Dear Folks, A week ago the ground was covered with six inches of snow and I couldn’t summon up the psychic energy to do a single spring chore.

Today the grass is suddenly green.  The first daffodils have opened, the spring peepers are singing, the forsythia is in bloom.  In the mornings we hear new voices — robins and song sparrows and killdeer and juncos.  The maples are covered with their strange pink blooms.  The perennial garden, which looked completely dead three days ago, is showing green shoots of phlox and hollyhock and iris.

Thanks to John and Don, the greenhouse is up, the sheep are sheared, the rototiller got an oil change and is ready for action.  Last night I came home from work and stayed outside until dark, planting spinach and mustard and tatsoi and arugula seeds, and transplanting out from flats early lettuce and fennel and broccoli and kohlabi and onions.  Voila!  Rows of healthy green veggies where so recently there was snow!  (I’ve covered them with Reemay, though, because there’s no guarantee the snow won’t come back.)

Since I last wrote I’ve spent much too little time on the farm.  I’ve been to Aspen to present Beyond the Limits to the Global Business Network and to plan a new book with Amory and Hunter Lovins.  I’ve given speeches at MIT and the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age.  I’ve been on radio stations WHYY in Philadelphia, KTXQ in Dallas, WLUW in Chicago, WCCO in Minneapolis, CHUM in Toronto, and nationwide on CBS and on the NPR show “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross.  I’ve been to the World Bank, the Washington Post, and the World Resources Institute.  Dennis and I did the last live interview on the Monitor cable TV channel before it closed.  All three authors — Dennis J¿rgen, and I — were on C-Span and at the Smithsonian and the Global Tomorrow Coalition and the USA Club of Rome.  Next week I go to St. Louis and also give a public talk at Dartmouth, and two weeks after that all three of us will launch the British, Dutch, and German publications in Europe.

I can say now with certainty that I would rather write a hundred books than publicize one.  Though this is a fascinating process, and I’m learning a lot, basically I do not like being the object of publicity.  I am never so happy as when I finish the long drive home from Logan airport in Boston, pull in the driveway at Foundation Farm, tussle with the welcoming committee of bouncing dogs, say hi to my farm-mates, hug Heather, kick off the heels and the monkey clothes, pull on slacks and a sweater, nuzzle a purring cat, and go out to see the lambs.

I guess it’s going to be impossible to describe here all the meetings that have taken place.  Each was different. All were interesting.  Many went well.  Some went terribly.  It is not the same world out there as it was twenty years ago, except for the mainstream economists, who don’t seem to have changed at all.

Business people have changed.  After I presented BTL at the Global Business Network meeting, and Amory Lovins and Lee Schippers had followed up with practical, technical, institutional ideas for how to get down below the limits, Peter Schwartz asked for a show of hands as to how many thought the question of limits was indeed an important one, one that requires significant action.  Out of maybe 60 people who were there, only 6 hands did not go up.  Interestingly, these executives (an extraordinary bunch, admittedly) were especially eager to follow up on my discussion of love, of goodness, of compassion, of morality.  Some soft, warm ideas have been penetrating the management councils of some of our major corporations.  Their responses, which went on all afternoon, were often so passionate, so caring that I had tears in my eyes.

If only all the responses would be like that!  I was amazed both at MIT and at the Kennedy School at how mean-spirited and narrow some of the top people in academia still are.  I shouldn’t have been surprised.  I have spent plenty of time in both those places.  But it’s been awhile since I’ve been hit by the “you haven’t made your model the way we make models, and therefore your model is wrong” argument.  I’ve been leading a sheltered existence, farming and writing and avoiding faculty meetings.  I had forgotten about the people who are more eager to be true to their esoteric disciplines than to be intellectually open, much less useful to the world.

And I am not good at fights.  When people come out swinging at me, I don’t swing back, I duck.  I can engage with spirit in an honest intellectual disagreement, but when the blows get low and nasty, I just want to leave.  There have always been good reasons for Dennis’s and my partnership, and that’s one of them.  Dennis thrives on public appearances, to my constant amazement, and he can fight when he has to.

The economists, at least as represented by the Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow at MIT and the nephew of two Nobel Prize winners Lawrence Summers at the World Bank, still can’t envision a finite economy in a finite world.  They have come a long way in 20 years in acknowledging the problem of managing the commons and the weaknesses of the market, at least in the micro-economic sense.  They’re full of good ideas about how to make markets in pollution permits, or how to do better resource accounting.  But they have no insight into why those corrections don’t happen or how to make them happen.  And they don’t see the macroeconomic failure of the market at all — its inability to regulate its own scale so that it fits within its carrying capacity.  They still don’t understand how the planet works.  They can’t begin to think of questioning growth.  They are tinkering within their paradigm, adding epicycles like Ptolemaic astronomers, not yet ready to make the great leap across the abyss to real ecological economics.  And they are as arrogant as ever.

