Dear Folks,
Last week we passed from November to Winter and there’s a sense of relief in the air. November (which can go on into December) is gray and stormy and the ground is bare. In November you know winter is coming and you scurry around preparing for it, getting the last of the wood in, leaving fence gates open so you can get through them in the snow, digging out boots and snowshoes and insulated mittens. Everything freezes and thaws and freezes and thaws. You never see the sun, and you get a little crabby — I do, anyway. It’s a time of anticipation. I never quite experience November, because I’m regretting the beautiful fall that’s past and preparing for the long winter ahead and trying to remember what sunshine looks like.
And then comes the big storm that marks the break — it came last Tuesday. The snow that falls is snow that will last till April. It will protect the roots from any more freezing and thawing. When the storm is over, a big Canadian high moves in, it pushes away the clouds, the temperature plummets to zero, and the sun shines! That’s the winter pattern at last: storm and shine, storm and shine, warm in the storm and cold in the shine with the sky blue, the air crisp, and the snow sparkling. Around here the snow is a friend and it’s welcome.
This morning I went out to do the chores just as the sun was coming up. It has a way of lighting up Mt. Ascutney in the morning after a new snow that makes the mountain glow and swell until, though it’s just a little 3000-foot hummock, it looks like an Alp. I crunched up the hill on the snow and all the animals were perky and waiting for me. The duck, who spends nights in the stall with the sheep, heard me through the barn wall and started cussing me out before I even got the door open. That duck has to comment on everything, and she approves of nothing.
I let her out and then I let the sheep out into the barnyard too. I had never done that before, because the Whybrows have horse fencing instead of sheep fencing, and Aida and Pamina, the yearling ewes, are still a little wild, and I was afraid they would run away. But I knew they wouldn’t go far in the snow. They came out hesitantly, with delicate little steps, wondering at all the white stuff. They were born last spring and had never seen snow before. They snuffled their noses in it and tasted it and bounced around in it and decided they like it. The chickens don’t; they hate snow on their feet and refuse to come out of their house. Freckles the horse snuffled at me and told me to hurry up and throw down her hay. She had been pawing at the snow, trying to dig through to the grass underneath, even thought there’s hardly any grass left in her yard. I think she just does it to keep busy.
Unfortunately when that winter storm came through I wasn’t home. I was in Washington and New York, trying to get home, which turned out to be quite an ordeal. The East Coast can get into some monumental snarls when there’s even a slight interruption in its normal tremendous flows of traffic. I spent a lot of time sitting in planes motionless on runways, getting soaked on New York streets trying to find taxis, and even standing in the snow in White River Junction, Vermont, waiting for an Advance Transit bus to slip and slide along on its rounds and take me from the Greyhound bus station across the river to the airport, where I had left my car in cloudy 40-degree weather just five days before, when it still felt like November.
My main reason for being in Washington was a meeting of the Committee on Population, Resources, and the Environment of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It’s a group of academic-types, economists, demographers, and such, who come together twice a year and in between do various projects together, write papers, put on meetings and workshops, and generally try to engage the academic community in practical global problems of the sort that you know interest me. The group is by no means in agreement — just having economists there along with me guarantees some clashes. But we are using the disagreements constructively, almost as a map of where the scientific community is uncertain, where more knowledge is needed, where disciplines blind people to certain kinds of information. We have been working together long enough now that we respect each other as people, and so we’re discovering how scientific disagreements can be interesting and even useful, once you stop taking them personally.
I stayed over an extra day to work with the National Geographic Society on the slides for my talk. Next month the NGS has its 100th anniversary, and they’re putting on a week-long symposium at their headquarters. The speakers are impressive — Daniel Boorstin the Librarian of Congress, Lewis Branscomb, Frank Press, James Reston (Scotty Reston, ace New York Times columnist — wow! to me the most important person in the whole bunch!), Swaminathan, Jerome Wiesner, Paul Ehrlich, Mohamed Kassas, Gilbert White, Peter Raven — all big stars in my academic firmament. I’m the only woman among them, unfortunately, and I have a heck of a topic — the past and the future of the Quality of Life.
