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Bill McKibben: Being green won’t solve the problem

By Lindsay Abrams Can snakes really be charmed by music?

By Ryan Bradley When my birth mother found me

By Liz Fields

Bill McKibben: Being green won’t solve the problem The writer-turned-activist on leading the leaderless climate movement LINDSAY ABRAMS SUNDAY, SEP 15, 2013 6:00 PM UTC

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A self-described “average 51-year-old book author with a receding hairline” turned “unlikely and somewhat reluctant” activist, Bill McKibben these days is something of a rock star.

McKibben first stepped into the climate scene with “The End of Nature,” his first book and one of the first to bring climate change to the public’s attention. More recently, he founded 350.org, an international activist organization. In the course of 25 years, he’s gone from writing for the New Yorker to being a major player in a recent feature published there, which argues that his work “successfully made Keystone the most prominent environmental cause in America.”

His new book, “Oil and Honey,” is in large part an account of this new role. It’s bookended by two major events: a protest at the White House against the Keystone XL pipeline that he organized, and at which he proudly got arrested, and a national tour promoting his fossil fuel divestment campaign. Running counter to the campaign narrative is McKibben’s relationship with a beekeeper named Kirk, who lives, he writes, at the opposite extreme. Running a local honey business, Kirk lives off the grid, and never even goes on the Internet.

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McKibben spoke with Salon about protests, beekeeping and how the climate movement has finally grown up. The interview has been lightly edited for space and clarity.

The way you approach climate change has completely changed course since you first wrote “The End of Nature.”

Then, you were bringing attention to the issue, but you were reporting on it. Thirteen books later, “Oil and Honey” is the memoir of an activist. Can you talk a bit about that transformation?

Everyone believed, 25 years ago — at least I did — that people would see there’s a problem. That if scientists and the rest of us really explained to policy leaders what was going on in the world, then they would take care of the problem. I mean, that’s how the system is supposed to work, right? You identify a problem — the biggest problem the world’s ever faced, potentially — and people go to work and do something about it.

I know I thought that’s what would happen, at some level, and I know that that’s what all the scientists trotting up to Capitol Hill year after year thought. But at a certain point it just began to dawn on us, or many of us, that it wasn’t working. And really the reason it wasn’t working was the incredible power of the fossil fuel industry, based in wealth. They presented an almost

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insurmountable obstacle, and we certainly were never going to outspend them. So the hunt was on for the other currencies we might work in. The only ones that anyone could think of was currencies of movements: numbers, passion, spirit, creativity, occasionally spending one’s bodies. And I guess with 350, and the Keystone fight, and the divestment battle that we’re in now, that’s one of the places from which they came.

It’s funny, because I write about the environment, and I feel like a hypocrite when I drink out of a plastic water bottle. You got to the point where you had to be arrested on the White House lawn for this.

Well, I don’t know that I feel like a hypocrite anymore. I mean, I fly all the time, or I have for the past few years as we’ve organized 350. But this is a systemic problem. It’s going to be solved or not solved by a systemic solution. It’s past the point where we’re going to manage to do it one light bulb at a time. The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When I’m home, I’m a pretty green fellow. But I know that that’s not actually going to solve the problem. So a lot of people have to get on the train and go to Washington to be in protests.

You write in the book that you’re not very comfortable taking on the role of an activist. But you also say that the real radicals are a different group entirely.

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Whenever anyone challenges anything, the powers that be try to paint them as extremists, or radicals, or whatever. And I think that’s actually nonsense. I think if you look at, say, Occupy, which is held up as the most radical thing going, or whatever, well to a large degree what people in Occupy are asking for is a system that works somewhat the way we were told in civics class it did: where everybody had some say in how things came out, and just because you have a ton of money doesn’t mean you get to dominate everything.

