September 7, 1998, Foundation Farm
Dear Folks, What was it I said last month about losing something you love and then turning around to see what needs loving next?
We have a CALF!
A JERSEY HEIFER CALF!
When she arrived yesterday she was FOUR DAYS OLD! About half the size of our dog Emmett. Little doe-eyed thing with round ears and a maple-syrup-colored coat. Skinny. A bit skittish, but calmed right down and started sucking when Kerry brought out a bottle to start fattening her up.
I’m so tickled! I have always wanted a Jersey cow on this farm, but never quite dared to get one. The schedule of a milking cow does not exactly mesh with my schedule. But this one won’t be ready to milk for two years at the soonest, after we move to the new farm. And she’s not my cow (though I hope to help with her), she’s Kerry’s and Stephen’s. They have been talking cow for some time. Kerry managed somehow to sweet-talk an old farmer in Woodstock into giving her this one.
BREAKING BULLETIN: Kerry has just announced that her name is Maple.
It is the height of golden September, one of the loveliest times around here, sunny days, chill nights, the sun moving toward the equinox, so low in the sky that the shadows of the tallest pine trees are starting to fall on the garden again. The last precious weeks before the frost. The weeks of greatest abundance, with the knowledge of increasing scarcity ahead.
Sunflowers tower over the garden, visited by swooping flights s of sweetly chirping goldfinches, which hang upside down from the flowers and eat out all the seeds. Marigolds and dahlias are at their peaks; mums are just starting to bloom. Every day I pick late raspberries and broccoli and white Dutch runner beans to stuff into the freezer and tomatoes to stuff into jars. Stephen and I have been digging potatoes and stuffing them into the root cellar. Many kinds of potatoes. Once you start really tasting them, just one kind won’t do. Russian Banana and Finn Rose fingerlings (for potato salad and oven fries. Yum!) Frontier Russets (big bakers). German Butterballs (mashed potatoes that look and taste like they’ve got butter in them when they don’t). Yukon Golds, Green Mountains, Red Norlands (for all purposes).
The barn is hung with drying onions; the tractor shed is hung with drying garlic. I’ve covered one back porch table with dry beans, which I’m starting to shuck into glass jars. I like putting them in glass, so I can see the pretty colors. Dark red Kidneys. Mottled pink Vermont Cranberries. White Soldier beans. Black and tan Rattlesnakes, light brown Kentucky Wonders, big spotted Wren’s Eggs. Yes, those all are beans!
I’ve also been stuffing roosters into the freezer. Not my favorite job, but one can learn to make an art of it, an art that acknowledges the beauty of the young birds and the clever way they’re put together (which I admire as I take them apart). I don’t raise many roosters, just 11 this year, the prettiest one of which I’ve left to fertilize the eggs and entertain us with his crowing. The others are now in the freezer. We don’t eat much meat, but every now and then in the winter, when half of us are going around sniffling, chicken stew starts sounding good — and our tender cockerels, which grew up eating good grain and green garden scraps, taste like real chicken, not like the output of a chicken factory.
Meanwhile I’ve integrated the rest of this year’s chicks, now grown into beautiful Black Australorpe laying hens, into the adult side of the chicken house, since they’re about to start laying. Chicken sociology requires a period of turbulence after I do that, while a literal pecking order is re-established.
There have been people changes at Foundation Farm too. Kim Christiansen has moved out. He came last March, in a trial separation from his wife, hoping to get some perspective with which to put his marriage back together. It was a sad time for him, and we gave him all the help we could, but the marriage is now ending, and he needs more support than we can provide. He won’t be far away, we part friends, I pray for him.
