Dear Folks,

This is going to be such a busy month, I’d better write a bit now, or I’ll forget what has happened so far in the rush of what is going to happen in Costa Rica.

We got in a beautiful cut of hay. It dried in one long, brilliant June day and was dark green and sweet-smelling and full of clover blossoms. As we worked to get it into the barn, the weather was perfect, cool and breezy. The only trouble was that it was a light cut, not quite enough to get us through the winter, which means I have to buy hay and fertilize the field. Don got out the manure spreader and has been making trips back and forth from the barn to the hayfield, hauling horse manure and adding a sack of lime to each load — but we don’t have enough manure to cover the whole field.

The raccoon notches on Don’s gun have risen to four, but we still see the critters around the yard just about every time we shine a light out there at night. They have learned to climb up the outside of the chicken house and pry open the screens on the windows. When they can’t get chickens, they go for chicken feed. Sylvia thinks there’s been a population explosion and they’re aggressive because they’re hungry. They aren’t willing or able to stay on the 50 acres of this farm that we leave alone for them. We also have a family of bold foxes. Don sees them regularly when he leaves for work at 6 each morning. One of them grabbed a chicken right in front of John in the middle of the day.

All this is making me mad. I’m tired of supplying chicken to a raft of irresponsibly multiplying wild animals. I also realize that the problem starts in the house, with our two aged dogs, who never used to let a critter come anywhere near the barnyard, but who now snore peacefully while the chickens scream. I sense a new dog on the horizon.

Last week I made a quick trip to Tucson for a lovely conference. Gordon Brown, now 85, was the dean of engineering at MIT and the teacher of my systems teacher Jay Forrester. Gordon did not slow down in retirement; instead he set out to instill systems thinking in the public schools of Tucson. He ran into a terrific middle-school teacher named Frank Draper. Gordon taught Frank STELLA, the computer language we use, and arranged for him to get Macintosh computers for his students. The first year Frank used STELLA the kids were so interested he had to throw them out of school at the end of the day. They got through the seventh-grade science curriculum weeks before the end of the year. So he spent the remaining time thinking up more advanced exercises for them to do.

Here’s an example of one of his exercises — design an ecosystem. The kids work in groups of two or three to think up three animals, one carnivore and two herbivores. They have to specify what the animals look like, how much they eat, how many babies they have, how long they live, and what kind of biome (desert, grassland, forest) they live in. Typically the kids start out by wanting their animals to be very BIG and to have LOTS of babies and to live essentially FOREVER in a TROPICAL FOREST. Then the program puts the animals together, keeping track of their populations and their effect on the vegetation and each other, to see if they work together as a system. Big animals that reproduce a lot and live long build up populations that can’t be supported by the vegetation. So it’s back to the drawing board. As the 12-year-olds rework their ecosystem to be sustainable, they learn about carrying capacities, food chains, population pyramids, and lots of other stuff I have trouble trying to get across to college students.

The enthusiasm of Gordon and Frank spread to other teachers in Tucson. Pretty soon there was a high-school English teacher using time charts to map out Hamlet’s level of resolve through the progression of the play. (Talk to ghost: resolve goes up. Kill Laertes: guilt goes up, resolve goes down.) A chemistry teacher is simulating dynamics and equilibria in chemical reactions. Gordon keeps raising funds and providing computers and dropping into classrooms to kibbitz.

The movement has spread, and the conference I attended was the second national gathering of systems teachers and principals. There were about 150 of them, from Georgia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Michigan, Oregon, and of course Arizona. Most of the conference was workshops where they exchanged experiences.

Here are some examples of stocks and flows thought up by 11 and 12-year olds in Georgia:

These kids are also playing with a little model of CFCs and the ozone layer, learning the dynamics of how long it takes for the ozone to be depleted and to come back.

I acted as general cheerleader at the conference and gave a speech trying to express the importance for the world of what these teachers are doing. I said, and I meant, that being with them restored my faith in American schools.

It was 110 degrees in Tucson during the day, getting down to 80 at night. Life there seems to consist of scurrying through an outdoor oven from one air-conditioned space to another. I wondered why anybody would live there, though I spend the winter scurrying through an outdoor refrigerator from one heated space to another. Little did I know that Tucson was perfect preparation for the weather that was about to hit New Hampshire — except that in Tucson there’s no humidity.