Sigh.

The media have changed a lot in twenty years.  No problem with their running off in hysteria claiming that we are predicting the end of the world.  The problem this time is that their attention span has collapsed to such a short time horizon that we can hardly catch it at all.

I’ll have to write a column sometime about my conversations with reporters and TV producers.  I had a nice talk with a McNeill-Lehrer producer, after which I called our publicist in New York (who sets these things up), asking what was going to happen next.  “Oh, they thought you were very interesting, but they’re not going to do anything now,” she said.  “They’re waiting for an oil spill or something, so they have a news hook.”

I’ve had long conversations with writers for Business Week and Newsweek and a producer for “Nightline,” all of whom think the book is important and want to do something about it, all of whom are being blocked by editors higher up.  The Business Week reporter has been wanting to write about Herman Daly and the new field of ecological economics for two years now, but can’t get permission to do it.  “They still call it the sustainable GROWTH story around here, though I’ve told them a hundred times it’s sustainable DEVELOPMENT,” she says in frustration.  Newsweek and “Nightline” are also waiting for news hooks, probably the UNCED conference in June — if they get around to doing anything at all.

With radio we’re doing better.  There are a lot of environmental radio shows around the country, and they do interviews that are long enough to have substance.  A number of the hosts had actually read the book.  But some others were disappointing, especially the professional, pre-recorded ones like Elizabeth Dribben on CBS and Terry Gross on NPR.  These are busy, strong-minded ladies, who didn’t have time to do more than glance at the book, and who wanted to steer the conversation their direction.  They wanted to dwell on the horror of global collapse, they were fascinated with “computer predictions,” and they especially wanted to go into the political consequences of our work.  I wanted to talk about the present state of the planet, the possible good futures, the necessity to reduce unnecessary consumption, and the power of love.  Terry Gross cut all that stuff out of the tape.

Even the hosts who let me go in the direction I wanted to go had to conduct the conversation in snatches, between ads for the state lottery and a sale on golf clubs, and news of a traffic pile-up on Route 93a south of the city.  And often, especially on television, the interviews have been, well, just non-human.  Host reads down the pre-prepared list of questions.  Guests stammers around doing her best to answer — or not to answer but to steer the discussion a different way.  Host never hears the answers, never reacts at all, just reads the next question.  No logic.  No listening.  Slam, bam, thank you ma’am.  There is no contact of souls or even minds.

Sigh again.  How can you get a new paradigm through a filter like that?  How can you even be yourself in a setting like that?  I have gone away from many of these events wondering who I am, or if I exist.

So I have spent a good deal of time this month dispirited, trying to find myself, trying to be true to our message and to be grateful for whatever opportunity there is to spread it.  At some events I have spiritually simply left the room.  I have spent some nights tossing in self-disgust or in despair for the world.  And at some events people have been so supportive, so responsive, that they have drawn the best out of me.  I have walked out more energized than I was when I went in.

Here’s the best part — everywhere we have gone, friends have shown up, new friends, old friends, many friends who shared the experience of Limits with us 20 years ago.  Former students now doing great things.  Fellow warriors from many kinds of battles.  One evening at Harvard Dr. John Edsall walked into the room to hear me — the Great Professor at the Harvard Biological Labs under whom I did my postdoc in 1969.  He’s now 90 years old.  I was so touched I could hardly speak.

It is as I have been permitted this month to relive our adventures of the past 20 years, and I have been able to see what a rich time it has been, full of wonderful people.  We are not alone in this endeavor.  Though I haven’t always been permitted or empowered to talk about love, in fact love has been surrounding us everywhere.

What with all my travels, I was only home for one lambing.  I came out one morning and discovered Rosemary with tiny white twins, a boy and a girl, still literally wet behind the ears.  There was nothing for me to do but towel off the babies and carry them into a barn stall, holding them down low so Rosie could keep her nose near them and follow.  Then I got some hay and some warm water laced with molasses (a special treat for new mothers).

That’s all you have to do when the lambing goes well.  That and watch to be sure the babies are finding their way to the nipple.  You can tell when they’ve made contact, because you hear a loud, satisfied sucking sound and their little tails start twitching around in utter (or udder) ecstasy.

All the other lambs arrived when I was on the road.  Don and Sylvia took good care of them.  Don turned out to be a conscientious midwife, even crawling out of bed at 3 AM when he heard the piping of small new voices out in the barnyard.  Only one ewe needed help.  Paprika’s big black singleton was arranged with one leg back.  (Normally they come out like divers, with their front legs leading, followed by their noses.)  One leg back is the most common malpresentation, and the easiest one to deal with.  The shoulder of the backward leg catches on the mother’s pelvic bone.  Usually a twist and a hard pull manages to free it.  Sylvia has a natural talent for dealing with animals, so she hauled Paprika’s lamb out with little trouble.  We had to give her a shot of antibiotic and some glycerin to pep her up afterward, but now she’s fine.

