Dear Folks,
It’s Sunday morning at the beginning of mud season. Most of Foundation Farm is still covered by about a foot of snow, but there are bare patches on the southern slopes, and they are solid mud, a portent of things to come. The snow has been going off very gradually. That’s good, because with all the snow we had, we were set up for a big flood. Now enough is gone that we’re probably safe.
When I did the chores this morning my boots began to sink into the sheepyard for the first time. Soon it will be a morass. We “harvest” the manure the sheep drop there all winter by planting corn and pumpkins in it every summer. It works well, but it makes for 3 weeks of muck right about now.
The sheep are walking blimps. They are due to lamb next week, and I think I see at least two sets of well-formed twins swelling out under all the wool. The ewes all seem healthy and active, none of the dragginess that might be a sign of milk-sickness or toxemia. Last year’s lambing was bad; I think it will be better this year. I’m beginning to get excited — lambing is the most interesting, gratifying, scary, wonderful thing that happens on the farm.
As the snow goes off, it is giving up its treasures, the tennis balls and sticks (and less mentionable objects) the dogs left there. The dogs welcome each emergent with joy and mad games; they snarfle down in a melting drift and come up with some unspeakably smelly old bone and prance around in triumph. All the natural smells of the earth are coming back. It takes a long time to walk the half-mile to the post office, because the dogs have to check out every glorious new waft of groundhog or hint of raccoon. I hear new birds on that walk every day. The red-winged blackbirds have just arrived. According to my garden calendar, the robins are due next week.
Suzanne and I spent all day yesterday starting seedlings — peppers, petunias, pansies, early broccoli and cabbage, onions, herbs. Lots of them are late — they didn’t get done while I was in Vienna. But they’ll catch up, with the warmth and light that are coming in the south windows now. Since, typically, we have already filled up every south-facing windowsill in the house, and we haven’t even started the tomatoes yet, John is talking about building a lean-to greenhouse against the garage door. We surely need it.
I’ve been home nearly a week now, but I haven’t fully re-entered my life here. I’m resisting all the complications and duties I’ve created for myself. We are hiring the first director for our new land trust, so I have fifty applicants to sift through there, not to mention raising enough money to pay whomever we hire. I have 250 applications to read for a new professorship in environmental studies at Dartmouth. I have a month of mail to answer, speeches to give, columns to write, newspapers to contact, and a mounting number of spring farm chores to do. I have two long papers woefully overdue, and two books. How do I get myself into these messes? Ugh!
I know in another week I’ll be completely absorbed and handling everything without complaint, but now it seems too hectic, after the nice simple life I led in Vienna. I was working at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), which occupies a beautiful Hapsburg palace (called, familiarly, the Schloss, which is the German word for palace) on the edge of a royal park about 20 miles outside the city. I stayed in a small guesthouse IIASA maintains a block away from the Schloss.
I could have gone into Vienna on the bus and had a high old time, I could have gone to the opera every night, but to my own surprise, I didn’t. I only went into the city once. That was to meet Gerhart Bruckmann, an old friend who has just been elected to the Austrian Parliament. Parliament was in session, so I sat in the hall outside the main chamber and Gerhart and the members of the Green Party told me the story of Zwentendorf — which you’ll find in a column in this mailing. Every time a vote came up they all hustled in and voted; then they came back out and we talked some more. It was fun. But it was the only time I saw Vienna.
Every morning I got up about six, so I could get to the park just at dawn, which is the only time you can see the deer. I would walk or run 3-4 miles on the paths in the park — I know all the paths by heart and I know where the deer hang out. It was still surprisingly wintry for Vienna. Normally people would be planting peas in March, but snow was still coming down, and it looked more like New Hampshire than Middle Europe. But the deer, swans, pheasants, ducks, squirrels, and rabbits in the park all seemed to be surviving, and I took pleasure in watching them every morning.
Then I’d come back for an Austrian breakfast of superblack coffee and fresh rolls, which I’d supplement with yogurt, and then I’d walk the block to the Schloss. I had a neat white office in the wing that used to be the Emperor’s kitchen; for the last ten years it has housed IIASA’s Food and Agriculture Program (FAP). I have had a peripheral association with that group from its beginning, more because I admire its work than because I contribute to it. At its height FAP had more than 20 people; now, near its completion, it’s down to 3 — Ferenc Rabar, a Hungarian; Vladimir Iakamets, a Russian; and Gunther Fischer, an Austrian. These are the people I worked with for the month.
They are finishing 4 books, all arising from FAP’s research. One is an analysis of world grain trade, two is a mathematical book about the innovative computer program behind the analysis, three is a users’ manual for that computer program. Those books are all in final proofreading stage and I had nothing to do with them. I was there for book four: what all this research says about how to end hunger. That book is barely begun, and I was there to push it along.
