Dear Folks, I’m looking out the window at a RAINY DAY, HOORAY!!! I was gone for two weeks, and every time I called back, Ruth or Dennis or Anna told me it was 100 degrees and sunny. I didn’t want to come home. I didn’t want to watch what was happening to the garden or the pastures, which were already too dry before I left. I didn’t want to figure out how to feed the sheep with no pasture and no possibility of a second hay crop. I didn’t want to watch my vegetables shrivel up.
But of course I had to come back (mentally I was half still here anyway). I was greeted with a thunderstorm that came down in buckets, followed by a whole day of gentler rain. Since then it’s rained off and on for a week. Everything is sodden. The water tables are coming back up, the pasture’s greening, and thanks to Dennis’s faithful watering, the pea crop is coming in bushels from the garden. For now at least, all’s well.
The heat and drought influenced my column-writing, as you’ll see from the enclosures. As the land dried up and became less fruitful, my writing, in desperation, became more so. There’s good news on the newspaper front. Maybe I’d better tell the story in the order it happened, which means taking you on another trip with me. A few months ago we went around the world; this time we’re just going across country.
I left on July 2, first stop Arkansas for a day with my Mom and Karl. I like the journey there, as well as the destination; I rent a car in Little Rock and drive three hours into the Ozarks to Harrison. I know the route well — the hills are spectacular, especially in the spring when the wild dogwood blooms. This time it was hot and dry, of course, but I hit a lucky 80-degree cool spell between 100-degree blasts. I had a happy drive, listening to funky Arky music on the radio, and I had a nice time with the folks. My mother’s garden was glorious, as usual, and all the Harrison folks are well — Dennis’s parents live there too, so I get a double bonus when I visit.
Then it was on to San Diego for one of the rate-payers for the trip, the System Dynamics conference. I knew System Dynamics when it was just a pup — when it was just Jay Forrester, Jack Pugh, Ed Roberts and a bunch of their students at MIT (one of whom was Dennis). Now it’s an international society, with annual conferences in places like Shanghai and Seville, which I usually can’t afford to go to. This year it was on this continent, and I was the keynote speaker, so my way was paid. It was great to see everyone again. Half the people there had taught me, or I had taught them, or I had worked with them. A surprising number of the old Limits to Growth team were there. I got to relive the past 25 years, and to remember a lot of the fun and usefulness of Dennis’s and my partnership.
San Diego is a massive city almost down at the Mexican border, next to a larger city on the other side called Tijuana. The two of them together make a megalopolis of nearly 4 million people. From the air it’s an unbelievable slurb in the middle of a desert. You wonder how a city could ever be in such a place. On the ground, and near the ocean where the cool breezes blow, it’s very heaven (a few miles inland the temperature goes up 20 or 30 degrees). At least it’s heaven on the University campus where the conference was. The sun always shines, it’s cool, flowers bloom, and sprinklers come on each night, using water that must come from hundreds of miles away, to keep all the green things growing.
Two hours to the north is Los Angeles with another 8 million people. Deane Wylie, my gracious editor at the L.A. Times, made the trip down to hear my speech, bless his heart. The title was “System Dynamics Meets the Press” and the subject was my vision in trying to write my column, and what I’ve learned from doing it. None of my editors have ever heard a flow-blown explanation of that before, or know that a lot of my writing comes out of my systems training. I’m not sure what Deane thought of it, but he invited me up to L.A. the next day for lunch with the opinion editors of the Times, an invitation I almost literally jumped at.
The train from San Diego to L.A. goes up the coast for awhile and you look out on miles of perfect beach with surfers catching the waves. I begin to see why Californians always seem to be coming from a different world than I am — they are. Sunny always. Surf’s always up. Year-round growing season. The government supplies all the wealth and water you want (20% of San Diego’s economy is based on defense spending). The New England Puritan ethic got dropped somewhere in the plains on the way west and never made it over the mountains. I never can quite believe that California is real. I always suspect it’s a stage set that they roll up and put away as soon as I leave.
Near Los Angeles the view was of freeways and endless city and smog. The Times is a few blocks from the train station, and there I was, in one of the citadels of the newspaper world, circulation over a million, having lunch in the executive dining room with the Sunday opinion section editors.
They were most encouraging. They think my writing is terrific. When I write a piece for them (which I’ve been doing about once a month), it goes out on the wire to their syndicate, hundreds of papers — so in a real sense I’ve attained my goal and become syndicated, though not, of course, in the way I envisioned, not as a weekly column on the editorial page, but as a monthly feature on the features page. (That’s a tricky thing about visions; they do happen, but rarely in the exact way you thought they would.)
