Dear Folks, It’s a gray Sunday morning, pouring rain onto fields of new grass that are almost blindingly green. The countryside is in its green-brown stage; the upper stories are still unleafed, but the ground is pushing up succulent biomass so fast that it satisfies even the hungry mouths of the lactating ewes and their lambs. In the front yard the daffodils are in bloom but not yet the narcissus. Drifts of blue scylla are scattered over the perennial bed, but the buds of the wild shad trees above them — always the first trees to bloom in the spring — are still tight shut. They’re ready to open on the next warm sunny day. It won’t be today.
Inside we’ll have apple blossoms open today. When I prune I like to stick some of the branches I’ve cut into a big crock of water. On our kitchen table they open weeks before the outside ones do. Inside we also have blooming geraniums in the greenhouse. John Zimmer designed that greenhouse years ago when he lived here. He still kindly comes over in the spring to put it up and in the fall to take it down. In exchange I start seedlings for his garden.
The day the greenhouse goes up is always an occasion. It’s a simple but ingenious three-sided affair with a slanted roof that fits up against the big garage door that opens into the basement (which we put in so we could get cars inside for repair in the winter). We’ve replaced its plastic cover over the last two years, so it’s almost like new. The minute the shelves are up I move down most of the seedlings that are bursting out of my bedroom upstairs — all but the tomatoes, peppers, dahlias, and melons, which still need the heat of the house. Then, as long as there’s greenhouse space still unfilled, I happily go about planting ten zillion more seedlings. Right now the shelves are covered with onions, petunias, lettuce, broccoli, kohlrabi, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, herbs, pansies, and about ten other kinds of flowers, and later today I’ll go down and plant a lot more. That’s one farm job I can do in the rain.
Some day, when I’m rich, I’m going to build a big, permanent, heated greenhouse. And then you may never hear from me again, unless you come visit the greenhouse.
This year the greenhouse went up on April 7, and the sun was shining, and it was 70 degrees. I went bonkers and went ahead and planted some of the outside garden too. It was two weeks earlier than I have ever done that before, except for the first year we lived here, 1972. Then I went out on an unusually warm April 9 and planted lettuce, and all the neighbors laughed at me. They were right. The poor baby lettuces froze solid and never recovered. Since then I’ve restrained myself from planting until the end of April. Most years that was easy, because the snow wasn’t off the garden until the end of April.
But this year, with my sad faith in the greenhouse effect, I asked Karel on glorious April 7 to till the upper garden patch, the first to dry in spring, the one we use for a kitchen garden. The soil was warm and fragrant and perfect for planting. So I took a chance and filled up the whole thing with early crops — spinach, lettuce, radishes, carrots, beets, leeks, parsnips, dill, parsley, and the second crops of broccoli and kohlrabi (the first are already well started in the greenhouse). We covered a few things with plastic, out of nervousness at what we had done. But the temperature stayed in the 60s for a week, and everything germinated. It looks like I’m going to get away with it. Given what that means for the planet, I can’t really be too happy. It’s nice to have two more weeks at each end of the growing season, but we’ll see what that implies for our weather in July, and for the long-term health of the ecosystems around us.
The lambing is done and the sheep are sheared. It was one of the worst lambings we’ve ever had — only eight lambs from eight ewes. We lost two lambs, both the second in a set of twins. I would be upset about this — I aim for a 200% lambing, and this was only 100% — but I have declared this the year to restore the pasture, which has been overgrazed. So I’m bowing to the wisdom of nature, which is telling me decisively to cut the flock. I’m going to sell two ewes and three lambs as soon as they are weaned, so we will carry only six ewes and five lambs this summer. Don spent all yesterday putting spreader-loads of horse manure and wood ash on the pasture. So we should be setting up for a much better lambing next year.
Jim Mason showed up yesterday afternoon, in his usual sudden fashion. He’s the sheep shearer. He’s built like a Sumo wrestler, with bulging muscles in the shoulders, arms, and back, which is just what you need when you shear thousands of sheep every year. I’m not sure what Jim’s shearing range is these days — he used to follow spring right into the southern hemisphere, hitting New Zealand in their spring, which is our fall — but I think he only covers the state of New Hampshire now. Anyway, he keeps in his head a map of where every flock in our valley is. If there are new flocks, or if old ones are sold off, the neighbors tell him, and he revises his mental route.
He pulled his rattletrap car into our driveway about midday yesterday. As usual he had a kid with him, this time a four-year-old named Katy, who had fun playing with Heather. Karel saw him first and yelled, “Sheep shearer’s here,” and we started hustling.
I ran to the basement to get the wool bags, the marker, and the scale. By the time I got to the barnyard Karel already had a bucket of grain and was leading the sheep into the barn — all except Godiva and her lamb, who were being independent-minded. We had to catch her and walk her in, Don and Karel heading off a breakaway from in front, me pushing from behind.
