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The tasks Bill McKibben set for himself were monumental. Start a genuinely grassroots movement at a time when many big environmental groups focus on mouse-click petitions, fundraising, and lobbying done by professionals. Marshal enough political will to put a finger in the proverbial dike: to hold back climate change, the worst crisis to face society. It has been exhausting work, and to maintain his sense of perspective, he returns again and again to a plot of land he owns in rural Vermont, where a friend has set up a beekeeping business.McKibben’s latest book, Oil and Honey, chronicles his journey into ever-riskier and more confrontational activism over the past two years. The work has changed him: A former staff writer for The New Yorker, a thoughtful scholar, and a polite New Englander, he was never inclined to break the law or start political fights. After writing The End of Nature (1989), the first book to explain the hazards of climate change to a general audience, McKibben remained mostly a purveyor of ideas—and continued writing about everything from economics to genetic engineering.

“Sometime in the course of the past decade I figured out that I needed to do more than write—if this fight was about power, then we who wanted change had to assemble some,” he writes in Oil and Honey.

In 2007 and 2008, McKibben and a group of recent graduates from Middlebury College founded the organization 350.org. The name refers to scientist James Hansen’s quantification of the maximum concentration of carbon dioxide (350 parts per million, or ppm) the atmosphere can contain while still offering “a safe operating space for humanity.” (The planet is currently at 400 ppm, and rising.) The organization sparked what is arguably the most significant grassroots environmental movement in the world: It has coordinated dozens of campaigns and inspired tens of thousands of people to stage demonstrations in nearly every country, set up giant art projects visible from space, and hold community-based work parties in neighborhoods all over the planet.

Still, McKibben felt they needed stronger and more direct tactics. “Global warming was accelerating—2010 had just set the new record for the hottest year ever recorded. It was time to pick up the pace and move from engagement to resistance,” he writes. Oil and Honey begins in the summer of 2011, when he launched a campaign against the massive oil pipeline project, Keystone XL—as part of a larger strategy to diminish the impact and political power of big oil, coal, and gas. McKibben and James Hansen argued that the pipeline would lead the world to a point of no return for climate change, by ramping up extraction of Canadian tar sands oil—a dirty, carbon-intense source of fuel.

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