Don and Sylvia also pulled off a minor miracle, one I have never managed to achieve — they got a ewe to accept a bummer.  Brownie, our yearling, was the last to lamb.  Yearlings are not quite full grown and are totally inexperienced, so you have to watch them very closely.  Brownie managed to produce her lamb without any help, but then she didn’t know what to do with it.  In fact she didn’t recognize it as hers.

There’s a miraculous moment right after birth when the ewe licks off her lamb, which dries it and stimulates its circulation, and which also produces some kind of powerful chemical lock.  The ewe starts chuckling gently to the lamb — a low sound she never makes at any other time.  The lamb bleats back in answer.  At that moment they fall totally in love with each other.  They can identify each other by smell and sound ever after, even in a barnyard that is jumping with identical-looking ewes and lambs.  After that magic bonding, the ewe will drive away every other lamb, and she will rest content only when she knows that her own precious child is close to her.

Somehow that chemistry failed with Brownie.  Sylvia found the lamb still partly wrapped in its amniotic sac, and Brownie cruising madly around the barnyard looking for something she knew she had lost, though she didn’t know quite what it was.  I’ve seen this happen before, especially with yearlings, and the outcome is what we call a bummer — an abandoned lamb.  We have to adopt it and bottle-feed the poor thing every 3-4 hours day and night.  Bummer lambs are endearing, because they identify with people, not sheep.  “Everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go” was surely written about a bummer; they follow you around with great insistence.  But bummers are a lot of trouble in the short term, and in the long term, no matter how conscientiously you coddle them, they never grow well.  Ewes just make better lamb mothers than people do.

Sylvia and Don knew it was essential to get the colostrum, the first antibody-rich milk, into that lamb.  So they wrestled Brownie into a stall, and that’s where they began to have brilliant ideas.  Pay attention, everyone, in case you ever get stuck with a bummed lamb.

Because it’s a bother to milk a sheep by hand (they have such little udders you have to do it with 3 fingers and it takes forever), they rigged up a temporary stanchion, so Brownie was held tight standing up,  Her lamb could nurse all it wanted without her butting it away.  The lamb was strong and aggressive and took full advantage of the opportunity.  By the time I got home 24 hours later, the skinny little newborn tummy had filled right out and the lamb was dancing around, full of energy.  Brownie was very unhappy, but the lamb was off to a good start.

We tried letting Brownie loose at that point, hoping she’d settle down with her baby.  But she took one look at the lamb and knocked it off its feet.  It’s heartbreaking to watch a ewe bum a lamb.  The sweet little thing runs enthusiastically up to its mother, and its mother slams it against the barn wall.  It tries again and gets slammed again.  Well, we couldn’t let that go on.  I was ready to give up, when Don came up with the second brilliant idea.  “Let her out of the stall and back with the other sheep,” he said.  “That won’t make any difference,” I said, but there wasn’t much else to do, so I grabbed the lamb and we let Brownie loose.

She ran straight back to the spot where the lamb had been born and began searching for it.  We put the lamb back down, right there.  She butted it away and kept searching, but the clever little lamb managed to sneak in behind her back legs and get some sucks in anyway.  The lamb was bonded to the mother, and it was getting food, so we backed off and watched anxiously.

For a day that fool Brownie searched the barnyard bawling constantly for her lost lamb, with her lost lamb tagging right behind her.  It was so frustrating to watch — like the search for happiness, when it’s right there waiting for you to just wise up.  Somehow, sometime, the magical chemical signal clicked on — 48 hours after birth — I didn’t know it was possible.  By the next morning Brownie had stopped moaning and was chuckling to her lamb, who was getting bigger and stronger by the hour.

It was a happy ending to a good lambing.  Wally the ram did a good job.  Three sets of twins, four singles.  The barnyard is jumping with cute little fuzzies.  Wally also turned out to be the all-time wool champion of this farm — his fleece weighed 21 pounds when it came off today (admittedly, it was a little wet, but I’ve never seen more than a 15 pound fleece before).  If his babies pick up that characteristic, we’ll keep quite a few of them.

John and Don have begun to take apart the biggest beaver dam, the one that is diverting a substantial part of Blow-Me-Down Brook into our pasture.  They only dare take down a bit at a time, because there’s so much water impounded behind it that they could create a flood if it all goes at once.  Since I love to take down beaver dams, I’m hoping to help them out with the next stage in demolition this weekend — and plant the peas — and fill up the greenhouse with flats of flowers — and finish pruning the fruit trees — and get this newsletter mailed out — before I take off for Oklahoma and St. Louis.

Love, and happy spring! Dana