Jim Mason plugged in his shears and the routine began. He waded into the pen and snagged a fat, woolly, struggling ewe. Sylvia and I found her lamb and got it out into the barnyard, out of calling distance. I marked a bag with the ewe’s name, Karel started stuffing wool into it as it came off the sheep, Sylvia worked barn door and pen gate to let shaved sheep out while keeping unshaved ones in. Karel weighed and marked each bag as it was done. I rushed to sweep away the ragged remnants of leg and face wool, not good enough for the bags, before Jim hauled the next ewe into place.
We had a moment or two to breathe in this routine, but Jim Mason never stopped. He flipped the sheep with one arm (Don is the only one of us who can do that without help, and it takes both his arms), grabbed the whining, lethal shears, and waded into the wool, twisting and turning the sheep with one arm and legs and shoulders, while making long sweeps with the other arm. The principle is the same as judo, knowing just how to apply the least force to redirect the force of a kicking 150-pound opponent. It’s an amazing thing to see. The wool peeled off like a blanket, showing us its real color and quality on the inside where it’s not sun-bleached or tangled or dirty. When Dennis used to do the shearing, with help from the rest of us, it would take about an hour a sheep and then we’d have to stop to rest. Jim does it in about 4 minutes and then grabs the next one.
When it’s all over there’s a lot of desperate yelling in the barnyard, because the lambs have to learn all over again to recognize their mothers. We have to stand there and remind ourselves who’s who too. The great fuzzy blimps of a month ago are now, without lambs and without wool, clean-lined goat-like creatures that weigh 20 pounds less. They’re going to be much more comfortable now.
Well, from reading the above you’d think I’d spent the whole month farming, but of course I really spent it sitting in front of the word processor. The poor textbook is back on the shelf again, while I have been working on the reprint of Limits to Growth. (Limits has to take precedence, because we’re aiming for published books by its exact 20th anniversary, next March 6.) I am surprised at what exciting and emotional work this is turning out to be.
It’s emotional because Dennis came up to Dartmouth about a month ago and unearthed from the basement where he had stored them, files and files of papers from the 15 years of the Resource Policy Center, which he ran here. Most went to the dumpster (historians will never forgive him), but many boxes of records and reviews and criticisms of Limits went to my office. Reading them has been an emotional roller-coaster. It’s sweet to remember those exciting days, our young and happy and wonderful team, our earnestness and our surprise as our work suddenly turned into a global event. It’s also frightening to read, all in one sitting, what the media did with what we said, how little listening or thinking they did, how eager they were to turn us into attention-getting headliners of doom. It’s disgusting to read some of our critics, and stimulating and thought-provoking to read others. Above all, it’s touching to read some of the writings, public and private, of those who leaped to our defense.
For awhile there, in early 1972, the world really was discussing the big, long-term issues — growth, population, environment, resources, progress, equity, where we are all going, what scale the planet can accommodate — the centrally important things, the context within which all smaller issues take their places. Wow! It was really exciting! I’m even more excited now, reading it over, than I was then, because then I was too much in the middle of it to understand all that was happening. And I’m tremendously sad and mad to see how that discussion was inexorably trivialized, diluted, suppressed, and finally ridiculed by those who felt that it threatened their short-term interests.
Awe-struck, sentimental, excited, sad, mad, scared, disgusted, uplifted. That’s how I’ve been in my office this month. Mainly I’ve come out fighting. We’ve GOT to re-issue Limits! We’ve GOT to try to start that discussion again! We’ve GOT to learn from what happened last time and head off the diversions and keep the discussion on track!
So, burning with missionary zeal, I’m finding that a new book, which we call for our own amusement Son of Limits, or Twenty Years Closer to the Limits, is pouring out of me. Discussions among Dennis, me, and Peter Matson our agent, are beginning to solidify around the idea of bringing out three separate items next March. 1. A reprint of the old Limits, but with charts and graphs updated. Computer runs will probably not be changed; there’s nothing in them that needs changing. 2. Son of Limits, which will be another book, roughly the same length, a more personal and personable account of the creation of Limits, its message, what happened afterward, and how we view, twenty years later, the prognostications we made then, how we would answer our critics — and why the whole discussion was a paradigm conflict that is far from over. 3. A computer disk and small workbook that will allow anyone to put the World3 computer model up on their PC and do their own experiments.
Dennis will do #3. I will do the preliminary writing on #2 and we will see later whether we want to make that a joint publication or just mine. Together we will do #1. I am so fired up with this, so grateful to be able, after all these years, to take on all the nonsense arguments (technology will save us, the market will save us, travel to outer space will save us, we need growth to end poverty, we need growth to clean up pollution) and answer them in one place, that I almost resent any other incursion on my time, except farming of course. I have an outline now and three draft chapters of Son of Limits, and Peter is beginning to negotiate for a publisher.