I don’t think I’ve properly introduced Jen’s boyfriend Ben, who now lives here, though I mentioned last month the fact that the household has filled up with exquisite Simon Pearce glassware. Ben is an apprentice glassblower, just about to move up to the senior category. He takes glassblowing very seriously. Though it’s a physically demanding job (you can go watch them work — raging furnaces, glowing molten globs that have to be constantly rotated or they’ll drop to the floor and shatter, tricky maneuvers with long sticks and precise instruments), Ben puts in extra time to try out his own designs. He also goes off to study with other glassworkers (who use colored glass for example — Simon Pearce uses only clear glass). He designed and made an exquisite cake plate for Stephen & Kerry’s wedding.
Last weekend Jim Hourdequin also moved in. He graduated from Dartmouth this June, one of those amazing students Dartmouth blesses me with from time to time. (Some of those former students happen to subscribe to this newsletter!). Jim was not only a good student, he was (and is) a wildly effective promoter. When he was a sophomore he persuaded the powers that be at Dartmouth to start an organic farm — which is now going strong. His junior year he interned with an environmental group that was working to set up responsible forestry rules in New Hampshire and to ban aerial spraying of herbicides over the forest. He spent much of his senior year organizing a cooperative of Vermont and New Hampshire loggers to set up their own workman’s compensation insurance — because independent loggers can lose a third of their income to workman’s comp. Now he plans to spend a year working with one of the loggers, learning that business.
Heaven knows what he’ll be up to next! I’m glad I get to watch.
So it’s a young, energetic household. I’m not sure I can keep up with it. But, even more than ever around here, there’s never a dull moment.
September 8, 1998, Lufthansa, somewhere between Boston and Frankfurt
BREAKING BULLETIN: We now have THREE CALVES!!!
Kerry decided that if she was going to bottle-feed one calf, she might as well get a little herd started. And Maple seemed lonely. So she and Stephen went to a registered Jersey farm and bought two more. One’s a week old, the other’s a month old.
When I left, early this morning, they hadn’t arrived yet, so I won’t get to see them till I get home in a week. (I hate to leave with all this excitement going on!) Rumor has it that their names will be Oak and Linden.
On my way to the Boston airport I spent the day in Concord NH at the Northern Forest Center. It’s a new nonprofit that intends to be a clearinghouse and educational center for players (town officials, loggers, paper companies, sawmill owners, environmentalists) in the forest economy of northern NY, VT, NH, and ME. Our new Sustainability Institute has formed a partnership with the NFC for our forest commodity project. We will make systems models of the forest, its growth, the harvest and flow of the trees to paper, boards, etc., and all the economics, including the impact of the global forest products market on New England. (That impact is growing. The land is increasing owned by distant money-managers who buy and sell it in million-acre chunks. Pulp is now being shipped from Brazil to supply east coast paper mills.) The NFC will be our link to advisors and clients in the region and will be the repository of the models, papers, games, and policy ideas we, working with them, will generate. This is all the more fun because another former student, Laura Tam, works at the NFC (and so does Dan Viederman, the son of my friend Steve Viederman). Yet another former student, Drew Jones, is part of the modeling team.
Yesterday I spent the day working on another wing of the commodity project, the shrimp model. That one’s the farthest along — we have a preliminary working model — but my team is departing (MIT post docs going off to professorships, parenthood, and other distractions), so I had to find a new team and transfer the flag (the model, the learning, and the enthusiasm). We had a good meeting, and I think we’re in motion again with a new team that is located near me in the Upper Valley instead of in Boston. That will make my life considerably simpler.
I have never managed any organization before; I have spent my life studiously avoiding administrative jobs of all sorts. I don’t like telling people what to do, I don’t like being boss, I don’t like papers and rules and reports and records. So now I find myself managing not only a new institute with an ambitious research program and a significant budget, but a virtual institute, with no office or secretary, and with staff in Boston and North Carolina — and now the Upper Valley. Why do I do these things to myself?
Because I feel an absolute Call to do so, that’s why. And in a year or two, when we move to the new farms, we’ll have an office there in the Hunt farmhouse.
