How can Bill McKibben remain so optimistic and energized in the face of looming global catastrophe?

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: OUR FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2013 - 'Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist' and 'Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools' - Book review

How can Bill McKibben remain so optimistic and energized in the face of looming global catastrophe?

In his latest book, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist (Times Books), he lets us know.

Part of the answer is McKibben's rootedness in his Vermont home, which recharges and restores him. The other part is his relentless activism--his frenetic work building a mass movement to address the most pressing problem facing humankind.

Above all, you get a sense from his memoir of a year in the life of a climate-change activist that his direct, human connections to the land he loves, and the beekeeping neighbor he admires, as well as his friends--the amazing writers, scientists, and activists he works with--shore him up against despair.

Having a deeply personal stake in his activism means McKibben can't give up. So he keeps on doing the best he can. And for McKibben, that's a lot. He alternates stories of arrests and mass rallies to protest the Keystone pipeline, and his year traveling the United States as record temperatures, drought, floods, and the sudden, horrifying liquefaction of the polar ice cap make his case for him.

McKibben is clear-eyed about the "terrifying math" of climate change. And about the odds of doing anything to change it. It's too late to stop global warming one lightbulb or Prius at a time, he writes.

Instead, he and his friend and fellow author/activist Naomi Klein decide, it's time to go directly at the fossil fuel industry itself--the richest, most powerful force on the planet. McKibben believes citizens joining together in a mass movement can overcome all that money and power. At least, he writes, "If enough bees could fill a fifty-gallon drum with honey, it was worth a try."

McKibben describes his transformation from shy, bookish writer and "a bit of a coward" to stadium-filling climate-change rock star. He also writes...