Every morning this week the forecaster has said HHH — hot, hazy, humid. There’s another week ahead they say. I’ve switched my working pattern. Normally I like to get up early and write while my mind is fresh, then go out and garden. These days I get outside early to pull weeds and shovel sheep shit and commit abortion on unborn baby potato beetles. When the temperature hits 90 I come inside and sit by the fan and try to write. When the evening shade hits the garden I go out with Don and pick peas.

Don is especially fond of peas, fresh or frozen, so I planted zillions of them this year with a promise from him that he’d help me pick and shell them. We go out every night with a bushel basket, pick till dark, then come in, get cold drinks, turn on the TV set and shell and shell and shell. (I’ve watched more TV this week than I usually watch in half a year.) I freeze what we don’t eat for supper. So far we’re only through the first planting of Early Frosties. The Lincolns will be ready to pick tonight, and then come my favorites, the Green Arrows. We also pick and freeze peapods every night: Sugar Snaps and Mammoth Melting Sugars. Yum! Sounds good just to say the names!

We’re also inundated with lettuce, beets, chard, turnips, and radishes (I made radish relish last weekend). By the end of the week the zucchini, broccoli, and black raspberries will kick in. In spite of the heat, or maybe because of it, the garden is gorgeous. The house is full of bouquets — Sweet William, stock, bachelor’s buttons, tiger lilies, calendula, old-fashioned roses. The delphiniums and hollyhocks in the perennial garden are ten feet high. There are orange daylilies everywhere — they’re a weed around here.

I never can quite believe July! How can it exist in the same world as January?

July 19, 1993
On the plane from Miami to San Jose

It was hard to tear myself away from the farm. Last night was Sylvia’s birthday, so we had a feast from the farm, and the usual contingent of friends, relatives, and kids — Heather 5, Lucas 3, Shona 2, Pavel 1, and their respective parents whom readers of this newsletter have met before. I marinated chops from last year’s lambs and Heather and Don caught some trout (“I caught SIX,” says Heather, “and Daddy only caught ONE”), and Don grilled them. We had potato salad, and tossed salad with snow peas and kohlrabi, and stir-fried summer squash with onions and basil, all fresh from the garden. And cake and ice cream, of course. What wealth we have, even though we don’t have much money!

Up to the last minute I was freezing broccoli, pulling out spent pea bushes, and planting the released spaces with the next rotation of lettuce and the fall crop of Chinese cabbage. It finally got cooler, but it has been refusing to rain. I hope the heavens open this week while I’m gone. If they don’t I’m going to return to a burned-out pasture.

This morning I got up at 5, sent out this week’s column over the modem, wrote an overdue book review and sent it off, threw some clothes in a bag, and headed for the airport. Now I’m sitting next to my friend Joan from Zurich and Herbie Girardet from London. We met in Miami and we’re on our way to the first Latin American regional meeting of the Balaton Group.

The BG is an invisible college of workers for sustainability around the world. It operates not like an organization with rules and budgets and enforced or purchased obligations, but like a community or family, driven by shared purpose and human relationship. Therefore it has a problem about getting bigger. At some size any group, even one as informal as Balaton, has to start operating by rules. We’re trying to get as big as we can without crossing that line. One of our ploys is to build up regional networks, so we can have smaller meetings and work on regional issues. We’ve had one regional meeting in Asia. This is the second, organized by our Costa Rican members Carlos Quesada and Gerardo Budowski, and paid for by a grant from the C.S. Mott Foundation.

The subject of the meeting, chosen by the Costa Rican hosts, is sustainable human settlements. Many of the people they have invited are architects, planners, and civil engineers, working in communities varying from the sparsely settled Chaco ranching country of Argentina to Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City. Six members of the BG from North America and Europe are also coming, not only to contribute their expertise about cities, but to seed the meeting with the Balaton spirit. It’s kind of like sourdough starter, this spirit. We carry it around the world, incubate it in warm, fertile human hearts, and it grows. Pretty soon everybody’s hugging everybody.

July 20, 1993
La Catalina, about 30 miles from San Jose

“Welcome to Costa Rica, garden of peace and democracy,” is the greeting mounted on the luggage carts at the San Jose airport. Isn’t that a GREAT way for a country to define itself? As a GARDEN? I felt like I was coming home. And to be proud not of your ability to wage war, but of your commitment to peace — well, Costa Rica abolished its army in 1949 and put its military budget into education and health, and it has been one of the most rational places on the planet ever since. The Costa Ricans believe in democracy so fiercely that they refuse to surround their president with pomp and circumstance. “You’re just one of us, taking a short turn at leadership; don’t get all puffed up,” is their attitude. The president can serve only one four-year term, period.

