Dear Folks,
Merry Christmas! Or, by the time you get this, Happy New Year!
It’s about 5 PM on Christmas Eve. A very light snow is in the air, the flakes so insubstantial that they get wafted up a few times before they finally settle down. We’ve had three big snowstorms, and there’s more than a foot of white stuff piled up to make the kind of winter we like. When the snow blankets the ground before the subzero temperatures arrive, the soil doesn’t freeze down very deep, the shrubs and trees are protected, and the meltwater in the spring doesn’t get trapped above subsurface ice, so mud season goes away much faster. And all winter the countryside is white and sparkly!
The mood of everyone in the Valley goes up after a good snowstorm and way down if there’s no snow. You’d think it would be the opposite, because snow is undeniably messy and dangerous to drive in and a chore to shovel. But we love it. Things just look right around here with the pine boughs draped with white.
Emmett thinks the snow, the first he’s seen in his life, is a special gift to puppies. He runs around in widening circles, faster and faster, sending up showers of crystals. He goes crashing through the drifts at full tilt –he’s a teen-aged dog now, with a teen-ager’s energy and strength (and temperament). It’s a pleasure just to watch him. Old Basil sticks to the shoveled paths — he’s over 12 and stiff and doesn’t move very fast, but he still gets a grin on his face when he sees the snow.
This evening I have candles burning and the Christmas Revels playing on the radio. It’s the first day of my fast, and I just took a long nap — something I ordinarily never think of doing. Out in the dining room Chrissie and Scot and their guest Minna are bending over a 3000 piece puzzle that covers the table completely. Two nights ago they cooked a solstice dinner for friends, with a duck and a rooster and other good stuff from our farm. They cut a nice little hemlock from the woods (Scot says it was growing too close to other trees and would have had to come out anyway) and set it up for a lovely feathery Christmas tree in the living room. Tonight we’ll walk to the Plainfield Church half a mile away for a candlelight carol service.
The farm is tucked in for winter. The hens are in the Chicken Palace, the woollies are gestating their lambs in the barn, the geese and ducks have a big wired-in run that Scot built because Emmett is not entirely to be trusted around birds. Scot and Chrissie and Marcia did a magnificent job of cleaning up the basement so that, for the first time in living memory, there’s a big open space to work in, the tools are hung up neatly, and the countertops are clean and ready for projects. I got so inspired by this inviting space that I lugged down my four spinning wheels, oiled them, restrung them, repaired them. Now every Saturday afternoon when the opera comes over the radio from the Met, I sit down there and spin. I’m working on a magnificent fleece from Wally, our Romney ram, who was killed a year ago, you may remember, by our new ram Satchmo. We have Wally’s wool to remember him by, unusually long-stapled wool, shiny and easy to spin. I haven’t decided what to make out of it yet, but as I work the wool, the right idea will come to me.
To all those who phoned or wrote after my depressed letter last month — thanks so much for caring, it helped a lot to hear from you, and as you can see, I’m back to normal. The good thing about any human emotion is that it doesn’t last, and so my discouragement has gone, for no better reason than it came. Finishing the term helped a lot. Scot and I spent the first of this month grading and then felt great weights lift from our shoulders.
Scot has spent much of the time since then installing C++++++ (I’m not sure how many pluses go here) to do some heavy-duty programming for his thesis. He’s studying the factors that affect the regrowth of trees in secondary forests, and it involves mapping and measuring something like every tree in British Columbia. Meanwhile Chrissie has taken a part-time job at our consumer coop, helping them straighten out their records, and I have been traveling for a change. Early this month I went to Seattle for the first time ever — how could it have taken so long, with so many friends doing good things in Seattle?
The purpose of the trip was to bring together the steering committee for the network on reducing consumption, about which you’ve heard before. Betsy Taylor of the Merck Family Fund organized us to help plan her conference last spring, and we worked so well together that we just stuck together. In addition to Betsy and me we consist of Alan Durning of Northwest Environment Watch, Jacqueline Hamilton of NRDC, Paul Gorman of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Bob Engelman of Population Action International, Juliet Schor of Harvard, and Vicki Robin of New Road Map Foundation — in whose house we met. That was reason enough for me to make the trip, to visit New Road Map at last.
To anyone new to this letter: New Road Map is the place that produced the tape course and book Your Money or Your Life, which has probably moved more Americans toward a frugal, empowered lifestyle than any other force. It’s also the communal household from which Marcia Meyer came last spring when she arrived to live with us. And it’s an actual foundation, since the book makes money that none of the members need (they are all financially independent, living on something like $6000 a year apiece), so they give the royalties away.
