Dear Folks, All’s quiet at Foundation Farm. It’s Saturday afternoon, 4 PM, just turning dark. I’m listening to the Met broadcast of Don Carlo. The big woodstove in my study is ticking with heat and three big dogs are sprawled out on the floor in front of it. Simon the gray cat is curled up on the copy machine, Kitty the black cat on a chair, both as close to the stove as they can get while staying well above the pile of dogs. Kerry’s working at the coop with her sister Rachel. (Kerry’s WALKING, using only a cane and sometimes not even that.) Stephen just came back in from a run. Mary’s over in Hartland with Don Faulkner, preparing for a New Year’s party.
In the living room is the prettiest Christmas tree we’ve ever had. I planted it in the garden 9 years ago and have been carefully pruning it ever since. It’s a balsam fir about 6 feet tall and perfectly shaped. We have one more out there for next year. After that we move to the new farms in Hartland. I have to get some balsams started over there this spring.
I’m into the fourth day of my Christmas fast. It’s a time for me to slow down (the fast takes care of that, especially the break from caffeine) and just be quiet, light candles, listen to beautiful music, meditate, knit, clean off my desk, get ready for a new year. And get a little writing done around the edges, because I’m badly backlogged, and I start teaching at Dartmouth next week.
I like to start my fast on the day before Christmas, because the first day of a fast is always especially nice, so by Christmas Eve I’m feeling really fine. This Christmas Eve I played in the bell choir at church and accompanied a handbell soloist on the piano. Church is just half a mile away in town, so I walk there in the blessed Christmas darkness, passing the brook and most of our farm fields. Walking home afterward with the smell of the candles in my nose and the final “Silent Night” on the bells in my ears is a wonderful experience.
Two days before Christmas we had a beautiful snow, then on Christmas day it sleeted, ruining the skiing. I was glad to stay home and snuggle near the stove and watch the sleet come down. It has been a warm December, mostly sunny until this week’s two storms. Mary has pretty much taken over the animal chores, but she’s been over at Donny’s all week, so I’ve taken them back. I love going out twice a day to care for the animals.
In the morning I feed the dogs just about as soon as I’m conscious, because Emmett comes and nudges me with his cold nose and hounds me (so THAT’S where that expression came from!) until he’s fed. By then the cats are milling around, Jimmy the fat grey Siamese yowling. I feed them, pull on my boots and jacket and head outside with the dogs.
First sunflower seed and mixed seed for the wild-bird feeders. Then down to the basement to fill water pails, which I slosh out to the sheep and the geese, who hear me coming and call me in. Open the little door to let the ducks and geese out, scoop out cracked corn and game-bird crumbles for them. By then the sheep are lined up waiting to come into the barn. Fill half a bucket with their molasses-smelling grain, scatter it in their feeder, let them in (trying not to get crushed in the rush). While they’re chomping, climb up in the hayloft and pitch down a bale.
Then it’s time for the chickens. Back through the snow to the basement for more water. The biddies hear me coming up the chicken-palace steps and run to the door to greet me. Open their little hatch so they can go out in the yard, fill their water, their scratch-feed, their layer mash. I may have some kitchen garbage for them to fight over. I may bring some pumpkins or rutabaga from the root cellar for the sheep to munch on.
Then I walk around to the road with the gamboling dogs, pick up the newspaper, go over to my neighbor Ruth’s, where Chrissie is house-sitting, but Chrissie’s away, so I’m feeding her cats. On Christmas day when Stephen and Kerry went down to his folks, I even got to take care of the horses.
Why am I telling you all this? Probably because I’m fasting and my world has closed in. I take huge pleasure in the smallest things. I waste half an hour every chore time, just watching the funny animals doing their thing. I rejoice in the brilliant planet Venus hanging low over Mount Ascutney when I go out in the evening to collect the eggs. My sense of smell gets so acute that cooking smells are overwhelming — I don’t need to taste; I just fill up on the smell.
Well, I have spent most of this month not in this exalted state, but rushing around like normal, with no time for small marvels.
Right after Thanksgiving I took a lightning trip to Tucson for a meeting on globalization and its effects on the environment. It was called by a number of foundations that work on preserving biodiversity, in order to brief themselves on how the global market may be a force they should pay more attention to. (If you’re funding biodiversity, your thoughts naturally turn to land and park preservation, ecologists, and NGOs fighting for endangered species acts, not to GATT and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.) Normally I don’t believe in wasting jet fuel zooming to Arizona and back in three days, but I made an exception this time, partly because I was asked to present our beginning commodities work, but mainly because it was a great opportunity to hang out with the other invited experts (such as Hilary French of Worldwatch, Mark Ritchie of the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy, and Andrea Durbin of Friends of the Earth) and learn about global markets.
The commodity presentation went much better than I thought it would, given that we’re just getting going on that project. Even at the beginning, systems thinking gives us clear and useful ways to organize information, show interconnections, and find driving factors.
And I learned so much from the others. From Mark Ritchie I heard a great description of the just-starting move to certify forest products, so the consumer knows which ones have been harvested sustainably. (Similar to organic labeling on farm products.) He gave a moving description of a town in Minnesota, full of loggers, truckers, foresters, and county officials, getting the news that their forest has been certified. It made everyone feel wonderful, to know that they’re doing a good job with the forest, he said. We need to recognize that human factor of rejoicing in doing things right.
In contrast Michael Jenkins of the MacArthur Foundation said that he goes around the world with a map of the biodiversity “hot spots,” offering grants to NGOs who are trying to save tropical forests, and that the Malaysian logging companies must have the same map. Wherever he goes, there they are, offering more money over and under the table for logging concessions than he can ever come up with to get forests protected. Ken Newcombe of the World Bank said that the rate of logging in Asia is simply indefensible, and that it is impoverishing local economies. Don Henry of the World Wildlife Fund said that every forest in Indonesia outside of parks is now under concession — they’ll be gone as soon as the logging companies can get to them. Within five years, he said, the same will be true of Papua-New Guinea.