I have been here three times before, but I forget how gorgeous this country is. San Jose lies in a bowl in the mountains, several thousand feet up. The climate is warm in the day, cool at night, with short, sharp rains, spectacular clouds, and constant breezes. Sweeping up from the city on all sides are green mountain slopes. We’re in a simple conference center partway up one slope. Our rooms are little bungalows scattered among mango, orange, palm, and mimosa trees. During the day we have a sweeping view of coffee fields and corn patches and tropical gardens and the city off in the distance. At night we can see how thickly settled the central valley is — it’s a sea of lights.

We’ve had a long day. We started at the University of Costa Rica, where Carlos arranged an opening presentation to appropriate ministers and ambassadors and professors and such, to promote the discussion of sustainability in his own country. Can you imagine YOUR Minister of Natural Resources, Energy, and Mines getting up and giving a literate speech referring to the ideas of Jay Forrester and Kenneth Boulding, and pulling out a well-worn copy of <em>Limits to Growth</em> to quote from?

Another speaker was Alicia Barcena, the dynamite secretary of the Earth Council, a prestigious group created by the Rio conference last year and now located in Costa Rica. She went through Agenda 21, the global mandate coming out of Rio, a 500-page document written in incomprehensible U.N.-ese. She pulled out and interpreted for us all the sections relevant to human settlements. It was an impressive performance.

Other speakers were Carlos Quesada, Herbie Girardet, Jerry Barney, and me, and a panel of some of our Latin American guests, chaired by Gerardo Budowski. I thought it was a rousing opening. The audience was large and enthusiastic, and the 25 of us going on to the conference were getting to know one another and feel good about being in each other’s company. We ate lunch, got on a bus, and came here.

This afternoon we began our meeting in Balaton tradition by going around the room, each telling a bit about our work. In Balaton tradition, I was moved to tears just to be in the presence of such a group. Here’s a sample:

Enrique Ortiz from Mexico, slender, courtly, gray-haired, and radical, an architect by training, but not satisfied to design buildings for the rich, so he went off to design them for the poor. He discovered that it wasn’t enough to work with the people; he had to do something about the policies that prevent the people from solving their problems. So, as he says, he went back to the city and started shouting. In 1976, after the U.N. conference on housing, the government asked him to make housing policy for the country. He did, creating credit systems and other useful innovations. The Mexican government being what it is, he didn’t last there. Now he is the Executive Secretary of Habitat International, working globally for the realization of the human right to decent housing.

Carlos Gonzalo Canas from El Salvador, an engineer, interested in appropriate technology. Worked in that field for awhile, then got a master’s degree in environmental engineering and began to focus less on technology and more on people. Started a campaign to make the bicycle the vehicle of choice in San Salvador. Has just been appointed his nation’s first environmental ombudsman. His job is “to sit down and listen to the problems of the people.” If they complain about a factory’s air pollution or the smell of a garbage dump, he goes to the appropriate ministry and tries to get something done about it.

Sonia Regina deBrito Pereira, a forthright, energetic young woman, a biologist and lawyer, founder of the Brazilian Movement In Defense of Life. Became Secretary of Environment for the city of Rio de Janeiro. Began to side with poor neighborhoods when rich developers tried to move onto their lands and build skyscrapers there. The Brazilian government being what it is, the developers hire assassins to kill off community leaders, and the police do nothing about it. Sonia is a target. She left the city government and moved to the university, where she heads graduate programs in environmental impact assessment and environmental law — and goes on working for the poor neighborhoods.

Everywhere I go in the world, I move among and work with amazing people like these. What I keep wondering is why, given that human nature is capable of the integrity and compassion and fire that I see here and everywhere, why the system as a whole keeps producing injustice and violence and pollution and waste. How do we get the goodness of the world’s people to add up to a potent force, instead of the insecurity and fear and greed?

July 21, 1993
La Catalina

I’m not going to be able to describe this day in detail, or this letter will become too heavy to mail — anyway, my mind is now in its typical Balaton buzz. Here are just a few observations that stick in my mind from the discussion today.

The average household in Dade County, Florida, pays more in a year for garbage disposal than 91% of the households in Guatemala earn.

The field of urban planning, complemented with endless GIS computer maps, taught to a generation of outstanding Latin American young people by the architecture and city planning departments of U.S. universities, is a sterile exercise. It seems to have no effect on decision-making, and as far as I could see from what I heard today, it shouldn’t. It’s planning for growth, not for development, and certainly not for sustainability.