So I spent my days meeting with Ferenc, Vladimir, and Gunther, outlining the book, and beginning to write it. At lunchtime I would go to the IIASA restaurant — in the same building as the guesthouse where I stayed. I tried to have lunch at least once with all the interesting people at IIASA, and that led to many wild and wonderful conversations. People from 17 nations work there; most important to me are the people from the Soviet Union and the East European countries. I wish somehow I could capture for you those conversations. If I could capture them for the world, I think war would certainly end. The warmth, the honesty, the excitement, the humanity of those people.
For the Russians, especially, these are thrilling days. Several of them are about to finish their time at IIASA and go home, which used to be a sad occasion. But no longer. Now they say, “this is an exciting time in my country. I’m happy to go back.”
They would do something I have never seen before in 10 years of visits there — they would bring Pravda to lunch and argue over it. Pravda these days is full of critical, biting, truthful articles. Vladimir would read them to me at lunch, nearly breathless with wonder.
One article, by the popular writer Konstantin Rasputin, talked about the Soviet plan to divert five major northern-flowing rivers southward to irrigate the steppes. The plan has just been killed — some of my Soviet friends spent years trying to prove what an environmental disaster it would be. Rasputin’s article asked how such a crazy scheme got hatched in the first place. Because of mindless bureaucracy, he said. Because a bunch of high-powered engineers wanted more work, wanted to be more important. Because of the arrogance of the leadership who thought they could bend nature to their every whim. It sounded like an American environmentalist attacking the Army Corps of Engineers. In Pravda!
Vladimir says you have to get up very early in Moscow to get a copy of Pravda any more. It used to pile up unsold on the streets, but now that it’s so interesting, everyone grabs it. He gets it in Vienna because he lives in the Soviet compound, where it is flown in every day.
I had dinner in that Soviet compound one night with another friend, Leonardas, a Lithuanian, and his wife Irena. That was an experience to counterbalance the experience of the new, free Pravda. Always, with the Soviets, you have to be balancing opposites in your mind. They are much more free now in some ways. In other ways they are just as rigid as ever.
Several hundred Soviet families live in Vienna, working at IIASA, the U.N., the embassy, and various other international organizations in that international city. They used to find apartments in the 18th District, where they started a Russian school for their children. But recently their government completed a massive housing compound for them, where they are now all required to live. It’s near the Danube in an out-of-the-way spot and surrounded by heavy metal fences with automatic gates that only open if you have a pass card. Inside is everything everyone needs — a parking garage, a school, a clinic, a library, several stores with Russian groceries.
The Russians seem quite cheerful about living there, and you can see the conveniences. Many of the wives speak no German or English; here they can find companionship, trade baby-sitting, do their shopping. The apartments are nice, built to Viennese standards not Moscow’s, so most of the families are living better than they ever have in their lives. The school is excellent. But there is the heavy fence and the heavy, nontrusting paternalism that I always experience when I am in the East Block but have never before felt in Vienna. Never before in that city have I been in a colleague’s home and been sure it was bugged. Never before was I certain that my presence, while not forbidden, was somehow duly noted and recorded. The feeling upon entering that fence was the same as the one of entering the Soviet Union itself — the feeling of being reduced to a tiny, suspected cipher constantly under the inspection of an enormous, paranoid, and arbitrary Power — the feeling of being a small flea on a large bear who may at any moment start scratching hard to rid itself of me.
I may have been making up all the ominousness. Leonardas and Irena were certainly comfortable and gracious, and they didn’t talk as if they were worried about bugging. It could very well be that the reason for this enormous installation is purely economic. The Western-currency salaries of all the Russians who work in Vienna are paid not to them but to their embassy. The embassy then deals out to them monthly living expenses, which are far lower than their salaries, and keeps the rest as foreign exchange earnings for the State. Some of the dole the Russians receive from the embassy is not even in cash, but in special chits that can only be cashed in within the compound — that’s where they have to fill up with gas, for instance, and where they have to buy nearly all their groceries. I suspect the State makes back a percentage of those purchases too.
I find the whole thing an outrageous infringement on my friends’ liberties. But they have much more liberty there than they would ever have at home.
Another set of irreconcilable USSR opposites that I always have to contend with at IIASA is the simultaneous excellence and irrelevance of Soviet scientists. I had some wonderful discussions with Russians while I was there. Vladimir and I share an excitement about organic agriculture — I have never before met a Russian who knows anything about that subject! He and I designed a new project, a project we will certainly carry out, monitoring and comparing some Russian farms and some American ones (and, when some of our other colleagues heard about it, they insisted that we add some Hungarian and West German farms too). He was open-minded, practical, enthusiastic, efficient. It was a pleasure to work with him. I have met many other Russians at IIASA who are that good — and I go out of my way to do joint projects with them.
But some others, including some of the most respected Academicians, are so far out you wonder how the Soviets ever manage to accomplish any technical goal at all. Some are unable to communicate in anything other than mathematical equations (pure mathematics is the highest-prestige area of study in the USSR), but when you look at the equations you see they are a lot of hifalutin nonsense.