In the case of climate, it’s very clear who the radicals are. If you’re the CEO of an oil company, making a huge fortune by altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere, then you’re doing something so radical that nobody in the ‘60s would ever have thought of it. I remember reading once that in the ‘60s, people got really scared, because Abbie Hoffman or someone pretended he was going to dump LSD in some town’s water supply, and get everybody out of their minds as a prank. What Exxon does on a daily basis is a million times that, and it’s going to last for a million years. It’s just craziness.

So I don’t buy that anyone thinks you’re a radical for standing up for this. And the people that came to get arrested at the White House? They seemed as normal to me as it was possible to be.

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How so?

Well, they were incredibly diverse. They came, I think, from all 50 states, and there were a wide range of ages. When I wrote the letter to ask people to come, I said I don’t think it should just be college kids, because in our economy, maybe an arrest record is not the best thing on your résumé when you go out for a first job. But past a certain point, what the hell are they going to do to you? We didn’t ask people how old they were, but we did ask who the president was when they were born, because we wanted a sense of what era people were from.

And the two biggest groups came from the FDR and the Truman administrations. A guy was arrested on the last day with a sign around his neck that said, “World War II Vet, Handle With Care.” Most people were in ties and dresses. It couldn’t have been a more normal group of people. Scientists, students, preachers, businesspeople, retired people, just people who understand that the climate fix we’re in is truly dire. And one of the many things it means is we’ve got to leave the carbon that’s in the ground in the ground. It’s just so crazy to go open up vast, more fields for exploitation.

I wrote an essay a few weeks back about how this is largely a leaderless movement. The thing that’s really impressed me in

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That’s just an excuse for inaction. These are not people who are serious about engaging this issue.

the last six months is just the degree to which this movement has spread out. I wrote an essay on this a few weeks back. It looks to me the way we’d like the energy system to look: millions of solar panels on millions of rooftops, not a few big power plants someplace. And the same with the movement — it is the most open-sourced, spread-out, horizontal, beautiful sprawling thing. Which is precisely what it’s going to have to be because standing up to the fossil fuel industry, which is such a protean, sprawling thing itself, will require that kind of movement.

The New York Times just published an article about 350.org’s divestment campaign, in which administrators are arguing that having stocks gives them influence. They say they can sway oil companies toward better practices from the inside— Yeah, this seems like exactly the same article that people were using when they didn’t want to divest from South Africa 25 years ago. It’s theoretically a good argument, but they’ve been theoretically doing it for 25 years, right? And it hasn’t worked at all.

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In fact, the big oil companies have gone in the opposite direction. Ten years ago, BP was talking about being “beyond petroleum.” In the last three or four years, they’ve sold off their wind and solar divisions. That’s just an excuse for inaction.

These are not people who are serious about engaging this issue.

Happily, there are lots of boards of trustees and politicians who are. And we’ll convince the rest of them over time the old-fashioned way. It will just become clear that students, faculty and alumni at colleges, and voters in various cities, and parishioners in churches and synagogues, just don’t want to be involved and invested in this mess.

Do you see that as something that’s more symbolic, or do you think it could have a real economic impact?

I think it’ll have its real economic impact, oddly, through symbolic action. We can’t bankrupt Exxon. But we can politically and morally bankrupt them. We can’t bankrupt them financially in the short run – they have lots of money. But we can reduce their political power dramatically. When the United Church of Christ, the oldest Protestant denomination in the country — it traces its roots back to the pilgrims – when they say, we don’t want to be invested in these guys, involved with these guys, that counts.

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When Nelson Mandela got out of prison, one of the first foreign trips he took was to the U.S. He did not go first to the White House, he went first to California, to say to people, thank you for your help in overcoming apartheid. We obviously liberated ourselves, but we couldn’t have done it by ourselves.

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Back to the book, one of its core ideas is the tension between localizing and globalizing: Should we all be out protesting at the White House, or should we retreat to subsistence agriculture? Do you think there’s a happy medium there?

I think it’s sort of summed up in the physics of the problem.

