship with a beekeeper in Vermont, and his love of a simpler, more grounded lifestyle. Of course, he has his hallmark catalogs of recent climate disasters. Increasingly, they become a way to mark the passage of time—2011, oh yeah, that was the year of Irene.I will not a bit of incongruity I find in the beekeeping practices described. Although the beekeeper is fully chemical-free in his treatment of his bees, he still uses sugar water to feed his bees sometimes. I find practices like these to represent a breakdown in the integrity of such enterprises. Is it local food if it's supplemented by cane sugar grown in the tropics? Also, how do the bees feel about their beloved nectar being replaced by a commodity?Although I've read many an article by Bill over the years, and have some of his books up on my shelves [I'm especially looking forward to "Deep Economy"], this is the first time I've read one of his books. I was pleasantly surprised by the humanity within. Sometimes I feel as though Bill has been consumed by his work to fight climate change, coming to a nadir in his piece in the New Republic, "We Need to Literally Declare War on Climate Change."If you too find yourself hesitant to step into a new role in our times of strife—nationalism, racism, and climate change, to name a few—you may find this book useful and reassuring. Changing how we engage with the world is never easy, but such a shift can be quite fulfilling.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I don't necessarily disagree with the author but (at least for me) McKibben failed in his goal to convince me to act. Whatever environmental issues we have, they are essentially beyond our control to change. Unless the author wants to eliminate a few billion people and abolish most modern technology, humans are going to continue changing the environment until we kill ourselves off; and then the Earth will slowly shift back to a pre-Industrial Revolution climate.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    If you like stories about bees and protests, then you will enjoy it. Certainly valuable for the discussion of global warming but I wasn't entirely enamored with the subject matter overall.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I received this book through the Library Thing Early Reviewers program in exchange for a promised review. I'm not entirely sure why it took me a long time to finish it, as it is engaging and well written. McKibben alternates between his transformation from a mild-mannered academic to an world-travelling environmental activist and thoughtful visits with his beekeeper friend in Vermont. His goal is transparent- Global Climate change will force a break from fossil fuel use- and sooner will be better for all of us. He has advantages most of us don't share- credibility, adequate "free" time to trot the globe promoting his cause and getting arrested in front of the White House, and a publishing record that lets him write about it all with the expectation of publication. It is well worth reading. His ideas seem sound- (I'm an old hippie who remembers the 1960's) and the issues are clearly important. The topic is so current that even this recent memoir is a bit dated now- Politics and Economics move so fast that this is a bit like tales of the good old days, even a couple of years ago. Read it- I hope it inspires you to take action.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm an unabashed Bill McKibben fan, a huge admirer of his 350.org movement and the path he has followed. As such, I enjoyed this book b/c he's talking about his personal journey, the person this movement has forced him to be vs. the person is really is. He juxtaposes a storyline of a bee keeper friend and draws some parallels and hope but for the most part it is a story of an activist. Since I traveled to Washington D.C. to be part of a 350.org action, I'm anything but a casual reader of his story. Can only hope more passionate concerned citizens are led to action as he has been. KH
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm an unabashed Bill McKibben fan, a huge admirer of his 350.org movement and the path he has followed. As such, I enjoyed this book b/c he's talking about his personal journey, the person this movement has forced him to be vs. the person is really is. He juxtaposes a storyline of a bee keeper friend and draws some parallels and hope but for the most part it is a story of an activist. Since I traveled to Washington D.C. to be part of a 350.org action, I'm anything but a casual reader of his story. Can only hope more passionate concerned citizens are led to action as he has been. KH
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Environmental activist Bill McKibben tells the story of how a Vermont beekeeper inspired him to become involved in anti-climate change activism on a large scale, leading rallies and getting arrested during protests against the Keystone XL Oil Pipeline. He realized that climate change could not be stopped without immediate change, and that isn't going to happen while powerful corporations are profiting from fossil fuels. He decided to promote divestment from fossil fuel companies, a method modeled on the anti-apartheid divestment from South Africa in the '80s and '90s. I really enjoyed his ideas on activism and even joined the club at my college working for fossil fuel divestment. I was less interested in the more personal side of the book, but it was by no means bad, and someone else might find it far more interesting than the ideas on activism.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Perfect first book of the year!  