I just read Bill McKibben's Oil and Honey, his memoir of the early days of 350.org, published in 2013. Of course I already knew who McKibben is - he is the key founder of 350.org and a long-time writer and activist on climate change - and I'd read a few short articles he's written, but this is my first long-form encounter with him, almost a decade after the event. I may be slow but I get there in the end.
Oil and Honey describes the key actions, or at least McKibben's role in them. He describes the sit-ins at the White House to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline; the 'Connect the Dots' campaign which got people around the world to place dots on places threatened by climate change; the campaign for fossil fuel divestment; and through it all the endless round of lectures, interviews and forums he spoke at to promote the cause, and the interminable hours spent on buses and planes crisscrossing North America and the planet. He and his colleagues succeeded in building a global movement and had some wins but he is all too aware that the fossil fuel lobby still has the upper hand. The fight continues.
It's an exciting story but what gives this book its depth is the way he pairs it with a second story - the story of his partnership in a beekeeping enterprise with his friend Kirk Webster. Kirk is a pioneer of chemical-free beekeeping, weathering the storms of Colony Collapse Disorder, the Varroa Mite and other recent beekeeping crises not by using pesticides and supplements but by selecting and breeding for resilience.
This grounds the story of activism in the soil of McKibben's home in rural Vermont. Here he and Kirk - mostly Kirk - are contributing in their own small and slow way to building the world as it needs to be to weather the climate crisis. Instead of mining the soil and treating the bees as machines Kirk is working slowly to restore the exhausted land they bought with McKibben's money and to breed bees that can survive. It's not lucrative, but in these passages of the book you sense a deep contentment, a slow, patient building that offsets the frenetic activism. It gives the story a wholeness that the activism alone couldn't do. Just as his time with Kirk and the bees serves as a peaceful retreat for McKibben, it restores hope to the reader in the midst of angst at how small the gains from activism seem to be compared to the scale and urgency of the problem.
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I came away from this book with a sense of the sheer stupidity, even insanity, of it all. Not of Kirk Webster and Bill McKibben - they are among the wise and sane people of the world - but of the governments and corporations who are the targets of McKibben's activism. We have known for decades that burning fossil fuels is creating climate change that threatens life on this planet. Yet companies and governments around the world keep doing it, not out of passive inertia but with purposeful, aggressive ruthlessness.
At one level the answer is obvious - money. Fossil fuels bring in billions for the companies that mine and burn them, and they deploy a small portion of these funds to ensure that governments will do their bidding and sustain the flow of gold.
Yet this answer only makes superficial sense, and this is what McKibben skillfully shows us in his stories about beekeeping. In a good year, Kirk Webster earns maybe $50,000 from the operation, in a bad year he can end up with less than $20,000. Yet he is happy and content, indeed would not choose any other life. Even McKibben, who no doubt has a more substantial but still modest income between his academic salary and book royalties, is happy to invest money and time in an enterprise from which his returns are not in money but in contentment, in the chance to spend his downtime in the meditative seasonal rhythm of honey production.
This is, more or less, how much of the world lives. We have enough. Some of us have more than we need. But very few have obscene wealth. We don't seek it or need it. We are happy to have somewhere secure to live, the love of family and friends, enough set aside to weather storms and retire comfortably.
Why, we ask, can't the Rineharts, Kochs, Adanis and Palmers of this world see this? Why do they subvert governments, bulldoze local communities and indigenous peoples, drive species to extinction and place the future of civilisation at risk in their pursuit not of enough but of obscene profits, more money than any human can possibly need? Why do they knowingly steal the future not only of everyone else's children and grandchildren but even their own?
Are they insane? Are they stupid?
***
It might just be a coincidence that straight after Oil and Honey I read Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber. Then again, perhaps there are no coincidences.
Published in 1979, The Bloody Chamber is a series of gothic tales inspired by the folktales collected by the likes of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and Andrew Lang. These stories are mostly seen as children's tales but she is decidedly writing for adults and she pulls no punches.
It's almost a perfect parable for the conundrum of these billionaires. On the surface what you see about the Marquis is his wealth and worldliness, a kind of sleazy self-focus which makes people uneasy but remains within the bounds of civility. But in the heart of his castle, which in the iconography of fairy-tales can be seen to represent his own heart, is a charnel, a murderous obsession with torture, blood and death.