There was much more. I came home with an impression of capitalism gone mad, of some companies, including the Malaysian forest cutters and the Taiwanese fishing boat owners, acting virtually like pirates, cruising the world, sucking up resources, making 40% per year on their capital, and caring nothing for what they leave behind. I don’t know what the foundations present concluded, but I concluded that if we DON’T stop this international piracy, there’s little hope either for biodiversity or for future resources for the human economy.
It was the first time I’ve been to Tucson in the winter — somehow I always end up there in July when it’s 100 degrees plus. This time it was in the 50s and raining. On my way back from the hotel to the airport I took a shuttle, and the driver was talking to another passenger, both of them long-time Tucson residents. They looked down the hill at the city spread out below and noted the ugly yellow smog. “Horrible. Never used to see that,” they said. “We all came here for the clean air.” “What causes the smog?” I asked. “Cars,” they agreed. The city has tripled in population over their time of residence there and probably more than tripled in cars. “Awful guzzlers, like that one,” said the driver, pointing at a big SUV pulling up beside us. “Gets only 9 miles a gallon,” and it had just one person in it, clearly using that huge 4WD vehicle just for commuting into the city.
Not five minutes later they were conversing about where in the city to find gas at less than $1.10 a gallon. “Think there’s any connection between that cheap gas and this smog,” I asked.
(I shouldn’t say these things, but I can’t resist.)
Well, a week after that flying trip I was off on another one, to Zurich for the Balaton Steering Committee meeting at Joan Davis’s house. This “little Balaton” is an intense weekend in which the committee (elected by the members) comes together to make such policy as we have and to plan the next year’s meeting, which always has a theme that dominates the whole year’s issues of the Balaton Bulletin. Last year’s theme, as I’ve told you, was Time. This coming year’s, we decided after long discussion, will be Long-Term Forecasting, including not only computer models, but science fiction, mental models, scenario building, crystal balls, all the devices we humans use to try to peer into the future. We Balaton folks do long-term forecasts all the time; high time to look at that practice critically.
There was another reason to choose that topic this year. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is about to start its third round of assessment of the future climate. Bert deVries of our group is part of a team working on forecasting possible patterns of future energy emissions (till the year 2100 — these forecasts then are used to calculate greenhouse gas emissions, which then drive the climate models). We will make a working group aimed at helping Bert influence those forecasts, especially working out the “taboo” scenarios. No big official international forecasting effort is allowed to forecast either an overshoot and collapse for the human economy, nor a transition to real sustainability. Official forecasts are astonishingly unimaginative, just extrapolating faster and slower versions of Business As Usual. No hint of downturns or completely alternative goals and paradigms is permitted.
Balaton, being unofficial, is allowed to say “taboo” things and work out “taboo” scenarios.
Steering Committee meetings, like all Balaton events, are noted not only for their intellectual content, but for their wonderful feeling of fellowship. We had members there from India, Thailand, South Africa, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland and the U.S. Some of us stayed an extra day to work on our forthcoming two publications on sustainability indicators. We lit candles, went on walks, ate good but simple vegetarian meals mostly that fixed by ourselves — with the great conversation continuing in the kitchen. Joan’s house is about a 10 minute bus ride from the Zurich airport, so it’s a yearlong stopover place for traveling Balaton members, and a warm, inexpensive place to have our meetings. A lot of great schemes have been hatched there over the years!
Let’s see — in other news, THE FARMS ARE OURS! The closing happened while I was in Tucson; it seemed like an anticlimax, after all the work of negotiating for them. One of our families has bought the Curtis house, and the Sustainability Institute, which will go on owning the Hunt house, has rented it out to another of our families for the two years it will take to build our own houses in the eco-village. Much of this month has been spent fixing up the Hunt house, painting, polishing floors, repairing windows, replacing appliances. A full energy retrofit is needed there, but we don’t have the money yet. I hope to raise it within the next two years and do a real Energy Number on the place before the Institute moves in.
I missed not only the closing, but the monthly community meeting too, because I was in Zurich. Most of our community time is spent on design questions these days. Next month we’ll choose our chief designer/architect, and then we’ll really get going.
Another family has asked to buy in — that’ll make nine, once we get them all processed. GREAT people. This is getting really exciting!
This morning I went over there to get an official mailing address for the Institute (PO Box 171, Hartland VT 05049 — this is the first time I’ve typed it; you are the first to know!) and to check on the Hunt house (Peter Kawecki was there painting) and to visit the Kirns in the Curtis House. Mary and Donny have been helping with Hunt house refurbishing and have been walking all over the land, getting to know it. Stephen has just gotten back the soil tests on the good ag land. (6% organic matter, that’s terrific! But the usual potassium deficit common to all our soils in the Valley.) Peter Forbes, Don Seville, and Tim Traver will be working with Ken Hunt to get the sap lines ready for this year’s sugaring.
It’s so good to begin to feel our presence there, to begin at least modestly bringing the place back to care and life. There’s a huge long way to go — but many hands to help. This summer I want to organize a huge barn-painting party.
All I need, of course, is THREE old farms to worry about!
Well, one day at a time, with lots of help from my friends. I expect this fast to go on for at least one more day, maybe two or three. By its end I hope to have my house clean, my desk clean, my seed orders sent out, and my course (Environmental Ethics) prepared for next term. Everything ready for the New Year.
May yours be happy, moving ever toward a sustainable, equitable, joyful world!
Love, Dana