Environmental consciousness is alive and well and producing innovative community development, environmental education, puppet shows, songs — but not political action — all over Latin America.

There were at least three extended moments today that were each worth the cost of this meeting. The first came after Cuban-born Rodrigo Rodriguez, now a civil engineer in Miami, gave a presentation on the state-of-the-art technology by which his firm finds and fixes leaking sewage pipes. Not, you would think, an inspiring topic, but it started a spirited discussion on the universally deplorable maintenance of public capital, on the difficulty of getting officials to see what great losses accrue from deferred maintenance, and on the corruption/incompetence/negligence of public officials. Many stories came from the group, and also a terrific idea for a Sustainable Terms of Reference Project.

It was Carlos Quesada who started complaining about the “terms of reference” by which international lenders and contractors design major investments in the Third World — water systems, road-building, dams, you name it. These terms are imposed upon government officials, who don’t know enough to challenge them. They contain no thought about efficiency, equity, or long-term sustainability, or about the workability of the whole system. Water projects, for instance. Millions of dollars may be invested in a new sewage treatment plant, which may involve leveling a forest or moving a poor neighborhood, when a fraction of that money could instead fix the corroded pipes that allow the infiltration of groundwater or stormwater that is swamping the existing treatment plant. Similarly, billions might be spent for a dam to supply water to a city, when a million low-flow toilets and showerheads and some repaired pipes would make more water unnecessary.

We need some model terms of reference to spread among lenders and governments to help them see the whole picture, find the least-cost alternative, and divert investment to the most sustainable and equitable options.

Another great moment came when the classic North-South confrontation came up about population growth versus consumption growth — the issue that cleaved the Rio conference last year. In THIS meeting, we zeroed in on a good balance, out of a passionate group discussion, discussing the role of the Catholic Church and the “Church of the North” (the free market ideology), the difficulties of even talking about population as an issue in some countries and consumption in other countries, the social injustice that drives population growth, and the inner emptiness that drives consumption growth, and the presence of both in the North and the South. We ended up enlightened by each other and focused on the human core of the problem of unsustainability.

The third coming-together happened after Sonia showed us a rough, amateur videotape made in the low-income neighborhoods in Rio. We saw the little communities in the path of the advancing wave of skyscrapers, the bulldozers flattening the makeshift houses, the peoples’ outrage and grief, the unfeeling platitudes uttered by the officials, the murdered bodies of activists. It was, as Enrique Ortiz said, a powerful testimony. I thought about the Rodney King beating and other instances where video turns out to be an amazing technology, when it’s in the hands of the people.

Having witnessed Sonia’s testimony, we sat together in pain for awhile. We talked about other such instances, where in the name of “development” bulldozers crush people and nature. We spoke of the pathology of power, of the mentality of those who utter falsehoods and hire assassins just so they can make more money. We tried to understand. We asked what we can do as a network to protect Sonia and her friends. I don’t know what will or can come of that discussion, but I know no one in the room will forget it. I guess that’s another purpose of a network, just to share pain.

There were several large question marks floating in the room at the end of the day. One was whether it makes sense to do what every planner has been doing — to direct urban growth away from the centers of density where it naturally occurs and out to the hinterlands. Maria Antonieta from Venezuela is trying to get industry away from Caracas and down to the Orinoco valley. Mexican planners are doing everything possible to prevent anything more from happening in Mexico City. The Norwegian government, if I remember correctly, subsidizes enterprises willing to locate away from Oslo and Bergen. That seems to make sense, but it also spreads the blight, the pollution, the roads, the sewage, the trash, and the transportation into relatively unspoiled areas, good soils, productive forests, and sustainable villages. It also goes against the driving forces that concentrate cities in the first place. Economic activities depend on each other, and separating them sets up a requirement for more transportation and more energy use. Would it make better sense to make human settlements much denser and to manage that density better, rather than spreading them over the land?

Another big question has to do with the wisdom/short-sightedness of government versus the wisdom/shortsightedness of the people. The community leaders gathered at our meeting have largely given up on government (“corruption,” “incompetence,” and “negligence” were the kindest words they used to describe Latin American governments). Many of them tend to worship the native common sense of the people, but in truth they are also working hard to get the people to stop dumping garbage in streambeds, stop clearing steep slopes, stop overgrazing, stop domestic violence. The government/people system as now structured adds up to the blind leading the blind. The good-news stories told today were in every case a non-governmental organization intervening to pull better behavior out of both the government and the people. So how do we do that better? How do we set up a system that draws on the strengths, rather than the weaknesses, of both?