September 10, 1998, Csopak, Hungary
Here I am on the shore of Lake Balaton for the 17th annual Balaton meeting. It’s the end of the first day, as always full of the buzz of 50 old and new friends, all trying to talk and listen fast enough to catch up on a year or a lifetime of news. I’m about to fall over from jetlag, so this is just a quick login.
How on earth to get across the mounting excitement of Balaton? The meeting actually started at Logan airport, where three other Balaton members joined me for the Frankfurt flight. One more came on for Frankfurt-Budapest, and at the Budapest airport there was my dear friend Joan, waiting for us. Over the next two hours, as planes came in, the group grew to around 15, and the conversation deepened and speeded up. Never mind that we’ve been up all night on our various planes and it’s now 4 am back home. How are you, how’s your family, how’s your work? What’s happening in Thailand after the economic crash? How are you managing in the chaos of Moscow? What’s the latest Dutch energy plan? How is South Africa doing after its great revolution?
It’s amazing to remember, when I get back together with these friends from around the world, how many major revolutions they have lived and are living through. For the East Europeans and Russians, of course, their revolutions continue. (Vladimir Kollantai is trying to find CNN, to see who his new prime minister will be.) The Asians are trying to stay upright in the waves of their economic collapse. Joan Dutoit tries to do energy forecasts for the new South Africa. Qi Wenhu from China has lived through the Cultural Revolution and Tianenmen Square and now the coming of capitalism. (His institute forecasts that China’s economy will grow by a factor of FIFTY over the next 40 years, and the GDP per capita will be $11,000. Wenhu personally doesn’t believe that for a minute.)
The fifteen of us constituted the first bus to our resthouse on the lake. When we got there, we sat out on the terrace and sang with Alan AtKisson and welcomed the others as they pulled in. The second bus arrived at about 9 pm. By then it was 3 in the afternoon, home time, and I was getting my second wind. But now I am going to go and lose consciousness!
September 12, 1998, Csopak, Hungary
Whew!
I’m going to have to give up describing this meeting as it goes. If you really want it in detail, ask me for a copy of the fall Balaton Bulletin, which will somehow get processed out of my dozens of pages of notes during the 2 weeks or so following the meeting. All I can do at the meeting is stay in the moment, not try to distill or process anything, just try to keep the channels open for new information to come in.
Nanda Gilden is here, Wouter Biesiot’s widow. (For those of you new to this letter, Wouter died of cancer last April.) It’s her turning point, as she herself says, a completion and a time of beginning. She had never been to Balaton, though she met many of us as we entered her household in the Netherlands to say good-bye to Wouter. She felt she wanted to come here, because we had a small ceremony for him at our opening session, and because he had always spoken so glowingly of these meetings, and because she wanted to meet his friends, and because she felt it would help her to find her way back into life. Nanda is herself a chemist and a consultant to many major European companies on environmental matters, so she belongs here in her own right. She is loving the people here, joining in the evening singing (she has a beautiful voice), having long and sometimes tearful talks with those of us who remember Wouter so fondly, and coming very much alive. It’s one of many small Balaton miracles to see this happen.
Jorge Zalles is a delightful newcomer, a Peruvian, now working in Ecuador, but recently returned from a BirdLife International Project that had him tracking hawk migration patterns between North and South America. Jorge is young, bright, articulate, enthusiastic as a puppy. He’s cornering everyone at the meeting and learning all he can from each one. I can see the group reacting: “this one’s a keeper.” We will do all we can to support him, bring opportunities to him, help him become a leader in his part of the world — as we have done to other young people, many of whom are now leaders of Balaton.
Gilberto Gallopin, on the other hand, is an old-timer who should have been part of Balaton long ago, but we’ve just managed to make the connection now. Gilberto is an Argentinian currently working in Sweden. (Many of the group move around like that; they are really global citizens!) He was involved in one of the first global computer models, back in the ‘70s, the only one made by people from the non-industrialized world. Now he’s been leading a global long-term scenario project (without computer modeling), which he presented to us in a plenary session this morning.
