September 20, 1992
Dear Folks,
Happy equinox!
It’s Sunday afternoon, a brilliant day, so heartbreakingly crisp that I think I’d better cover the tomatoes tonight. The garden, still unfolding slowly, could get cut down by frost any one of these clear nights.
That would be cruel; there’s so much stuff out there. The tomatoes didn’t start coming till the beginning of September. The fourth planting of sweet corn is just ready to eat. (What’s left of the first three is safely packed in the freezer.) Yesterday I brought in two of the three kinds of dry beans — the Vermont cranberry beans and a new one from Johnny’s called Marfax — but the third kind, the dark red kidneys, are still too fleshy and moist to harvest. The buttercup, butternut, kindred, and ponca squashes are put away in the root cellar, but the pie pumpkins out in the corn patch aren’t fully oranged up yet.
I can’t complain, even if the frost comes tonight. It’s been a slow year, but incredibly productive. I’ve been canning, pickling, or freezing something nearly every night. Crops that have normally pooped out by now, like cucumbers and zucchini, are still coming. Sylvia and I can hardly bring ourselves to pick any more broccoli or beans. I’ve never seen such a bountiful crop of late lettuce, spinach, and Chinese cabbage. I’m going to make a soup tonight of winter squash chunks, turnips, cabbage, and celery, with a garlic-ginger seasoning. Yum!
I have been exulting in this September, a glorious month here in any case, but special to me this year, because it stands as an island of calm between two intense bouts of travel. This whole month I don’t have to go anywhere. I can listen every night to the million-voice chorus of crickets and cicadas. I can watch the harvest moon wax full, hang over the house like a beneficent lantern, and wane. I can cruise the tomatoes every day and snatch away the ones that are beginning to turn pink, before the slugs make holes in them. (The cool, wet summer has been kind to slugs.)
What’s most fun at this time of year is watching the colors change. The Virginia creepers go first. They festoon the still-green shrubbery and trees with astonishing red streamers. Then the sumac bushes make a fiery orange hem at the lower edges of the forests. That’s the stage we’re just beginning now. Only a few maples have burst into flame. I love the early turners most, since each one stands out. Later, when the whole countryside goes ballistic, I get overwhelmed. But now my heart can get pierced by a single tree. Last week on another day as bright as this one, I was driving over to Meriden to pick blueberries, and I rounded a corner and saw my first fully-turned maple aglow in the afternoon sun. I burst into tears. There’s no other possible reaction.
I’ve been using the calm of this month to work on my never-finished textbook. I was enjoying the work and liking the result, until I came to the chapter on ecological economics. I’m having a hard time with that one, partly because it’s not my field and I’ve never tried to explain it before. (You always find out how poorly you understand something when you try to make it perfectly clear to others!)
But there are other patches in this book where I’ve run into new territory without trouble. I think my main problem is that I don’t WANT to understand economics — at least not the basic micro- and macro-economics I have to write about first, to lay the groundwork for ecological economics. I HATE conventional economics. The only economists I can stand to read are the dissident ones. I have a paradigm problem. I have a scientific problem. (It doesn’t match my experience of the world. I spent a whole day figuring out the theory of cost at the level of the firm — fixed cost, variable cost, average cost, marginal cost — and then had one short discussion with my publisher about the price of the paperback edition of Beyond the Limits, and realized that real firms NEVER have the information they need to draw all those neat theoretical curves.)
Above all, I have an emotional problem with economics. It doesn’t interest me. Beyond being sure I can pay the farm’s property taxes, I have a hard time getting worked up about money. I was born deficient, without the gene that spurs me on to that exquisite point where marginal cost equals price. Bucky Fuller summed up my feelings on the subject in one short sentence: “The grass doesn’t pay the clouds for the rain.” Gardens are much more interesting than GNPs.
Well, I have to get through this chapter, carefully, with as little disdain as possible, because nothing is more important to the planet right now than human devotion to human economic theory. So I’m slogging through. As a reward when I’m done I get to revise the two chapters on ecology.
The traveling ahead commences October 6 with a trip to Oregon for a Pew Scholars meeting. That will be fun, because I’ll get to hang out with some of the world’s best ecologists. I come home for two days and then I’m off to South Africa for a short week of conferencing and consulting. I’m looking forward to that. I love South Africa, both the magnificent land and the wonderful people, of all colors, who have to solve the world’s problem of 20% wealth amidst 80% poverty right in their own country — and who, I think, have a real chance of doing it. I haven’t been there for eight years, not since before the break-up of apartheid, and I’m delighted to have a chance to go back.
Straight from South Africa I’ll go to Europe and stay there till after Christmas. Right, I can hardly believe it either. Most of the time I’ll be at the home of my friends Hartmut and Rika Bossel in Germany. With Hartmut I’ll be teaching a seminar on sustainable development at the University of Kassel, but my main reason for going is to begin — and finish, I hope — another book. It will be a simple book on systems thinking, with a workbook incorporating a “systems zoo” that Hartmut has worked out — an ordered assembly of little pieces of systems — we call them “archetypal structures” — that help one learn the relationships between structure and behavior that govern all systems, from cells to organs to bodies to corporations to markets to economies to ecosystems (to the universe, I suppose). This will be the first book in the series I’m editing for Chelsea Green — “The Sustainable World Series.”
I’ll also be taking some side trips, to Denmark to launch the Danish BtL, to Holland to visit the Balaton centers there, and to Switzerland twice, once for the Balaton Steering Committee, and again at the end of my trip to spend the days around Christmas fasting with my friend Joan Davis.
Well, you’ll hear about these events as they unfold. With the help of my assistant Diana Wright over here, I expect to keep up this newsletter and my column, though I haven’t quite figured out how. If we mess up a few renewals or are slow at answering your letters for the next few months, please forgive us.