July 26, 1993
On the plane from San Jose to Miami

Well, of course, I lost any hope of tracking the meeting on this computer — I have 40 pages of notes in my old-fashioned paper notebook, which travels better than a computer in the humid tropics — and doesn’t need to have its batteries recharged.

We went on sharing our experiences, ideas, doubts, troubles, triumphs. We spent a day at the U.N. University for Peace and gave another set of presentations at the University of Costa Rica. Best of all, we loaded ourselves into a Toyota mini-bus and went on field-trips.

We saw some typical, pitiful squatter settlements, though in Costa Rica they are much better than in less socially concerned countries — at least they have electricity and safe water and schools. We also saw Guarari, a model low-income community of several thousand families, 80% headed by women. (In Costa Rica as in most of Latin America marriage is a flighty institution — half the children grow up in a household without a stable father — men may come and go in several families — most unions are common-law without any legality.)

Here are translations of some of the hand-painted signs posted around the hand-built, well-used Guarari community center:

Here we don’t have aggression against women.
Women have a right to a life without violence.
He who loves does not hit.
In this community we defend the rights of girls and boys.
Happiness is possible and we deserve it.

With help from a strong women’s NGO and several people from the University, who helped organize and get political and legal impediments out of the way, but who also had the sense to listen to the people, the Guarari folks have built their own small houses with their own hands and have designed their own community. Their first desire, they told their organizers, was to have a place safe for the children. Their second desire was trees. So Guarari has trees in flourishing community spaces, decorated with locally produced art and inventive places for children to play. There are little gardens filled with roses. There are locally owned businesses — a restaurant, a grocery store, even a factory that first turned out concrete slabs for the community’s own houses and now sells them to other low-income communities.

We spent an instructive afternoon at the San Jose dump, high on a mountain, with orange-brown leachate trickling down the hill, truck after truck groaning up the potholed, dusty approach road, vultures circling overhead, human scavengers picking at the trash — scattering out of sight at the arrival of three jeeps full of policemen. Two pounds of garbage come here per resident per day — about one-third of the rate in Miami or Seattle, but still enough to create a big headache. The site is almost full and the next plan is to ship San Jose’s trash by rail to a new (lined) landfill 80 miles from the city. Aside from the scavengers, who operate illegally, there is no organized recycling.

We went to a botanical garden and orchid sanctuary. (1500 species of orchids in Costa Rica, 1100 of them propogated in this sanctuary.) We went through Braulio Carillo National Park, in the high mountain cloud forest, with spectacular views of wild rivers and miles of rainforest exuberantly covering the steep slopes with layers of fantastic green. We came down the other side of the Cordillera Central to the steamy Atlantic lowlands, a cowscape of pastures with stumps of cleared trees still visible in the swaths of Kikuyu grass (imported from Africa). Every now and then a lonely giant tree from the once-forest still stands, covered with the bromeliads and philodendrons and lianas and hundreds of other plants that use the jungle trees for their support.

If you’re beginning to get a picture of an incredible mix of good and bad news, you’re getting the idea. The whole week was an experience of hope and despair.

For example, one night we stayed at EARTH (Escuela de Agricultura de la Region Tropical Humeda — School of Agriculture of the Region of the Humid Tropics). This is a four-year-old multimillion-dollar new university, built on what a 7000 acre degraded cattle ranch. (American taxpayers, your money bought most of it). It is a four-year undergraduate school for 400 bright students from all over Latin America, and it has a great philosophy of interdisciplinary, environmentally-oriented, hands-on education. The students take courses and go out on internships and do agronomic research and also help run the farm. There is a remnant 700 acre primary forest, which they are letting expand. Gerardo Budowski has laid out an educational trail through it, and we spent a great, sweaty afternoon prowling through it, marveling at the brilliant flowers, the twisted lianas thicker than our arms, the armies of leaf-cutter ants so enormous that they actually wear trails, the beautiful buttresses at the trunks of the enormous master-trees, the trunks so tall and so hung with epiphytes that we couldn’t see even see the lowest branches.