Roughly half the members of New Road Map have visited the farm, and I’ve talked to most of the others over the phone, so I knew that going there would be a) a real adventure, and b) like going home — which sounds contradictory, but both proved true. I was welcomed and treated with great affection. And I learned a lot by watching these people, most of whom have lived together for ten years now, practice community. Community, like marriage, like family, like gardening, is something that takes skill and practice. At New Road Map it takes such forms as an informal meeting over coffee each morning (late enough to accommodate the non-morning-persons), to check in with each other, and a clearing, completing meeting each evening. And things in the kitchen carefully labeled and put away, so people can find what they need. And not interrupting — allowing a moment of respectful silence after anyone talks, to be able to listen carefully, let it sink in, and formulate one’s response thoughtfully. And tolerating each others’ quirks and quiddities with humor and patience. And setting aside longer, more infrequent, phone-off-the-hook times for “heart sharing” — something Marcia had already started with Scot and Chrissie and me.
It was good to see. It restored my faith in community, and also my determination to work more mindfully at it. Community doesn’t just happen when well-meaning people come together. It has to be constantly tended. But it’s worth tending.
New Road Map was a perfect setting for our steering committee meeting, because it’s a place that masterfully practices what we want to preach — simple but good living, mindfulness again, this time directed to how we use money, what we buy, what we extract from the earth, use, and then return to the earth again. You would never guess, being there, that this is the home of people who are living at what in this country is considered a poverty level — or, if you want to look at it another way, people who have saved far more money than most American families dream of saving. The place doesn’t look as if its inhabitants live poor, or rich. It just looks as if they live.
We had a great, productive meeting, had time to come together as a group, and hatched a plan for an organization called ENOUGH! It will be a clearinghouse to provide information on the good organizations already working on consumption from all the angles — environment, social justice, spiritual renewal, anti-advertising, throughput taxes, reforms of capitalism, and plain old quality of life. It will be a catalyst for creative, fun, attention-getting campaigns. And it will be a communications center, working on writing and broadcasting to get the message out. We had a great discussion about the extent to which all people associated with it (including us, the steering committee) should practice what we preach, with the New Road Map folks suggesting that it be run primarily by volunteers and that no one on the staff should be paid more than the average American income ($31,000). There were some gulps around the room at that. In a spirit of compromise worthy of the Balaton Group, we decided that everyone involved with ENOUGH! should be working at frugal living and financial independence, but they don’t need to have got there yet.
We’ll have another meeting next month with an expanded group to plan more details, and we expect and hope to be up and running by June.
I returned home just a few days before Marcia left. She got to see one of our beautiful snowstorms, the trees glittering in the sun as we drove her to the bus station. She’s now in Winston-Salem NC, tending terminally ill guests in a hostel run by the Human Services Alliance, a large cooperative of volunteers with a strong spiritual foundation. She must be tremendously busy — we’ve only had one letter from her, and Marcia is a conscientious letter writer.
The night she left I had to write a postcard to her to tell her the ducks came back! We had seven ducks and seven geese down on the pond, and when freezing time came, we herded them up Daniels Road to the barn — except for two ducks who wouldn’t be herded. They flew back, and for weeks afterward we tried all kinds of schemes to catch them, as the pond froze and they swam in smaller and smaller circles of open water. Finally they gave up and flew to the brook, where we lost them totally. Sometimes we could hear them quacking, but we never saw them. As snow fell and ice thickened we gave up on them. But that night when I went out to do the evening chores, there they were, clamoring to be let into the pen. There was a chain of little duck tracks coming up the wood road.
Marcia will be glad. One of the first things she did on the farm was hatch out those ducks in the incubator.
Shortly after the Seattle trip I was on the road again to Denver and Aspen and Rocky Mountain Institute — a very different place from New Road Map, but another star on the sustainability map, a place that walks its talk, and another place where I feel at home. Amory and Hunter Lovins called a meeting of about 20 forestry experts (how did I get in there?) to put together a systems view of the forces that are devastating tropical rainforests. Others present were ecologists Tom Lovejoy and Peter Warshall, Alvaro Umana from Costa Rica, people who had worked with indigenous tribes, business people, industrial foresters, etc. Amory calls us the Systems Group
This all started when the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) called for a boycott of Mitsubishi, the giant trading company that is a major player in moving tropical wood products around the world. The trading company was unmoved by the boycott, but Mitsubishi Motors and Mitsubishi Electronics in the US were concerned and asked Amory to facilitate a dialogue with RAN. Out of that came the money to pull together the meeting I went to. Amory hopes there will be follow-up funding to implement the three neat projects we thought up.