Speaking of publishers, I received this week a hot-off-the-press copy of The Global Citizen, which, I am told, will be in bookstores by mid-May and will be publicized by mid-June. I took one look at it and knew I had made a dreadful mistake. I was too polite and too trusting. I had asked Island Press to let me approve the cover, but somehow in their scurry to get the book out, and despite my repeated requests, they never showed me any covers under consideration. The one they chose is, to my eyes, a complete disaster. You’ll see it, if you buy one of the first 5000 copies printed. It’s the book that looks just like a detergent box. Bright yellow and green and blue and red and noisy and tasteless and perfectly appropriate for a trashy novel.
I was just horrified. It was “Race to Save the Planet” all over again, only this time I couldn’t take my name off it. The marketers are at it again. The awful positive feedback loop grinds on — they scream, so you scream louder, so they scream louder, so the marketplace is filled with nothing but screams. The cover of that book is an insult to the senses and the intelligence; it’s a complete antithesis of everything inside it. I crawl with embarrassment every time I look at it.
I was too polite again. Instead of calling Island Press and demanding that they rebind the whole business — and have to wait more long months for the book’s release, which is already coming 4 months later than they promised, I merely insisted, in a remarkably quiet but icy tone of voice, that they change the colors on all future reprints. They are working on it.
So I apologize to any of you who have already ordered the book and will have to live with that atrocity on your coffee table. I suggest you cover it over with your own cover, or wait for the second printing (assuming there is one), or buy the hard copy, so you can take off the dust jacket. It’s a nice simple blue inside. I swear I will never publish another word without veto power over the cover.
Well, in contrast to that disappointment, I had one real treat this month. I did something I rarely do; I accepted a speaking engagement. They come at me at the rate of 3-4 a day, and I routinely say no to all of them, because I hate speaking, and because when I’m talking I can’t be writing. But this one I accepted, partly because it promised to pay enough to cover an enormous plumbing bill I knew was coming up (had to replace and replumb our hot water tank), and partly because I liked the sound of it over the phone. It was at Trinity College in Burlington VT. Trinity is a small school, mostly for women, mostly to prepare them to be teachers, run by a convent of Sisters of Mercy. They are devoting a whole year to studying the environment, and they wanted me to be their wrap-up speaker.
Well, I loved the place. I was bowled over by Sister Janice, the President, who is a no-nonsense liberation theology nun in a business suit. She manages to be hard-nosed and loving all at once. The students were polite and innocent and sweet. The faculty, which includes non-Catholics and men, is into system dynamics and is not only using systems in teaching in many fields, but is beginning to put on systems workshops for high school teachers. So I had great fun with them, encouraging them and admiring what they are doing.
And, a wonderful surprise, I happened to mention my experience with cancer and my desire to set up a Cancer Resource Center to help patients at Mary Hitchcock Hospital. It turns out that Sister Janice is on the Board of a similar center forming around the University of Vermont medical school. They’re way ahead of us; they’re just about to start up! They’ve incorporated oncologists and alternative practitioners and the business community in a wonderful way! It was SO encouraging to know that there will be such a center so close, and that they’re willing to work with us to get our center started! I came home full of energy and hope!
One thing I noticed during my two days at Trinity was how much I appreciate the energy of a place that’s run by women, and by people whose first commitment, above all others, is to be moral. It’s hard to put into words the FEELING, the exact distinction between the ambiance of Trinity as opposed to Dartmouth, for instance, or almost any other organization I’ve been part of. I noticed it from my first moments on the Trinity campus, and I savored it the whole time. It’s a softness in human relations, but also an incredible practicality, more practical, actually, than places that claim to be ruled by the bottom line. It’s an ease in conversation, less posturing, more authenticity. It’s a clarity in decision-making — you just start by asking what’s Right, you don’t have to argue for what’s Right over what’s expedient. It’s a firm sense of community and commitment to something larger than one’s own self.
I loved it. I felt right at home, which is pretty strange, given my firmly non-Catholic upbringing. I was reminded of how lovely it was to live with Anna, my dear feminist-liberal Catholic friend, who would happily argue theology with me by the hour. I was also reminded of my own thirst for community, which, though I live in one and serve many others, is never quite satisfied. That’s a message for me, one that comes up often, and one I need to listen to.
Well, there’s much to do. I’m off to Denmark in a few days to help Niels Meyer, a wonderful member of the Balaton Group, with an international energy conference. You’ll hear about that, and probably read some columns inspired by it, next time.
Love to you all!
Happy spring! Dana