I told them my story and left them copies of my columns, and they said they’d try to convince their syndicate to take it on (they are not the people who syndicate editorial-page columns; that’s a completely different bunch). The probability is low, because 1) opinion columns are poor money-makers for syndicates; there are so many free columns around (written by every interest group from the Audubon Society to the National Rifle Association), and 2) my column is wierd; it’s not about the daily shifts in political power that are the normal preoccupation of editors.
Listening to them I began to entertain the thought, for the first time in three years, that maybe I picked the wrong part of the paper. Maybe I ought to give up the column and write longer features pieces instead (longer ones are much easier to write). That’s not a decision I’ve made yet, by any means, but I’m considering it. For the moment I’ll do both and let the universe send me messages about what works. (Messages are arriving; read on!)
From San Diego it was on to Snowmass, Colorado (this was a real hardship trip! Snowmass is next to Aspen, high in the Rockies, where in July it’s cool, sunny, and spectacular every day). Hunter Lovins met me with her pickup truck, and I finally got my first view of Rocky Mountain Institute. Many of you know about that place, but for those who don’t, an explanation is necessary.
I love folks who not only have good ideas, but who LIVE their ideas — folks like the Todds of Ocean Arks, and the Orrs of Meadowcreek, and the Lovinses of Rocky Mountain Institute. Amory Lovins is the world’s leading expert on energy efficiency. You’ve read his name and ideas many times in my columns. When he and Hunter decided to stop shuttling around the world annoying the heck out of the established energy-supply moguls and to settle down, they built a home and research institute that embodies their work. It’s a big stone building, bermed into a south-facing hill at an altitude of 7100 feet. Their growing season is even shorter than ours is, and they get much more snow. The building includes living space, a greenhouse, and an office where 30 people work (flex-time, because the office wasn’t designed for that many people). The annual heating bill is zero. The electricity bill is about $5 per month; almost all the electricity goes to computers and copying machines. The building is pleasing, inside and out, and it’s nice to live and work there, which I did for five days.
Amory has had great fun designing energy tricks into the building. The light bulbs are the 8 or 11-watt wonders that give 75-watts worth of light. The windows are heat mirrors. The greenhouse is the “furnace” of the place; the earth, stone and water in it store heat. There is a solar clothes dryer, and a super-efficient refrigerator and freezer, and low-flow shower heads, and water-saving toilets, and photovoltaic-powered fans. The place uses so little electricity that it could be all photo-voltaic powered, and probably will be when the price of PV comes down a little more.
The Institute has expanded to apply the principles of efficiency and sustainability not only to energy, but to agriculture, water, national security, and community regeneration. It’s crammed with books and people of enormous interest to me, and I was as happy there as a pig who’s been dropped in a big, luscious mudhole. I talked to everyone and helped Amory write letters to editors and absorbed ideas and information through every pore. In the evenings we’d go out and eat and drive into the mountains or watch Hunter do rodeo riding or check in at the bar where she serves as a bouncer (neither Hunter nor Amory is exactly an ordinary run-of-the-mill person).
Interesting folks kept dropping by. On Monday we had a meeting with David Orr, Herman Daly, George Woodwell, and John Cobb to discuss indicators of global sustainability. On Tuesday two of the producers of the State of the World telecourse came by for advice on planning the energy show. One of the most interesting folks lives and works right there — Farley Sheldon, Hunter’s mother, coming from about 14 fascinating careers, including running Los Angeles County, has “retired” to become the development director of Rocky Mountain Institute. Her efficient and loving presence made the place even more special for me.
While I was there I wrote a piece for the L.A. Times on some calculations Bill Keepin of the RMI staff has done about nuclear power (see the last column included here). On Tuesday I faxed it to L.A. and called Deane Wylie to be sure it arrived. “Congratulations,” he said. “You were in the L.A. Times on Sunday and the New York Times on Tuesday! You’re getting famous!” I nearly dropped the phone, I was so surprised.
Before I left I had sent one of my columns to NYT — I do it about twice a year for a lark; they never even acknowledge receiving my stuff. But I keep doing it, remembering the old fellow in New Hampshire who taught Dennis and me about beekeeping. “The supers will never collect honey sittin in the basement,” he said. “You gotta keep puttin em on the hives.” Columns on my desk will never get published. I gotta keep sendin em to the papers. I tell myself that constantly.