The first is to put together a set of clear, concise, complete guidelines for responsible, sustainable forestry (tropical or temperate), taking into account that profits of companies have to be sustained, but so do communities of local people and habitats of local species. (One of the guidelines would probably be to the effect that every forest and every tree is different and therefore ought to be seen and managed by people who recognize the differences — not by industrial loggers that treat everything as grist for a single mill. (If your only tool is a whole-tree chipper, the whole world looks like pulp.)) We have no power except moral power to make anyone follow such guidelines, but at least we should write them out in a well-publicized, easily understandable, no-nonsense form. Moral power is sometimes a lot stronger than anyone thinks.
The second project would do for forest products what RMI has done for energy and water — define the end-use needs and figure out how to meet them using the least possible paper and wood. In the US we could cut our wood demand in half at least by wasting less and recycling more. Maybe this could be a new program at RMI, a logical extension, because conserving wood also conserves water and energy. I’ve always wanted to see RMI branch out into materials.
The third project would come to an understanding, through a simulation model and game, of the entire flow of a commodity like paper or plywood or mahogany from forest to final user, asking two questions. Why does this system push so consistently toward unsustainable use of the resource? And why does it so consistently allocate the profit from this activity toward the traders and processors and away from the resource itself and the people who harvest it? (Jason Clay, the inventor of Rainforest Crunch was there, and he said that 3 cents worth of Brazil nuts in the forest ends up selling for $10 in New York.)
My Dartmouth colleague Konrad von Moltke points out that it isn’t just wood — these two dynamics (unsustainability and low rents for the harvester) occur for sugar and bananas and copper and cattle and coffee and every commodity taken from the earth. There’s got to be a systemic reason why the resource-rich countries and regions of the world are the poorest, while the resource-poor Japans and Hong Kongs and Singapores and Switzerlands are the richest. Konrad has started a project at World Wildlife Fund to study a number of different commodities, but it doesn’t have any modeling in it. So I want to get the modeling done. We had some business people at the RMI meeting who sat down with me to map out the financial flows in the system and the mindsets that dictate them, while Jason Clay and others mapped out the flows of physical product. I’d love to make a generic model and then put in the numbers for three very different commodities — plywood, say, and sugar and tin — and then figure out whether there are leverage points to change the system, and whether the leverage points are in the same place for all commodities. (I suspect they are, and I suspect they’re in the financial system, in the minds of bankers who never see the actual physical resource.) And then make a game so Mitsubishi executives and Hong Kong lenders can understand why their business is eventually going to crash on their heads, if they don’t make it sustainable.
So, three projects, one on supply, one on demand, and a systems model of the market linking the two. We have to attack the problem on that whole-system level. If we do nothing but get Mitsubishi to swear off rainforest, they’ll just go on to abuse some other commodity, and the Korean and Taiwanese traders will move into the forest. As usual, there’s no point in working piecemeal, the whole system has to be transformed.
Well, that’s what I needed, another exciting project to do! At the moment there’s no money for this one, not even a proposal written, though Konrad and I will probably produce one in a month or two.
I haven’t solved any of the problems I had last month. I am even more overloaded with commitments and enthusiasms than I was then. I still don’t know how to allocate my time. I still suspect that I should take a year to stay home and do nothing but farm and finish my textbook and work on community. But it helps to have this Christmas down time to stand back and try to figure it all out, or wait for clear guidance.
Whatever else, community is still highest on the priority list, and since Marcia left we have two bedrooms open, one of them large enough for a couple. We’d love to have farming people with rural skills and an interest in making at least part of their living from the land. (With New Road Map living standards, that should be very possible.) We’d love to have people who want to buy in and stay. Most of all, we’d love to have people who are willing and delighted to work on community.
I have received three complaints from people whose newsletter got mangled last month without the envelope, or whose sticky fasteners stuck onto other things — and three compliments for the new system! Chrissie and I will try this non-envelope scheme one more time (it saves both money and trees), but if we continue to get complaints, we’ll switch back. If you get an envelope, it’s because we’ve stuck in some inclusion that required it. Please continue to give us feedback.
Love,
Dana
