Dear Folks, It’s 3:00 Sunday afternoon on the day of the solstice, the shortest day of the year. The house is quiet, momentarily. John and Brenna are away for a week at the homes of various relatives. Don is at work. He’s a house-painter and wall-paperer, and he has a rush job to be done by Christmas, so he’s working this weekend in exchange for days off this coming week. Sylvia is out in her house painting eggs. She blows out hen and duck and goose eggs and paints them with farm and nature scenes. They make delicate, beautiful tree ornaments. Of course she has a bunch of orders at this time of year.
Melinda and Heather and Melinda’s friend Steve have gone out sliding. They have just an hour or so before the light is gone. The day is warm, right around freezing, after a subzero week. There’s not a lot of snow, only a few inches, but that’s enough for sliding, which is Heather’s favorite sport. The night of the first snowfall Sylvia woke up at 5 in the morning to find her small daughter already dressed in snowsuit and boots, ready to go sliding. I saw them shoot past my window at 5:30 when there was barely any light in the sky. There have been several snowfalls since then. It looks like it’s going to be a much better winter than it was last year. In New England “better” means snowier.
Melinda met Steve in the Boston bus station within an hour of her arrival in this country. He works for the Navy in Los Angeles. They have been exchanging letters since; today is the first time they’ve seen each other since the bus station. He has come back East to be with his parents in Massachusetts for Christmas. He seems to be a decent and earnest fellow. He’s invited her to the Christmas service at his church.
We have a big tree up in the living room, but nobody has had time yet to decorate it. I have Christmas bread rising in the kitchen, and I’ve been playing Christmas music all day. Those are the two parts of Christmas I like: the baking and the music. Because of my eating disorder I don’t dare do much baking, but the music I can indulge in all I like. Beyond that I don’t do Christmas. I don’t send cards. I buy presents at any other time of year, but not at this time. I avoid shopping malls like the plague. I try to make the holidays a quiet, simple, spiritual time, insofar as that’s possible with a wildly excited four-year-old in the house. Her Grandma’s coming for Christmas and her Aunt Binky and cousins. I’ll cook a turkey and play carols on the piano, but those are the only two obligations I’ve taken on. I refuse to get hassled by Christmas, especially this Christmas.
If you’re noticing a somewhat more relaxed tone than you have heard in these letters for a long time, yes, you’re right, Beyond the Limits is (essentially) done! We delivered the first galleys, all set in QUARK, at noon on December 4, just a day and a half late, which was something of a miracle. In the afternoon of that day I wrote the week’s column and also a magazine article that was overdue (for Amicus Journal, the magazine of the Natural Resources Defense Council), both of them derived from data in the book. Then on December 5 Dennis and I took off for Switzerland for a meeting of the Balaton Group steering committee.
Thanks to my friend Joan Davis in Zurich, our steering committee meetings are unusually gracious and inexpensive. She manages to put up about 10 of us in her house, dormitory style, and we help (not as much as we should) cook simple but elegant meals. We hold our meetings around her long oval dining room table. Chirapol was there from Thailand, Aro from India, Dennis and I from the States, and the rest — Hartmut, Niels, Bert — names you have heard in these letters many times before — from Europe.
We always start out by exchanging news, and the news always amazes me. Joan is teaching community and canton-level workers in environmental management, in addition to her regular students in three universities, and she is helping a cartoonist make short TV spots on the environment. Chirapol has been conducting workshops for architects and engineers on energy-efficient buildings. He, too, is making environmental TV shows, two a week for a year to follow the evening news on Bangkok television. Aro has been helping in rehabilitation after an earthquake in the Himalayas; he is also preparing a report on the state of housing in all of India. Bert has prepared an authoritative report on the state of the environment in the Netherlands and is developing a greenhouse-effect game; Hartmut teaches 700 students a year and has been working with the government of Malaysia on sustainable forestry practices; Niels has been writing a global report on wind energy and giving speeches all over the world on energy policy in preparation for the Earth Summit next June.