McKibben, the internationally known environmentalist and winner of the 2013 Gandhi prize has brought two stories together to give us both hope AND a plan for saving the environment. With the story of a Vermont beekeeper McKibben gives us hope.  While the rest of the U.S. mourns the deaths and possible end of bees, McKibben's neighbor refuses to give up.  He also refuses to use chemicals to kill the mites that are destroying bee colonies nationally and worldwide.  There is certainly an initial cost as he also loses bees, but the ones who survive have developed  immunity to these threats and come back stronger than ever.  The neighbor uses these colonies to continue developing a stronger group bees and guess what?  Not only does he save the bees, but he also makes money!  The initial investment (by loss) is returned many times and income increases both from increased honey and from selling queen bees.  This neighbor is the person/place where McKibben continually returns to remain grounded after being pummeled by politicians and others in the service of big oil.McKibben is a writer, a prolific one, and that is the work he enjoys most.  However, he finds himself pulled into activism as he realizes the importance and immediacy of working to save the environment.  As he chips away at different smaller pieces of this work, he comes to realize that the only way to win this is with immediate action as time is running out.  He decides to use the model of divestment from the oil companies themselves as the only way to find success - striking at the core.  He uses this model that was developed by others to help end apartheid in South Africa.This is a quick, easy and enjoyable read.  What we end up with is a solid working model for resisting climate change, along with a model for living that is more fulfilling as well as financially satisfying.  Five stars.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The more I read non-fiction books, the more I realize that good ones are structured in a way that their raison d'etre happens at around the halfway point. Such is the case with Bill McKibben's environmental memoir, when just beyond page 100 we discover the relationship between the two halves of the book—the Keystone pipeline (oil) and a beekeeping farm (honey). Without giving much away, the revelation happens appropriately in a chapter titled "Simple," when McKibben looks at, among other things, the way both bees and corporations work effectively toward their goals (honey and money). Before this the two halves were tied only by timing, since McKibben was protesting the pipeline around the time he used his book advance money to help a friend buy a farm for the latter's beekeeping and residence.But really what ties the oil and honey together are McKibben's experiences, from spending nights in jail as part of the 305.org rallies, recounting his near-death hornet bites that made beekeeping a scary experience, and his lecture circuit where he drummed up support for his anti-Keystone stance. The book is about McKibben's venture into advocacy from scholarship, from writing to action. This means the book depends more on storytelling than his previous books, and in this regard I didn't like it as much as titles like The End of Nature (one of my favorite environmental books by any author), but it's still an intelligent and enjoyable ride about topics everybody should be paying attention to.(Review is part of LT Early Reviewers program.)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    McKibbens has written a thoughtful and insightful book. He weaves together the story of a beekeeper's ascetic existence in Vermont with his own efforts to stop the building of the Keystone XL gas pipeline. McKibbens emerges as a political leader (but not a politician), taking time out to reflect on the nature of corporations, family, political resistance, coalition-building, and modern existence.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I received Oil and Honey from the Early Reviewer program. This book recounts the author's work as an activist fighting the Keystone XL pipeline. A parallel storyline documents the work of a beekeeper in McKibben's Vermont community.I have read one other book by McKibben, Deep Economy, which really resonated with me. This book, while quite good, felt a bit disjointed. Going back and forth between discussion of a political activist movement against global fossil fuel giants and a small town beekeeper involved in the local food movement was not entirely successful. Each of these topics is important in themselves, and each gives the reader a lot of food for thought, but they did not blend seamlessly in my opinion.I also felt McKibben spent far too much time trying to convince the reader that he really never wanted to become a global environmental activist. It ended up feeling like he "doth protest too much"!Some parts of the book stood out as conveying a great deal of wisdom. A few quotes that spoke to me in particular are:"When people ask me where they should move to be safe from climate change, I always tell them anyplace with a strong community.""But in political debate, unlike academic debate, the actual facts matter not at all."This is an extremely readable book that addresses critical environmental issues of our time, specifically climate change and a sustainable planet.