Gilberto’s scenarios lay out well the futures the Balaton Group most believes are possible. He sketched out the “reference scenario” — exponential growth with no major changes, the official forecasts of the World Bank, the IMF, the UN. Then he trashed it. We can be sure that won’t happen, he said. It’s patently unsustainable. Then he talked about two much more believable futures: “breakdown and barbarization” on the one hand, “great transition” to sustainability on the other.
This was refreshing to us, because the purpose of the meeting was to comment on the 100-year-future energy scenarios that have been painstakingly put together by an international team for the IPCC. The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the group of hundreds of scientists worldwide that revisit the science and make a pronouncement about global climate at what is turning out to be 5-year intervals. They’re working on the third of these scientific consensus statements now. They use several massive climate models (called GCMs, for General Circulation Models) to simulate the world climate under various assumed futures — double the greenhouse gas concentration, ramp it up more slowly, etc. The climate models have to be given as inputs some assumed futures of greenhouse gas emissions from the world economy — and that means some plausible or interesting guess about the future economy. energy technologies, energy prices, and energy uses — for 100 years. Where can these scenarios come from? From other models, including the ones in our heads.
Bert de Vries, a Dutch Balaton member, is on the panel of experts that has come up with these energy scenarios, four of them, all of which assume a smooth exponential run-up of greenhouse gases at different rates. (At the end of the scenarios they range from 450 to 750 ppm CO2 equivalent — for comparison, we’re at about 360 now, and were at 270 100 years ago.) Our job at the Balaton meeting was to see if we could come up with better, more likely, more interesting test scenarios.
We quickly threw out the IPCC scenarios and indeed the whole paradigm behind them. It is a familiar paradigm, clearly revealed by the name they gave to the highest-growth option: “Golden Economic Age.” (It had been called “Tiger World,” but then the Asian Tiger economies collapsed, so they changed it.) Business as usual, the global market triumphs, industrialization penetrates every corner of the earth, we all burn more fossil fuels. As Bert described the process that generated these scenarios, it became apparent that the whole exercise is a desperate attempt to show that the growth-forever paradigm can somehow be shown to be compatible with an acceptable climate. Scenarios like Gilberto’s — economic collapse or a real change to a sustainable, non-materialistic, future of “enough” were, Bert said, taboo in the official discussions.
So interesting! So sad, really, how very hard people have to work and believe and screen out contradictory evidence to keep the growth paradigm alive!
Well, the Balaton Group is not wedded to the growth paradigm, so we had a great time poking holes in it and coming up with our own scenarios. For awhile we kept the IPCC’s nomenclature and called them Al (business as usual) and B2 (transformation to true sustainability). Then, like the public relations experts we aren’t, we began playing with the names. What we came up with tells you a lot about our paradigm!
A1 B2
dominant eagle wise owl
Blade Runner Ecotopia
more bigger faster enough for everyone
to have to be — 2B — two bee
isolated individual community
market future value future
Tyrannosaurus Rex emerging mammals
competition cooperation
materialistic humanistic
Viagra hugs
achieving being
Titanic Kon Tiki
more stuff more love
the impossible dream the future to be (2B)
Keep in mind that this is a group of people from India, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Russia, Hungary, Latvia, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria, Kenya, South Africa, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Argentina — just in case you wonder whether it’s just aging U.S. hippies who envision a 2B world. Balaton reminds me every year that I’m not working toward a future wanted only by a small group of privileged, overeducated, Northern people like me (something that A1 folks often accuse me of). Quite the contrary, I’m working for a future that the vast majority of humankind actively wants, and they, the A1 megamerger globalizers, are working for a future that reflects only their crimped set of values (based on money and power) — a future that is in any case physically impossible.