By the way, some of the faculty at EARTH used to be at another tropical agricultural school called CATIE, which is where we first met Gerardo and Carlos. Eight years ago, Dennis and I and other Balatoners gave a week-long course there in resource management systems. I would have said that not much came of that workshop, but the material we gave in that course is now in use in classes at EARTH! That was a great lesson in faith for me. The little things we do have effects that we can never imagine, and in most cases that we never even learn about.

Do your best, let go, and trust in the outcome — there’s that message again!

EARTH is a place of great energy and hope. But still operating there is a 700-acre banana plantation that made me decide never to eat a commercial banana again. The land has been in banana monoculture for 30 years now — nothing else grows there, not even underbrush under the banana trees. It’s so ecologically unbalanced that it requires constant doses of fertilizer, an airplane spraying fungicide every three weeks, and soil-soaking nematocides once a month (for the root-destroying nematodes). They warned us not to pick up and eat any bananas from the ground — they could be toxic enough to kill you.

The banana plants have to be held up by guy-wires when they start bearing — commercial bananas are bred to be so big and heavy that they topple the tree. Every fruit cluster is wrapped in blue plastic to keep off pests and enhance ripening. The plots are deeply ditched to insure good drainage — it rains about 150 inches a year there. Around the edges of the plots run wire cables upon which harvested fruit clusters are hung on hooks like sides of butchered meat. A tractor pulls the cables along metal guideways to the packing plant. That’s to prevent the slightest bruise, such as might be incurred if the bananas were hauled in a truck. We gringo consumers will not accept small bananas, or bananas with tiny spots on the skin.

Even with all this care, we watched the workers toss away 22% of the bananas at the packing plant. The discards are just dumped. The discard rate used to be only 9%, but as the price of bananas falls because of a glut on the world market, the discard rate rises. This banana operation is not only ecologically vulnerable to pests, it is economically vulnerable to the slightest world trade fluctuations. There’s also a nice plot of organic peppers growing at EARTH, but they are not even harvested these days, because the collapse of the Soviet economy reduced Soviet imports of Indonesian pepper, which got dumped on the world market, which depressed the price, so that it no longer pays even to pick Costa Rican pepper. So goes the world trade system!

We Balatoners reacted to all this with deep shock and started talking about polyculture and tropical home gardens and economies built not on trade but on self-sufficiency. We hate to think of the future agricultural experts of Latin America being exposed to this system without even doing any research on alternatives. But the banana plantation brings in $4000 per day toward the operating cost of EARTH, so the administration is reluctant to start tinkering with it.

Well, so it went, good news and bad news. I need to summarize, because now I’m in the Miami airport and my plane to Boston will be boarding soon, and you’re probably wondering whether this letter will ever end. I think every participant in the meeting, certainly including us Northerners, was moved, enlightened, energized, and filled with new ideas. The warmth of the human relationships grew, and the realization of how much we need each other. The Latin Americans have named their regional network the Irazu Group after the volcano above San Jose. (The global Balaton Group is named after a lake in Hungary.) Some of the ideas and projects that arose out of this interaction include, just to cite a few that I know about:

• We’ll seek funding to get a “terms of reference” project going.
• Enrique Ortiz will help Sonia deBrito carry the plight of the Rio communities to Habitat International and the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.
• Roberto Morales from Guatemala, Carlos Canas from El Salvador, Rosendo Pujol from Costa Rica, and Alvaro Uribe from Panama are starting a Central American project on urban solid waste.
• Inspired by Alan AtKisson of Sustainable Seattle, the group wants to organize their next meeting around the quest for indicators of sustainability.
• They’re going to bring together good-news and bad-news case studies from their various countries.
• They want more material and discussion on education toward sustainability — probably a topic of a future meeting.
• They want to retain a good dialogue with people of the North, as in this meeting.
• They want to expand the discussion of human settlements to the whole system, the surrounding lands and economic arrangements that bring food and water and energy and materials and that receive the wastes and pollution of the city.
• Enrique Bucher and I started a simulation model of the grass-bush-cow ecology of the Argentinian Chaco region, which we’ll continue at the next Pew Scholars meeting.
• I’m going to help improve the materials and software for systems teaching at EARTH.
• Joan is going back to Switzerland to organize an international sustainable cities network.

And who knows what else we all will do as a result of this week. It will affect my columns, of course. Maria Antonieta told me she is now eager to get out of her planner’s office and to work more with NGO’s. I think everyone feels energized, more in touch with the problems of Latin America, and also more aware that there are solutions.

We do our best, and we trust in the outcome!

A month from now comes global Balaton!

Love,

Dana