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I read McKibben's Eaarth and have several other of his books on my "to-read" list. This narrative follows two converging threads: McKibben's advocacy of small, organic farming as exemplified through an innovative beekeeper, and his global, political, environmental activism against the Keystone XL pipeline. The book reads easily and is much less "technical" and more personal. I appreciate that McKibben has struggled with his developing role as an environmental activist--a reluctant leader who would rather write and hike than organize people to get arrested. As he demonstrates, leaders are not necessarily those seeking to lead, but people who are "accidentally" thrust into the position because of their people skills, knowledge or some talent or ability that makes them "just right" for the job. McKibben juxtaposes his experiences as a fledgling activist with his contrasting role as a writer and advocate for small, organic farmers. He befriends a local beekeeper, Kirk, who has a passion for the simpler life--not owning or using computers or television and living in a Spartan one-room home. An unassuming man, Kirk's beehives thrived even as mite infestations wiped out nearly half of North America's honey bee population. He learned to raise queens throughout the year and keep small hives over the harsh winters. McKibben's journey's take the read back to Vermont, his home and Kirk's bees, becoming a refreshing pause to the hectic-ness that is political activism. Both inspiring and frustrating, the tone and feel of this book reflects the same from McKibben's life's work. What I found most inspiring is that there is a movement to return to a simpler, more "organic" (cliche) lifestyle in many areas of the country, yet at the same time the "powers that be" and their masters, the oil companies, pursue ever-increasing profits as they continue to carbonize the planet and make it unlivable for all.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book is an autobiography of an environmental activist. Professor McKibben would characterize his role as a reluctant but necessary leader in the 350.org movement. He moves back and forth between his time on the road and life at home in Vermont. Unsurprisingly, the less complicated rural experience is the preferred one. He uses a beekeeper friend as his model for a saner life choice in a post-industrial world. I was moved by his statement that small scale farming is the best kept secret in America for realizing a happy and satisfying life experience. That said, he is quick to point out the hard work and limited financial return that is part of that choice.I enjoyed this book a lot, would recommend it to anyone. The last few pages sums up the title, that what we need is a great deal more honey (small scale farming) and a lot less consumption of oil. I would agree.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I like reading Bill McKibben's take on environmentally provocative issues. I found this book especially interesting because it describes his journey from being a writer to becoming an activist. It seems as if he was surprised by where his writing has taken him. In this book, he deals with the importance of decreasing dependence on fossil fuels as well as the art of beekeeping. Although they both may seem worlds apart, each has a profound effect on our environment. McKibben's writing is very readable and presents difficult issues in an easy-to-understand manner. I like that McKibben has taken his struggle to protect our environment to another level. I plan to continue to read whatever he writes and do my own part to help the environment.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Bill McKibben recounts for our pleasure his involvement with the environmental movement over the past two years. It is a story with two sides, both new to the author and both surprisingly interconnected: the story of Bill McKibben the organizer and speaker for 350.org and the story of Bill McKibben the amateur beekeeper. He does a wonderful job of not only exploring the every day workings of these two lives but also their effects on the future of a warming Earth. I recommend this book to all Earth-lovers, sea-savers, bee keepers, and climate skeptics alike as it shows a very unique perspective on the climate issues facing our world today. The reader is able to take away ideas to help on personal, local, and international levels, and ultimately a message of hope for the future.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm a fan of McKibben's works, so I knew I would like this going in. This time, he centers on the local -- a bee keeper in Vermont who is fighting the good fight of localized, non-chemical, ethical production -- and the global -- his own turn to activism on climate change with 350.org. The frustrating thing is that with his activist hat on, McKibben is mostly speaking and getting arrested -- valuable things to do, but it's clear the major oil companies who are on the other side of this have sadly more effective means to get their policy done. Nonetheless, it's good to read about so many dedicated to the cause. He makes a very good point about corporations being not so much malevolent, as they are systems set up to do one thing, and do it effectively -- and to have no sense of anything else, most especially consequences. Citizens United is wrong -- they are not persons, and should not be treated as such.It was also nice to read about his fondness for NYC. His interest in small towns, community, traditional farming methods, and local production, most of which doesn't work in the context of the huge city, sometimes makes me feel guilty for loving to live here. It's nice to know he loves it too.I received an ARC of this book from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.