There is a Soviet habit that drives me crazy. A discussion starts off well. But then the Soviet moves to the blackboard and you know it’s all over. “Let y=f(x,z)” he says, writing furiously, “and max(y)”. He hasn’t defined the central function and he never will. He can’t tell you why or how it should be maximized. He slaps down an “a” or a “b” for a number he will never be able to measure. It all means nothing. He writes a flurry of equations and leans back, immensely satisfied. Anyone who can’t follow equations is snowed. The conversation has gone off into some abstract never-never-land.
One very senior Soviet mathematician told me once about an equation he had worked out, a complicated one, which duplicates the workings of the human mind. “Just tell me a few basic numbers about any person,” he said, “just a few parameters, and then I can tell you just what that person is thinking. Unless he’s a Jew,” he added, revealing something else that drives me crazy. The Russians are the most blindly bigoted people I have ever run into. “The Jewish mind runs according to a completely different equation.”
They’re fakers. A lot of them are. Hiding behind a thicket of impenetrable symbols. But there are enough good ones scattered in there, like Vladimir, to keep you coming back for more.
Well, after lunch with one of these characters, I would go back to the Schloss. I usually worked happily and quietly until about 7 in the evening. Then I walked back to the guesthouse, made myself a sandwich, and watched the news on Austrian TV. Sometimes I watched TV for an hour or two — it was good for my vestigial German, and also interesting. Lots of great sports coverage of all the skiing championships of Europe. Often interesting documentaries or astoundingly deep discussion programs, much more substantial than anything that shows up on our TV. Sometimes translations of Dynasty or Miami Vice, which I couldn’t follow. German takes longer to say than English, so when it’s dubbed into English, it goes very fast.
Well, so it went for a month. The hunger book has two chapters done, and I hope it will now go along without me.
On the way home I stopped at Joan Davis’s house near Zurich for an interim meeting of the steering committee of the Balaton Group. There are six people on the steering committee, but twelve people showed up (steering committee meetings are open to anyone) and we spent a wonderful weekend in what Joan calls The Spirit of Balaton.
I’m always at such a loss to describe the Balaton Group and its meetings. I guess I should just be purely factual. In addition to Dennis and me and Joan, the people at the meeting came from Norway, Denmark, West Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, India. Each one is deeply involved in environmental and resource matters, most are senior scientists in universities or government. Most of us have known each other a long time and are close friends; the ones we haven’t known very long are close friends too. There’s a lot of hugging and joking, and an incredibly rapid-fire exchange of interesting information. Conversations are about spills into the Rhine, German agriculture, American politics, tropical forests, energy conservation in Denmark, trips to the Galapagos, with occasional excursions into spiritual or philosophical matters that translate amazingly well across national boundaries.
This was a working meeting in every sense of the word. Since it was at Joan’s house (most people slept on the floor) we had to cook meals and do dishes together, which went very smoothly. We sat around her long table and made up an agenda of things we had to decide together and went to work — how to structure the next annual meeting, how we’re doing on funding, whether to participate in the WGBH television series on the state of the planet, who would like to send interns where, how we can prepare a no-nuke electricity scenario for Europe, how we can design a project on sustainable agriculture. It was very productive; everyone is so good, so full of ideas, so plugged into the same values, that the work just flowed along, in spite of several people being in various stages of jet lag.
It’s a strange organization, because its purpose is not to be an organization. Its purpose is to strengthen good people all over the planet who are working on the sustainable use of the planet’s resources. Our ways of strengthening are sometimes to direct money or computers or other resources to people, but mostly it’s to direct ideas and methods and moral support. That’s what we really get out of our meetings. Though I could say we went away with a plan for the annual meeting, etc., what we really went away with was a little more strength and a few new ideas for each of us to go home with and be more effective with.
Enfolding us all was the special magic of Joan’s place, a centuries-old farmhouse in a picturesque Swiss village on the bank of the Rhine (upstream from the spills at Basel). Somehow Joan keeps the place filled with lovely antiques, fresh flowers, good wines, and a loving spirit. It’s a regular informal meeting place for us now — members of the Balaton Group continuously show up there on their way through to someplace else. Dennis and I must each stop five or six times a year. Joan calls it “A Hotel of the Balaton Chain”. Now that I think about it, other hotels in the same chain seem to be emerging — IIASA, Karl Marx University in Budapest, and Foundation Farm right here being three other examples of places where many members of the Balaton Group show up for work and discussion, sooner or later.
Well, it was a nice, quiet and productive month and now I’m home where I’m probably even more productive, but it doesn’t feel that way, because I spread my energies over so many more topics. It’s the bed I made for myself, and in a few more days I will once again lie in it happily. It’s already nice to have housemates to talk to, cats and dogs to pet, and farm food to eat. And lambs on the way. And after the lambs, the daffodils. I came home just in time.
Love, Dana
