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, a protest of the Keystone XL pipeline in front of the White House.

With the Arctic melting, the Midwest in drought and Superstorm Sandy scouring the Atlantic, bestselling author (Eaarth and The End of Nature) and activist 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.

In OIL AND HONEY: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, McKibben recounts the personal, global, and urgent fight for a sustainable planet and delves into 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. With empathy and passion, he reveals the imperative to work on both levels, telling the story of raising one year’s honey crop and building a social movement that’s still cresting.