Well, there’s much more to tell you already, but I’m losing steam. Balaton week is an exercise in accumulated sleep deficit. So much goes on, on both the human level and the intellectual level. We think together and we grow into better and better friends. We have workshops on electricity deregulation and environmental education and eco-villages (that one was very spirited! it’s another thing happening around the world!), and then we have deep, quiet talks, in twos and threes, walking along the lake or sitting in a quiet corner, looking into each other’s eyes, reminding ourselves of who we are and what we are jointly working for.
Newcomers are always amazed. It feels different from any other meeting. One of the presenters today said something about how we must learn to create institutions in the world that bring out the best, not the worst, in people. I don’t know how, but somehow I think we have done that with the Balaton Group.
September 20, 1998, Foundation Farm
BREAKING BULLETIN: We still have only three calves, but further discussion changed their names. The littlest one is still Maple. The middle-sized one is Butternut (a great name for a Jersey, a cow known for its high yield of butterfat). The oldest and largest (though still not very big) is Linden. It looks like they might be all the cows for awhile, though Stephen and Kerry are talking of an eventual herd of ten. And I’m thinking I might like a little Brown Swiss heifer of my very own, if I can find a good one at a reasonable price. To go with the tree theme, I’d call her Ash.
Anyhow, they’re happily ensconced in the barn, little tail-twitching sucking machines, putting down a quart of milk apiece at each feeding and beginning to discover the joys of grain and grass. They are SO CUTE!!!
Balaton concluded with our usual final banquet full of funny awards (for the Most Incomprehensible Slide of the meeting, and a new one for the First Travel Information Form Returned to Betty Miller, our organizer and accountant). Alan AtKisson sang his new Systems Song (he can write a song about anything!), with an animated back-up group consisting of Nanda Gilden, Tony Cortese, and Vicki Robin. It was hard, as always, to say good-bye to everyone, but I’ll see an amazing number of them over the coming year, including at the steering committee meeting at Joan’s house in November. The steering committee has a lot to do, because my MacArthur grant is running out, so funding and the long-term future of Balaton is becoming a critical concern. We have plans that range from quietly ceasing to exist (would be easy; we have no infrastructure) to raising a $4 million endowment and doubling our budget and activities, to transforming ourselves into an international consulting group with offices in many countries (something that’s already happening a little). The group feels so solid, so much in rapid motion, so productive, that somehow I think we’ll keep going.
COMMERCIAL MESSAGE: (It just occurred to me to put this in here! I am not a natural promoter!) The first publication to the Balaton Group (which is how our publications will work), printed and distributed by the Sustainability Institute (also a first for us) is now available. “Indicators and Information Systems for Sustainable Development,” by yours truly. It’s a report (much embellished by me) of the Balaton workshop on sustainability indicators we had 18 months ago. Cost $10/copy (78 pages). There will be more Sustainability Institute publications coming. I’ll try to remember to tell you about them.
The farm is still in its golden time. I came home totally zonked from excitement and sleeplessness; it took a few days to get back onto the time zone and into the routine; but yesterday I felt fully home again, as I spent the day canning tomatoes, freezing peppers, picking apples and taking them over to be squeezed into cider, and cleaning out and reorganizing the freezers so we could fit the cider in. We get down to just one freezer during the summer, when freezers need a lot of electricity, but by now that one is stuffed with beans and corn and peas and broccoli and berries and lamb and chicken, and it’s getting cool enough to start up freezer #2, which stands on the back porch and doesn’t need to draw power for most of the winter — over which period we empty it again.
The root cellar is jammed with potatoes and winter squash. I have lots more dry beans to shuck. The fall greens have sprouted in the hoop house — we’ll be eating them through Thanksgiving. The last melons are ripening in there. Wild asters line the roadsides with smoky blue. The frost hasn’t come yet, so we still have great bouquets of dinner-plate dahlias. The days are so clear and crisp they almost ring. And I have a whole Balaton meeting to download out of my mind and experience, out of my joy and love and tears and hopes — so I’d better go get started.
Love, Dana