Is this the hidden psychology of our climate crisis, the dark hearts of our billionaires driving us purposefully to our death?
Or Beauty and the Beast. Carter offers us two versions of this story. The first, 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon', is the story as presented in the popular accounts. Mr Lyon is a kind, generous man trapped in the body of a lion. He saves Beauty's loving but hapless father from financial ruin, and Beauty's love restores him to human form. The bestiality, in a sense, is only skin deep.
The second, 'The Tiger's Bride', is something else altogether. Not the Beast - although rather more thoroughly bestial than Mr Lyon he remains honourable and generous. But Beauty's father is a piece of work, a dissolute lord who stakes his daughter along with his wealth in a losing card game with the Tiger. The Tiger offers her a deal - if she will just let him see her naked (no touching), he will return her to her father along with the rest of his winnings. When she refuses he doesn't attempt to force her but instead woos her, finally taking her on a horse ride through his grounds and revealing his naked tiger's body. Persuaded at last, she disrobes for him and lets him gaze his fill. Satisfied, he keeps his end of the bargain and returns all the wealth, but she chooses not to return with it, and on her marriage bed is transformed into a tigress.
Who is the beast here? The tiger certainly hunts at night for his prey, but he is also a creature of wisdom and honour. Beauty's father, on the other hand, is a man who will trade his own child in a fever of gambling addiction and not mourn overmuch if he never sees her again, so long as he gets to keep his money. So with our billionaires, feverishly gambling away the lives of their children, and everyone else's, for the sake of gold and lands. What do we prefer, the beast without or the beast within? Any sane human will leave the billionaires to gamble away their own wealth while denying them any more.
Just one more, 'The Lady in the House of Love'. Here the daughter of Count Nosferatu, left orphaned years before by his staking, lives out her shadowed life in the ruined castle above the deserted village, shunning the day in a curtained room with the dimmest of lamps, feasting at night on the blood of woodland creatures and, when the occasion offers, young men who wander into the village and are enticed into the castle for her to first seduce, then consume.
One day, in the early years of the 20th century, a young British officer pedals a bicycle into the village, drinks from the ruined fountain and is duly invited to dine at the castle. Yet this time, when the countess casts her tarot she sees not the usual cards of death but love and death paired. Disturbed by this difference she fails for the first time to perform the movements of ritual seduction as she has so many times before. She drops her dark glasses on the floor, then cuts her own hand trying to pick them up, seeing her own blood for the first time.
Into this vile and murderous room, the handsome bicyclist brings the innocent remedies of the nursery; in himself, by his presence, he is an exorcism. He gently takes her hand away from her and dabs the blood with his own handkerchief, but still it spurts out. And so he puts his mouth to the wound. He will kiss it better for her, as her mother, had she lived, would have done.
All the silver tears fall from the wall with a flimsy tinkle. Her painted ancestors turn away their eyes and grind their fangs.
How can she bear the pain of becoming human?
The end of exile is the end of being.
His innocence protects him like a halo, he sees not an alluring temptress but a sad, ill young girl, refuses to take advantage and spends the night sleeping on the floor. By morning she is dead, released from her endless torment of loneliness and sick craving.
But there is something more here, because he takes with him a rose which was her final gift. Soon he is recalled to his regiment as the Great War breaks out. Arriving in the barracks he takes the withered rose from his kit and soaks it in a vase of water, upon which it comes alive. And although he could face down an alluring vampire and keep his innocence, we know he will soon lose it and perhaps also his blood in the trenches. Who, again, are the blood-sucking monsters here?
***
"Surely this is overdramatic," you will say to me. "Surely our billionaires are not ravening beasts intent on prey, or sado-masochistic noblemen and women, or vampires driven to darkness and cannibalism." Well, not literally, but their actions nonetheless result in a lot of suffering and death. Why do they do it?
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Angela Carter's stories can be seen as little pictures of this tension. The characters must find a way to defeat or, at least, tame and contain Thanatos in order to not only live but find love. The Marquis (Thanatos itself) aims solely to seduce and then kill his bride, but she is rescued by her mother (Eros) whose love drives her to the rescue, aided by the blind piano tuner who truly loves her. In the end, Thanatos is defeated - ironically - by a bullet to the head, his castle is converted to a school for blind children and the Marquess settles down to a modest life of love, founding a music school with her blind lover. Yet she continues to wear the mark of death on her forehead, and the bloody chamber is merely sealed up, not destroyed.