By the time we got done sharing the news the networking had already begun. Everyone was interested in Joan’s TV cartoons — because they use no words, they can be adapted to all our countries. Aro promised to provide Niels with data on wind-power potential in India. Several people asked Hartmut for his simulation model of tropical forest growth. We all had ideas for Chirapol’s TV shows. And everyone began reading and commenting on Beyond the Limits for Dennis and me.
Over the weekend we settled the topic for next fall’s Balaton meeting (it will be environmental education for the public, a topic that especially pleases me because I won’t have to organize it; Dennis will — and we will get to show Joan’s and Chirapol’s TV spots). We handled policy decisions that needed to be made — not many, because Balaton is an informal and unbureaucratic network. We discussed funding, which is a critical problem at the moment. Before the meeting ended we had five computers operating at once writing reports and proposals. One of them was Joan’s, the others were portable laptops brought by others in the group.
One of those portables was MINE! The Pew Scholarship has allowed me to buy a new Macintosh Powerbook 140. It fits into my briefcase and, for the information of the computer buffs out there, it carries a 20 megabyte hard-disk and a turbomouse. I love it. I used it happily for 3 hours on the plane on the way home from Zurich before the battery ran out. (It’s rechargeable, and for long flights I’ll take to carrying an extra battery.) At the moment the Powerbook is in at Dartmouth having an additional 2 MB of RAM installed — it comes with only 2 MB, which is tight for running System 7 plus large applications.
Sorry for the technical talk, everyone else. I am really not much of a computer nut, always fascinated by the latest gadget. If I have a working computer that serves my needs, I see no reason to get a snazzier one. But this little portable is a wonderfully empowering tool for me. It’s like having an extra brain to carry around. I have all of Beyond the Limits in it, plus the World3 global model in STELLA, plus my library of Great Quotes, and the columns I’m working on, and the game SimEarth, and soon I’ll add my complete address book too, and I can take it all with me anywhere.
There is more computer upgrading in my future, courtesy of Pew. Having watched my book be transformed from WORD into QUARK, I am entranced with the possibility of doing my own professional page-making. My next investment will be to replace my old Mac Plus at home (upon which these letters and all columns have been written since 1986, and which is much too small to run QUARK) with a big new Mac (I haven’t decided which one), with a 40 MB hard disk and a double-page display. That will happen sometime this winter, after which you will be amazed at how beautiful these newsletters and the Balaton Bulletins will become!
Since coming home from Zurich I have been joyfully Cleaning Up. For two months I had been buried in book, neglecting farm and office, not reading mail, not answering the phone, not talking to friends, having to leave all sorts of physical and relational messes unattended to. It is giving me great pleasure to work, slowly but steadily, at putting my life back into some kind of order.
The first item on my neglected agenda was the beavers.
One of the great assets and liabilities of Foundation Farm is Blow-Me-Down Brook, which once powered the town gristmill just downhill from my present garden. It’s a big brook, which supplies the aquifer that gives us our water supply, and which has created the floodplain that is our main sheep pasture. The brook in flood is a major force, difficult to control when it decides to erode away the land around our well or to turn the pasture into a lake. The only ones who can control it are the beavers, and they do it for their own purposes, not mine. They think it would be a terrific idea to turn the pasture into a lake.
For twenty years we have been involved in hydrologic warfare with the beavers. The cease-fire line allocates 50 of the farm’s 75 acres to them. They have transformed that area into beaver heaven, a tangle of watery thickets, just about impenetrable to us, but home not only to beaver but to deer, raccoons, otter, foxes, and any other wild critters that care to move in. The problem is that as the beavers expand their population, they begin thinking about pasture-lake conversions. They plan beaver condos where the sheepshed now stands.
When Sylvia reported to me that a little stream was suddenly running through the lower pasture, I suspected that the beavers had struck again, but I was so busy with the book that I didn’t even go down to look for two months, until last Saturday.
Beavers can do a lot of damage if you turn your back on them for two months.
They have built an enormous dam beside the pasture, which accounts for the new stream now running over the grass. They are working on two dams lower down, one in the drainage ditch from our pond, the other where the ditch reaches the brook, backing up both. One or two more dams, and they’ll put not only the pasture but the whole of Daniels Road under water, the little hyperactive busybodies!