We have to adapt to that which we can’t prevent, which means all our communities are going to have to start thinking hard about how they secure food and shelter in a difficult world. We certainly learned that lesson in Vermont as Hurricane Irene swept through. So for me, the most hopeful part of

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this whole book is all the stuff about Kirk and his bees, and new ways of doing some of this stuff — and the power and beauty of it. At the same time, the trouble we see already was caused by raising the temperature one degree. If we raise the temperature four or five degrees Celsius, which is what the scientists tell us we will do if we keep on our current path, then it doesn’t matter how organic your farm is — it’s still not going to work. You can’t grow food if it rains every day for 30 days, or if it doesn’t rain at all for 30 days. Then you’re just stuck. So I think the mantra is: “Adapt to that which you can’t prevent, prevent that to which you can’t adapt.” Kirk was working hard on the adaptation part, and I was doing my best on the prevention side.

How are Kirk’s bees doing?

This was not a good year for honey, because it was very rainy and wet in the early part of the summer. But I just talked to him yesterday, and the queens-rearing business is going well.

It’s good that he has a business that stands on several different legs, but he was disappointed in the honey crop.

So the honeybee die-off hasn’t been affecting him?

Compared to what could be going on, exactly right. You really should see how beautiful … I’ve got to say, I was just mesmerized

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learning about bees. There’s just something about the fact that they manage to be both wild and sort of domesticated at the same time, in a way that no other creature I can think of is.

What about you? Do you plan on staying in the activist role for much longer?

I think this movement has many, many leaders, so I’ll be happy to help if people do good things. But the young people I started 350 with were 21 and 22 when we began. Now, at 28, 29, they’re the most accomplished activists I know. They don’t need much help from me — they’re really fantastic at what they do.

I think it’s important to realize that I’m not essential to it.

That’s kind of an odd thing to say since I’ve written a book about it, but for me, the most important realization I had — I almost ended the book there — was when I got up on the stage at this big climate rally in D.C. in February, which was the biggest thing of its kind ever. And the only thing I could think of to say was, “I’ve always wanted to see what the climate movement was going to look like, and now I have.” 

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“Soundscape ecologist” who has recorded with Stevie Wonder looks at different animals’ responses to sound RYAN BRADLEY WEDNESDAY, SEP 11, 2013 9:35 PM UTC

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Can snakes really be charmed by music?

No. The charm has nothing to do with the music and everything to do with the charmer waving a pungi, a reed instrument carved out of a gourd, in the snake’s face. Snakes don’t have external ears and can perceive little more than low-frequency

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rumbles. But when they see something threatening, they rise up in a defensive pose. “The movement of the snake is completely keyed in on the guy playing the toodley thing,” says Robert Drewes, chairman of the department of herpetology (the study of amphibians and reptiles) at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. “He sways, the snake sways.”

Drewes studies how animals respond to their own calls; his specialty is frogs. Frogs have very good ears, which makes sense, since airborne sound is vital to their procreation: A croaking male calls out to a female. Every call of every frog species is distinct, and Drewes can walk blindfolded into a patch of Kenya’s Arabuko-Sokoke forest and identify 15 different species by listening to their calls. Female frogs have inner ears that are attuned only to the call of their species. He likes a deep, rich pitch, and when he plays the saxophone, he prefers his alto and tenor to his soprano. Although when he travels to Africa, he brings a soprano. “I hate the damn thing, but it fits in my bag,” he says. What do the frogs think of his playing? “I can’t answer that,” he says. “The guy who really knows this stuff is Bernie Krause.”

Krause is a musician and “soundscape ecologist” who has recorded with Stevie Wonder, the Doors and George Harrison (Krause worked on Harrison’s album Electronic Sound, which

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credits Harrison’s cat for performing on one side). “Some musicians have played music to killer whales or dolphins,” he says, “and what happens is initially the critters that are being subjected to this appear to be curious and want to know what it is, where it’s coming from.” In 1985 he was part of a team that coaxed a lost humpback whale out of the Sacramento River delta with field recordings of other humpbacks feeding.