Similarly the young soldier's innocence protects him against the lure of the Countess, the Angel of Death, and his simple love ends her predations - but whereas the Marquis resists to the end, her death is a release as for the first time she experiences love and life as companions to death and is freed from her painful cravings and the endless sequence that she needs, but hates. Yet the force that animates her lives on and, if anything, grows stronger as the rose from her garden revives and blossoms on the fields of France.
The challenge for Beauty and her Beast is a little more tricky. Mr Lyon does battle with the two forces within himself - on the one hand, a gentle kind man, on the other, a prowling lion hunting its prey. In this case, he wins his own victory, and Beauty's love merely completes the triumph by converting him back to his own form. But the Tiger presents a more complex challenge. Beauty must first of all learn where the greatest and most dangerous bestiality lies - in her father, whose protestations of love are mere fronts for possession, rather than in the Tiger who gives her freedom to choose. Her father remains at large in the world with his wealth, which no doubt he will gamble again, but she is freed from being one of his possessions. Yet the Tiger, like Mr Lyon, is also a fierce and ruthless hunter and in joining herself to him she becomes a tigress and must, presumably, hunt at his side.
These stories, and the folk-tales from which they are drawn, provide us with pictures of the struggle we all live with. They are ways of bringing what is hidden into the light. We are not constantly aware of these drives, and we often believe we are doing something else when actually we are living out the tension between them. Sometimes we reach a healthy resolution of this tension, but at other times we resolve it in ways that are harmful to ourselves and to others.
***
This is the tension we can see in our society, and in Bill McKibben's stories of his activism and his and Kirk's bee-farming. They are both, in their own way, trying to find a way of allowing Eros and Thanatos to co-exist in a world where Thanatos is running wild. One half of the tale is about doing battle with Thanatos in our economic and political systems, trying to slay, or at least tame, the forces that want to destroy much of our world.
These forces are not the billionaires and politicians themselves. Indeed these billionaires often kid themselves that they are doing this as much for their children as themselves, giving their children a multi-billion legacy. Yet we see the folly of this in tales such as Gina Rinehart going to court to keep control of her children's money against their wishes, or two of Rupert Murdoch's children departing the company, one quietly out the back door, the other noisily in protest at the company line on climate change. Not to mention Clive Palmer, whose nephew is now a global fugitive after serving as a front for Uncle Clive's shameless plundering of Queensland Nickel. If these people are doing it for their children they have a funny way of going about it.
In fact, they are rather like the mythical King Midas who was given the gift of turning everything he touched to gold. Everything he touched did indeed turn to gold - food, clothing and even his beloved daughter - and he died in lonely starvation in a golden palace. Midas thought he had found a way to create abundance and allow Eros to triumph, but instead fell straight into the hands of Thanatos. This is the story of our 'gas-led recovery' if only we can hear it, but no-one reads this stuff any more except kids.
These people are dangerous precisely because they are blind to the influence of Thanatos in their lives. They need, ideally, to be brought to their senses but if not, they need to be deprived of the power to harm others. This is what McKibben and his co-campaigners are trying hard to do, playing the political game with as much skill and compassion as they can muster.
But this would be incomplete without the other half of the story, and they would risk turning themselves into what they oppose, descending into violence and destruction like the human protagonists of The Overstory. Hence the other part of story is crucial for its completeness. Here, Bill McKibben and Kirk Webster immerse themselves in Eros - not the uncontrolled sex drive which is actually an aspect of Thanatos, but loving regeneration of the soil, tending of bees, and the cultivation of peace and sufficiency which are needed not only to keep us within planetary boundaries but to keep us sane, to get us off the treadmill of endless acquisition.
The path to psychological and spiritual healing involves hard work. Yet if we don't do it, we can find ourselves stuck in a cycle of first order change which amounts to 'more of the same'. Because our problems aren't just individual but social and ecological, it's not enough to simply work on ourselves, we need to foster new ways of thinking in those around us. This is why change is so much harder than staying the same.
Until it isn't. Because if we push ecological limits, just as much as if we push our own physical and psychological limits, sooner or later the system we are working so hard to maintain will crumble despite our best efforts. Then the rebuilding task will be so much harder. Let's listen to the wisdom of the ages, and make the change ourselves before it is taken out of our hands.
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