The most fun part of this deal is that the NGS has encouraged us not just to get up and give a speech, but to make it visually interesting, and they’ve put their graphics department at our disposal! So I took them at their word and picked out 60 stunning slides from their collection of bout 50 million, to illustrate Quality of Life. They’re slides of a young Israeli couple in love, and a starving Ethopian baby, and dancers in Russia, and little boys in Brazil coughing from air pollution, and a Japanese couple playing with their children, and the London stock exchange, and political prisoners in El Salvador, and wounded Iranian soldiers, and a scientist with a model of a DNA molecule and — you get the idea. On Monday I worked with the crack team down there and we made up a show from the slides, using nine slide projectors, which is normal for them. We worked all morning to arrange it and then went down to try it out in the auditorium. It’s stunning! It moved me almost to tears. It was so great to work with the pros!
Since I’ve been back I’ve been working to get my paper on Quality of Life to be as good as the slides, and it’s not yet, not at all. I’m in that awful stuck place in my writing when I wonder if I’ll ever get it right, and I pace, and I snarl, and I wander around looking for distractions, and I groan, and I think why in the heck was it I wanted to be a writer anyway? I wonder what E.B. White would have done with this subject (dropped it like a hot potato) or Tolstoy or Wendell Berry. I wish I were all of them and not me. Quality of life! What on earth can you say about that? To such a glitzy audience? On a program with such eminent scholars?
The program is January 25-29, so in my February letter you’ll know how it all came out. I can hardly wait to find out myself.
After Washington I made it through the beginning of the storm to New York and actually entered the sacred halls of a SYNDICATE. United Features Syndicate, to be exact, the people who bring you Garfield and Peanuts and Jack Anderson. Their sales rep for New England keeps hearing newspaper editors compliment my column and has kindly brought it to the attention of his editors in New York (he has even sold a few papers for me, though he’s not supposed to do that). The people in New York said, “not interested”. Every six months or so I give them an opportunity to reconsider that decision, which they never do, but I went to visit them anyway, mainly to see what the inside of a syndicate looks like. It looks like the kind of support I wish I had in editing, selling, transmitting, and accounting for the column. But it’s also clear that the money is in cartoons and horoscopes and crossword puzzles and recipes, not in serious commentary. UFS has about 20 cartoonists but only 5 political columnists (none women, none on the environment, none on international affairs) and doesn’t want any more. Space on the editorial pages is too hard to compete for and pays too little for them to bother with.
Well, it was interesting to see a syndicate, anyway.
My last visit in New York was with the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, one of the few truly enlightened foundations in this country (meaning they think the same things are important that I think are important — organic agriculture, recycling, energy conservation, and basically ways that we can sustain life and civilization on this planet). They gave us a wonderful grant two years ago that allows young people in the twenty countries of the Balaton Group to visit other groups in other countries for purposes of training. We have done a lot with that grant — it helped bring six Hungarians to tour organic farms in the U.S., it let an Indian computer programmer work with our group in Scotland, it sent two young ladies from Thailand to Denmark and Germany, it brought a Chinese plant ecologist to study at Dartmouth, etc.
I visited the Noyes Foundation this time partly to discuss an extension of the grant, and partly to continue a conversation we’ve been having for some time about how foundations in general can help the whole movement toward ecological and economic sustainability. Talking with them is like talking with the members of the Balaton Group, it’s like being at home, it’s a partnership toward a large common goal — and that is so rare in any relationship with a funder. The Balaton Group has been lucky from the very beginning in finding such funders — Mark Horowitz of The Resource Group, Bill Moody of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Steve Viederman and Edith Muma of the Noyes Foundation. What a privilege it is to work with such people!
Well, I won’t bother to tell the story of getting back from New York to New Hampshire in the snow. I got back, anyway, only 20 hours later than I was supposed to.
The first ski tracks have just been laid down around Blow-Me-Down and Foundation Farms. Last night when I went over to Foundation Farm to take some Christmas cookies I had just baked, Richard and the kids were decorating a hemlock tree they had cut back in the woods. Kate and Helen get back from college this week. Ruth has been soaking her traditional English plum pudding with spirits. On Christmas eve all of us will get together around my piano to sing carols and drink hot spiced cider. On Christmas day John and I are going to help serve and clean up at the big community dinner in Lebanon.
It will be a lovely Christmas. I hope yours is too.
Love, Dana