Krause says that although animals seem to respond to what we call music, how can we know what they think? “Birds bob their heads to beats, bonobos played keyboard with Peter Gabriel,” he says, “but we’re ascribing our attributes to animals.

Show me animals appearing to enjoy music that aren’t captive, that aren’t looking for something to alleviate the boredom.”

Krause says that we learned our music from the natural world, and in a few small pockets of the globe, groups of humans still sing with nature rather than to it. The Kaluli in Papua New Guinea, he says, “mix their voices in with the sounds of the forest, which is how we first learned polyphony”-singing with more than one voice. Snake charming also may have begun this way, singing and dancing with the snake. But that was thousands of years ago, before we knew snakes couldn’t even hear that toodley thing. 

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When my birth mother found me I was adopted from China at 4.

I had no interest in tracking down my past — but my past tracked me down anyway LIZ FIELDS MONDAY, SEP 16, 2013 11:30 PM UTC

The letter from my birth mother arrived six days before my 22nd birthday. A month earlier, I had packed all my worldly possessions into a sun-blistered Mazda and moved to Sydney to live with my boyfriend of four years. But we’d broken

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up three weeks later, and I found myself alone, hating the corporate law firm where I temped as a paralegal, but dreading even more the return to the filthy eight-bedroom frat house I’d wound up in after the split. One of my revolving cast of roommates casually tossed it to me: a giant white envelope postmarked from Beijing.

“What is it?” he asked, clicking on the TV before I responded.

I had no idea. As I ripped open the envelope, my mind was elsewhere — on the new beagle I’d bought from a classified ad, on the news my ex had already met someone else, and how I was possibly going to eat this Indian takeaway without any clean cutlery.

“Birth mother in China has been looking for you,” announced an ominously bolded subject line. The rest of the letter read like one of those scammy, overemotional emails that show up in my junk folder. And I might have thrown that letter away if it hadn’t also been accompanied by adoption certificates, IDs and a couple of baby pictures. I’d never seen photographic evidence of my infant self, and was convinced I’d sprung from the womb 3 feet tall and able to enumerate the many virtues of Chairman Mao — a mantra obviously drummed into me at Chinese kindergarten. But the baby pictures made it all real.

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Suddenly I had a past, and I had to face up to it.

The thing was, I didn’t feel like facing anything. It seemed to me then that life wasn’t simply handing me lemons, but a lemon tree was hanging over me and a whole branch had crashed on my head. “Fucking damn it” were the first words out of my mouth. Not the response you’d expect from someone whose birth family just found her. But truth be told, I had never really wanted to be found.

I’d always known I was adopted at 4 by a noisy but loving AngloAustralian family. I knew that my birth parents had given me up after a violent and messy divorce. Other than that, I never dwelled much on my origins. My limited adolescent enthusiasm was taken up by piano lessons, detention and the weedy nextdoor neighbor I was in love with.

“Oh come on,” people often prod, unconvinced by my nonchalance.

“You never wanted to find your real parents?”

I cringe when I hear “real parents.” To me, my adoptive parents are my real parents – the ones who pinned my awful poetry to the fridge, taught me to drive and yelled and then laughed at me for getting my first wonky-looking tattoo at 15.

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COPYRIGHT LIZ FIELDS

The only thing I had been curious about was genetics. Did I have my mother’s eyes? Will I inherit my father’s receding hairline? Did I look like someone out there? My older, natural-born sister looks alarmingly like both our parents, and I felt a pang of envy whenever someone mentioned it. But the rest of the time, I was incurious. I already had one family who loved me and drove me completely mad. Why would I want another?

As fate would have it, I was one of the rare Chinese adoptees sought and found by their birth family. Not that it would have

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I would constantly be asked why I was “different” from all the kids in my neighborhood [...]

been so hard — they could have just Googled me. Instead, my birth mother paid an illegal people search company $2,000 to track down my address and the comprehensive life history of my entire adoptive family, including every city we’d ever lived in the last 20 years. But perhaps I should start from the beginning.