So the NYT took one and ran it while I was gone, cutting it mercilessly (I enclose their version along with the original, so you can see what big arrogant papers do to columns — in all fairness, they tried to call me to check out the cuts with me, but they couldn’t reach me.) They also syndicated it; a friend just arriving from Europe told me he had seen it in the International Herald Tribune, and I am getting letters about it from all over the country.
This may not happen again for a long time, but what a breakthrough it is — not only because I can now tell editors and syndicates that I’ve been in both the L.A. and N.Y. Times, not only because I now know that both papers actually read my stuff and are open to it, but most important of all, because I now hold myself as someone who writes pieces of that caliber!
To add to the good news, when I got home I found a letter from an editor of the Singapore Straits Times, who had just run my piece (from the L.A. Times wire) about Singapore. I’ll enclose that in this packet too (you’ll recognize it as a longer and more complete version of one you got two months ago). I’m amazed that Singapore allowed something so critical to be run. There is more freedom of the press there than I thought.
Well, time to move on from Snowmass to Racine. I went there for a conference run by the Water Pollution Control Federation, a 33,000-member association of people who are responsible for cleaning up water — municipal water commissioners, industrial effluent managers, sanitary engineers, etc. The meeting was at Wingspread, a spectacular Frank Lloyd Wright house, run by the Johnson (of the wax) Foundation as a conference center. The WPCF brought together about 40 people from the water-quality scene — from DuPont and Procter & Gamble and the Chemical Manufacturing Association, from the municipal water boards of Denver and Philadelphia, from the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Fund and Environmental Law Institute, from the American Water Works Association and the Environmental Protection Agency. Many of these people regularly sue each other or regulate each other or yell at each other in public hearings. The purpose of the conference was to bring them together to rethink the water quality laws of the nation.
It was exciting! I was the lead-off speaker, talking about harmony and whole systems and sustainability, trying to set a high moral tone for the venture. After that I had no official duties, but I fell into the role of mediator, trying to help these people talk to one another. Since I knew nothing about water quality and had no stake in the outcome, I could be simple-minded and therefore helpful. I was impressed by the progress that was made and the willingness of the participants. They all admitted that the current laws are not working. Billions of dollars are spent, many of them for bureaucracy and litigation, laws and standards abound, and the water is not clean. No one is happy, not industry, not environmentalists, not cities.
So we tried to think through a completely new Clean Water Act. One of the cheering outcomes was that they saw that water problems start with what we’re doing to the land — agricultural chemicals, urban spread, industrial siting, landfills — and they want to enlarge the discussion to include land use, agriculture, and urban planning. The process will continue with further meetings; it has been launched now with great enthusiasm.
That meeting was fun, and to make it even better, in the evenings I visited my brother Jay, who lives in Racine, and his wife Cathy, and my nephews, Matt, Jason, and Andy, who are nearly grown up now (the oldest, Matt, starts as a freshman at Purdue this fall). Jay has gardens that far surpass mine — a fanatic-gardener gene taints our whole family. Even in the drought (the farmers’ corn leaves were rolled up and looked like yucca, the poor plants were trying to tassle and they were only 2 feet high), Jay’s garden looked terrific.
On my last day in Racine my Dad drove up from Chicago to fetch me home for dinner with him and Lu. We drove through the 100-degree drought-scorched countryside, listening to the Cubs lose a ballgame. It is my home country — southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, with the Cubs losing. I think my green hilly New Hampshire farm is much more beautiful, and so are the blue Ozark vistas and the California beaches and above all the towering Rocky Mountains. But that flat, dusty, humble Midwest countryside with the simple houses, the shady front porches, the corn and soybeans, the motley shopping centers, the perfectly-straight highways aiming precisely toward the compass points — that looks the way country should look. It’s funny, isn’t it, how HOME gets ingrained into you, in a nonverbal, totally ineradicable way, before you even get big enough to know what’s happening?
The next morning I flew to now home, real home, Daniels Road in Plainfield, New Hampshire, where the rainclouds were forming up, the sheep were fat on the pasture, the folks were ready to welcome me with hugs, Basil with bounces, the cats with purrs. In two weeks the weeds had grown tall in the garden and the work had piled up on my desk. It didn’t take long to come down from the high of the trip and plunge into the normal hassle of my life. I’m anxious about a lot of things right now, mainly about my ability to do all that I’ve promised people I would do. But I’m also, after that trip and this rain, filled with a sense of blessing. What a beautiful country I live in! How many great people I get to hang out with! What a lot of fine opportunities there are to work and serve and learn!
Love, Dana