That’s where I’m going. You know where I’ve been, if you’ve been reading these letters for a few years. I’ve been to Balaton.
Full stop. What can I say that I haven’t said before? Especially since I’ve just finished a 50-page single-spaced newsletter summarizing the meeting, and THAT didn’t do justice to it?
Well. It was a great time, of course. It was ghastly hot in Hungary and dry. Our tribe gathered together as usual in a crummy student dorm in Budapest, where we who come across time zones always spend a night to recover, before boarding the bus to the lake.
The tribe is my professional family, my community of choice, people from all over the world who work on sustainability from a systems point of view. There are maybe 200 of them all-told, of whom 40-50 make it to Balaton each year. Niels and Jørgen from Denmark, Chirapol from Thailand, Carlos from Costa Rica, Joan from Switzerland, John from New Zealand — people whose names pop up in this newsletter, as I get involved in projects with them, or write columns based on their stories (such as the Maastricht column in this month’s collection).
We spend five days together in a little resthouse on the shore of Hungary’s big, polluted Lake Balaton. This was our eleventh meeting. We have morning plenary sessions — this year the theme was communication and education about sustainability. It evolved into a discussion about culture, myths, rituals, symbols, and songs — about the culture of sustainability. In the afternoons we self-organize into working groups on any subject anyone wants. What to do after Rio? How to program the systems zoo into the software teaching package we’re developing? How to organize a regional meeting in Latin America? What should be our stand on free trade agreements? In the evenings we drink wine, swim, watch the videos we’ve brought for each other, and sing songs from many lands, including those we make up.
The REAL meeting takes place at meals, and in the lake, and on long walks, and in the back of the bus, as we check in with each other as friends who are simply delighted to see each other again. That’s where all sorts of problems get worked out, great schemes get hatched, people plan what to do next with their lives, support gets generated — moral and financial and technical support. The process is spontaneous, magic, and incredibly effective. I watch it every year with awe. Its secret is ridiculously simple; it’s just the love that flows naturally out of a passionate commitment to a common cause much bigger than we are.
I love the Balaton people so much that sometimes I think I’m going to explode, surrounded by 50 of them at once. I get so moved, as Chirapol describes how he brought together 180 advertising executives and played their ads to them, and showed them where they were encouraging behavior that is bad for the environment. Or as Joan plays for us the little 2-minute cartoons she helped design for Swiss TV. Or as Niels describes the defeat of the Maastricht Treaty in Denmark. Or as Alan AtKisson sings us songs he has written, which capture our commitment and our feelings much better than all the words I’ve ever been able to put together.
Many Balaton members describe our meeting as a week in which they recharge their batteries. One of them once said it’s a week in which he transforms from a caterpillar to a butterfly. We blunder around with metaphors like that, trying to describe the power of love. For me, Balaton is the week when I get to be fully and continuously me — the me that wants to serve a great cause and to do it by pouring out love — the me that I often have to hide or that gets slapped down in the “normal” world, where love is not the organizing principle. At Balaton everyone knows who I am and what I’m up to, and I know who they are, and we honor each other, heart and soul. Even newcomers are swept immediately into that mode. It’s quite an experience. I like to picture the whole world working that way.
Well, it’s also an exhausting week, because I’m so high I don’t think about little things like sleep. I spent the day on the plane coming home napping, and in between naps I worked on my Powerbook, trying to consolidate all the new ideas I’d received, making lists of all I’d promised to do, and starting to type the next issue of the Balaton Bulletin.
There was something about the contrast this year, between hot, dusty Hungary and cool, green New Hampshire — when I arrived back at the farm I spent several hours just being dazzled. It was yet another brilliant fall afternoon, and the farm on its western slope was bathed in light. Everything looked neon-bright, especially the flowers. I wandered around the front yard that evening, drinking in the sight of phlox-mounds in their varied pinks, and the burst of big marigold puffs by the house. In the main garden the red and white dahlias were the size of dinnerplates. I felt so blessed, that I could go to a meeting like that, know people like the Balaton people, and come home to such splendor.
Meanwhile, back at the farm, Heather has turned FIVE!!!!! We had a party with balloons, bubbles, noisemakers, and chocolate cake.
Heather has also started KINDERGARTEN! Is there anything cuter than a little kid, in her best red plaid dress and her newest sneakers, with a little bookbag on her back and a purple My-Little-Pony lunchbox in her hand, skipping off gleefully to meet the schoolbus? Gregarious Heather loves both the ride on the bus and school. (“My teacher Mr. Woodcock knows how to JUGGLE RUBBER CHICKENS!”)
Sylvia walks around in shock on school mornings — “I have TIME to MYSELF!” She has enrolled in a Lebanon College course about publishing children’s books, and she’s excited. I’ve included here her tribute to Brownie, the Olympic high-jumper of our flock, and to Faith, the main character in what I hope will be Sylvia’s first published book.
In German BtL is #1 on the bestseller list in Austria, #3 in Switzerland, and has been between #8 and #13 all summer in Germany. In the US it has sold about 18,000 copies. In Dutch it has sold about 25,000 (to a population of 15 million!). There are now 14 languages in print or in preparation. There will be a paperback U.S. version by December, priced at $16.95, a number for which there is no rational micro-economic justification.
Both farm and Dartmouth will be in regular touch with me from October 6 to December 26, if you need to leave a message. Or you can reach me directly at:
D. Meadows c/o Hartmut Bossel
Center for Environmental Systems Research
Gesamthochschule Kassel
Mönchebergstrasse 21
D-3500 Kassel
GERMANY
office tel. (six hours ahead of U.S.!) 49-561-804-2519
home tel. 49-5606-8241
fax: 49-561-804-2330
email: meadows@usys.informatik.uni-kassel.de
Love, Dana