• I was adopted from Chang Chun (a relatively small town of 8 million people) in the far northeastern edge of China in 1990. I was 4 and fearless. When my birth father signed my adoption papers and handed me over to my new ghostly white parents, I told them straight up they had dà bí zi (big noses). But I never cried, nor complained. Not once.

In my first memory, my parents and I arrived in Beijing after a six-hour train ride from my hometown. It was winter — minus 22 degrees — and I was wrapped from head to toe, with only my eyes visible through a small rectangle of prickly scarf. This was less than a year after the Tiananmen Square massacre,

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and I could see what I later learned were bullet holes in the concrete monuments as we strode around the square, gloved hand-in-hand, for the first time as a family. No one knew that inside the bundle of clothing there was a Chinese kid.

That was the last time for many years I was afforded such anonymity. For the rest of my childhood, I would constantly be asked why I was “different” from all the kids in my neighborhood, and forced to grin and bear years of good-natured name-calling from friends. The playground intelligentsia was particularly fond of “banana” — a moniker reflecting the fact that I appeared “yellow on the outside, white on the inside.”

I might have overcompensated to fit in. In all my high-school photos I appear amid a gaggle of white girls. I’ve never had an Asian boyfriend. I took up French rather than Mandarin classes, despite everyone’s insistence about my natural proficiency, or perhaps because of it.

Far sadder than the rejection of my cultural heritage, though, was a sudden distancing from my adoptive father in public.

In my self-conscious teens, I stopped linking arms with him and loudly inserted “Dad” into the conversation whenever we dined alone at restaurants, tortured by strangers’ dirty glances, expecting that they’d assume we were a couple.

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The older Western guy with younger Asian girlfriend was an all too familiar sight in parts of South East Asia where we lived for many years.

But in the grand scheme of things, I knew I was lucky, considering the many desperate or disturbing stories of children around the world. I talked to girls who grew up as prostitutes in Cambodian slums or a teen who was born addicted to heroin and I thought of my own upbringing, filled with the usual sibling squabbles over Lego men and door-slamming fights with parents over the length of my skirt.

So I never resented my birth parents for giving me up. I came to embrace my differences as a topic of interest at dinner parties and around water coolers, and not as a source of shame or something to hide. Besides, Aussie mores dictate that one should refrain from grizzling (complaining) where possible, lest the whinger (complainer) be called a sook (someone who complains a lot). The variety of slang indicates just how discouraged such behavior is.

But when I told people I was adopted, I learned to wait for “the look.” That embarrassed, pitying stare that I’ve spent a lifetime trying to avoid. Some offer an “Oh, I’m sorry …”

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“It’s OK,” I say, “I hear there’s a good chance of survival.”

As an adult, I steer clear of adoption meet-ups and support groups, troubled by their perpetuation of all adoptees as people who need fixing and are desperate to find their birth parents and have rejection issues. I know this is not actually the case, but I grew tired of hearing so many well-meaning friends and lovers over the years tell me that my fear of rejection was the real reason I’ve never wanted to find my birth parents. My gruff response to that is, “If I were worried about rejection, I wouldn’t have become a bloody reporter.”

Oddly enough, my journalistic curiosity never spilled over into my personal life — I merely ended up professionally burying my nose in everyone else’s past.

By my 20s, I had resigned myself to the idea there would always be a part of my background left undiscovered. I kind of liked it that way. Mystery and intrigue filled the gaping black hole in my history, which in reality was much less romantic than my childhood fantasies, where I secretly fancied myself as a princess or the daughter of famous actors or acrobats or spies.

And then the letter arrived.

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The envelope was branded with neat rows of Chinese characters and was covered with a light salt crust after being exposed to wafts of sea spray on the front porch all afternoon where it had been left by the delivery guy. I opened it while finishing Indian takeaway with the head of a broken plastic spoon. There was a telephone number at the bottom of a slightly soggy second page, and my fingers were sticky as I punched the buttons on my phone, smearing it with fish curry.