Don and I took one look and waded in, starting to pull the most downstream dams apart. This would have been a fine project in September; it was stupid one in December. After ten minutes my boots were full of icewater, after an hour I was soaked to the hips. But somehow, after two months in front of a word processor, I found thrashing around in a December stream terrific fun.
It’s thrilling to take a beaver dam apart. First of all, you’re working in the middle of a forceful waterfall, which changes its dynamics as you work. Second, you get to appreciate the amazing skill of the builders. They site their dams beautifully, usually with one big log to form a foundation. Then they haul in more logs and weave together alder twigs for the interstices. Big rocks get cemented into place with a mixture of bottom mud and fallen leaves. Don and I had to work for an hour with a rake, a pitchfork and a chainsaw to get just one of the smaller dams breached.
Eventually we retreated to the house, teeth chattering, boots sloshing. I restored myself with my all-purpose cure for the chills — hot tea laced with Hungarian apricot brandy. It will probably take the beavers one or two nights to repair the damage we did. The only semi-permanent solution is to trap them and knock their population back for a few years.
Previously (about every 5 years) we have done that by calling the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, which sent trappers to dynamite the dams, catch the beavers, and remove the skins as their reward. In this depressed economy, however, Fish and Game no longer supplies this service. I have to hire a private trapper. I’ll do it soon, if beaver trappers can operate in the winter.
I have also been cleaning up my office, which is cluttered with great piles of paper, unfiled clippings, unread journals, unanswered letters. Yesterday I sent a huge crate of paper to the recycling center, and I intend to keep doing that until I can see all surfaces of my desk and computer table, and until all my file drawers (14 of them at home, at least that many more at work) are sorted out.
Most important, I have been cleaning up Beyond the Limits. Dennis and I and our Balaton friends and the copyeditor have found what seems like millions of mistakes in it (some of them substantive, some of them bad writing to correct, most of them having to do with punctuation or fonts or some other typesetting trivia). This week Diana and I go back into QUARK and start fixing it up. We have two weeks to do that before it goes to the publisher for final preparation for printing. It should be out in April.
People have been asking me how I like the book, now that it’s done. In truth I can’t tell. I can hardly get myself to read it. I think none of us who worked on it like it very much, at least from our present perspective at the moment. We’re very aware of how many compromises had to be made. We all had more to say, more quotes or graphs we wanted in there, our own favorite points to hammer home, but to keep the book readable and to make the deadline I had to cut out a lot of good stuff — my co-authors are not at all happy with me about that, and I’m not happy with myself. And the authors’ voice is none of our real voices; we kept to the straight and narrow of what the data and the model say, not what we as persons feel. The tone is like that of Limits to Growth, popularized scientific writing, the kind I always used to do, and the kind I almost never do any more, because I prefer to sense more of a real human being behind any writing.
It seems strange to me that this book, of all my recent writing, is getting advances, going into foreign translations, creating excitement, when, in a sense I can’t quite articulate, I haven’t had any chance to imbue it with soul. I wish we had all had more time. I wish Dennis and J¿rgen and I had been able to fight out every disagreement completely, so we could have found the truthful center of the interesting dualities that we were discovering, every time we disagreed.
Well, none of that was possible. We did our best. We put forth a simple but crucial message, one the world won’t want to hear, basically that the human economy is structurally unmanageable, over its sustainable limits, and organized around the wrong values. This book, which came into my life and took over from all the other books on my docket, was demanded by a power far outside of myself, for reasons I will never understand. I will be glad when the million corrections are done and it can go out in the world and do whatever it is supposed to do. I’m dreading the time when it comes out, but there’s nothing to do now but let go of the results and watch them with amusement.
Meanwhile I can go on cleaning up my life for another two weeks, and then I start teaching environmental journalism and getting to the next four books.
Sylvia has provided here for your entertainment the story of Kitty, the little black cat who moved in with John and Brenna. It turns out that you can have four cats living in relative peace, but when you move in a fifth, especially a little, feisty one, the entire cat-sociology has to be reworked, with some struggle.
I’d better go knead my Christmas bread.
May your holidays be as much fun as breaking up a beaver dam.
Love, Dana
