Oil and Honey; The Education of an Unlikely Activist

New York, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2013. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. [12], 255 pages. Signed by the author on the title page. Signed by the Author sticker on the front of the DJ. William Ernest "Bill" McKibben (born December 8, 1960) is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and leader of a climate campaign group. He has authored a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature (1989), about climate change. He was awarded the Gandhi Peace Award in 2013. Foreign Policy magazine named him to its inaugural list of the 100 most important global thinkers in 2009 and MSN named him one of the dozen most influential men of 2009. 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 felt 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. "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. He makes the case for a renewed commitment on both levels, telling the story of raising one year's honey crop and building a social movement that's still cresting.