To this day, I still associate the smell of turmeric with my first call to my birth mother.

As I waited for the dial tone, all the questions I’d never asked growing up suddenly clamored in my consciousness like a dozen people talking at the same time. Where were you the last 18 years? Why now? What do you want from me? Do I have siblings?

The woman who picked up was Rose, the translator friend who had helped “find” me, or at least pay some very shady people to find me. She was there, ready to answer any question I had, but my mind had gone blank. Plowing through the awkward silence, Rose informed me that since both my birth parents had split up and remarried, I now had three younger half-sisters and a half-brother I never knew existed. So much for China’s one child policy, I thought. There was a blur of other

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information, but I don’t recall much, except that I did scan the room a few times for hidden cameras, just in case my roommates were playing a practical joke. They weren’t.

The conversation only lasted 10 or 15 minutes, and afterward, I called my adoptive parents who were watching a football game in the grandstands of the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

“Dad, did you know?”

“Know what?”

Just as I said, “My birth mother found me,” a hundred thousand people screamed in the background.

• It took me a year after the phone call to work up enough courage to visit my birth mother in Beijing. I spent most of the week nodding and pointing and getting to know my siblings who spoke some English. It was all a bit dizzying, and I was embraced into the greater family bosom with a kind of huggy eagerness that made me feel very uncomfortable at first.

The oddest part was being around strangers who looked like me. Not only do I have my mother’s eyes, but we’re the same height, weight and shoe size. She even has the same laugh. It

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was like staring at a futuristic version of myself in the mirror, except my reflection spoke back in Chinese.

The sliding doors moment became very real when I took the train back to my hometown to meet the rest of my family.

The city was an industrial grid of endless concrete blocks, with bleak soviet monuments and starless skies. As I gazed around the home I’d lived in until I was adopted — a squalid

[...] sometimes it’s good to be found, even when you wanted to stay hidden. one-room apartment that had housed four people — my heart pounded. In another life, I could have ended up here, I thought, working in one of the city’s many car factories, pollution mask strapped to both ears. For many years, my adoptive parents had struggled to support our family on a single teacher’s wage, while one or the other finished their doctorates. We were never wealthy, but at least I’d had the chance to gain a decent education.

While I was in Beijing, most people reacted kindly to my terrible Mandarin. I was told it would come back. “Once Chinese,

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always Chinese,” they said. But I didn’t feel particularly Chinese or Australian at that point. I felt more like I had my shirt hooked on a door frame between two worlds.

Perhaps that’s why I fell in love so quickly with New York when I finally moved to the city last winter – the city where everyone is from somewhere else. Here, I’m just another anonymous immigrant with an interesting “origin story.”

Since the Beijing trip, I’ve maintained a close relationship with my birth mother and an amicable one with my birth father. Navigating language and cultural differences has been a struggle, as has been allaying the concerns of my adoptive parents, who in the beginning were uncertain of my birth family’s intentions. They feel jealous at times, which is completely understandable — it’s probably the biggest challenge to overcome for any adoptive parent going through the reconnecting process.

I can only remind them that nothing will change the fact they’ll always be my real parents.

Sometimes I look at little Chinese babies with button noses on the subway or in elevators and wonder how their mothers could possibly give them up. It’s a quandary I can only attempt to understand, never having been a parent myself, but it nags me every now and then when I entertain thoughts

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of entering motherhood at some far-off point in the future.

For now, I’m simply relishing sisterhood. In a perfect world, I would have grown up with my siblings, teaching them long division and how to apply makeup and attending their dance recitals. But I’ve realized just having the opportunity to be with them now is pretty spectacular. I may not have been ready to receive the letter from China five years ago (is anyone ever really ready for that sort of thing?). But sometimes it’s good to be found, even when you wanted to stay hidden. 

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