Watch for Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist to become a popular selection in college freshman common reading programs and composition courses. It’s a very easy read, written in a jaunty, sometimes amusingly quirky, first-person idiom that comes off as travel log, memoir, diary, morality play, hymn to nature, and… introduction to beekeeping. What should clinch the deal, though, is the book’s grim urgency as a passionate environmentalist manifesto. It’s both a call to arms and a tactical field manual in which author Bill McKibben exhorts us to join his crusade to save the Earth from an impending climatological catastrophe at the hands of a politically powerful, profit-sucking fossil fuel industry.
As McKibben sees it, there’s simply nothing to talk about on this score: it’s scientifically incontestable that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is for real. Planet
Get access to this article, plus the entire archive, by subscribing.