University bookshelf: Oil and Honey by Bill McKibben

Monday, June 20, 2016

In July 2016, Appalachian will host the 5th Annual Energy Summit — a collective effort by the 17 institutions in the UNC system, on target to save North Carolina $2 billion in avoided energy costs by 2025. Appalachian has facilitated this system-wide effort; without the efforts of Appalachian campus leadership this remarkable initiative would not have come to fruition. Our keynote speaker, July 18, is 2013 Ghandi Peace Prize winner Bill McKibben, an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. “Oil and Honey” is his most recent publication.

Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist - Available from Macmillan Publishers
Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist

By Bill McKibben
2013

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.

Available from Macmillan Publishers

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