Booted up. McKibben loves his rural Vermont home, but climate activism keeps him on the road.
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Stopping the pipeline may also be a temporary victory. TransCanada, Keystone's builder, has already said it will reapply using a different route. Still, McKibben believes he can slow the development of the oil sands in time to change climate policy in the U.S. "We can build off the momentum of stopping this," he says.
But at what political cost? Republicans cite Keystone as evidence that Obama would rather "appease left-wing environmental activists in San Francisco," in Newt Gingrich's words, than create jobs. (TransCanada claims Keystone would have created 20,000 jobs. The State Department's estimate is more like 5,000.) "I don't see where the protests go from here," says Michael Levi, senior fellow for climate and energy at the Council on Foreign Relations. "I'd worry it leads to a dead end."
McKibben is done with waiting, however. "This isn't the life I thought I was setting out to have," he says as he walks back through Frost's woods. "But the only way to win is to spend our bodies on this, and we'll do that." And he won't mind if you call him naive, so long as you're paying attention.