Dear Folks, It’s still a month and a half till spring, but we got a delicious taste this week of what’s coming! A south wind blew in, and the temperature went ABOVE FREEZING for TWO WHOLE DAYS! Amazing!
After December and January, we kind of forget that temperatures can actually go above freezing. By habit we go out all bundled up, bracing for an assault from freezing rain or frigid wind, and suddenly, miraculously, our cheeks are kissed by a warm breeze. We stop in astonishment, sniff the benign air, take off hats and gloves, unzip jackets, and turn our faces in wonder toward an ever-stronger sun.
Wow! Remember? There ARE times when we can walk around carefree, our skin unprotected by layers of down, our limbs unencumbered by heavy sweaters and thick boots. There are times when we don’t have to pound through an inch of overnight ice to release drinking water for the barn animals. There are times when it isn’t slippery underfoot everywhere we go.
We’re a little suspicious of these luxuries, as we should be, because they won’t last, not here, not in February. We’re almost relieved when, as happened last night, a Canadian front roars in and the thermometer drops 50 degrees in a few hours (from 60 to 10). After all, if we ever got used to benign weather, to a care-free environment, to running outdoors without a moment of forethought, we might lose all our hard-won New England discipline and turn into Californians!
We did have fun these last two days, though, watching snow piles sag and rills of water trickle downhill. All the footpaths we’ve worn to the barns and chicken house had been compacted into ice, so it was wonderful to watch them melt away and open up patches of bare grass, where we can walk with heavy water buckets in each hand without sliding. The land was still white except in the paths and the most south-facing hillsides, but it smelled of spring (which means it smelled, period — in mid-winter the only outside smell is of woodsmoke). The dogs went crazy, as buried treasures (beaver skulls, chunks of frozen horse manure, half-chewed sticks) emerged from the snow. The chickadees and titmice sounded their breeding songs. The ducks and geese dipped and rolled in the puddles. We began to think about servicing the rototiller, pruning the fruit trees, planting a little early lettuce in flats in the south windows, assembling equipment for lambing. It isn’t time for the spring rush yet, but we can feel it coming.
We do have pansies, leeks, celery and celeriac sprouting on the window racks in my downstairs bedroom (now Stephen and Kerry’s room until Kerry can handle stairs again). Great quantities of seeds have come in, which Kerry has organized in yogurt containers. We’re preparing for three acres of garden this year, with seven eager gardeners in the house (Kerry, Stephen, Chrissie, Scot, Anne, Mary Williams, and me — though I’m going to turn over the main responsibility and just become a stoop laborer for the others.)
Kerry is doing amazingly well, adapting to life in a wheelchair, both legs stretched out in casts in front of her, unbendable at either knee or ankle. It’s been four weeks now, and we have hopes, if the X-rays shows the bones knitting well, that she’ll graduate to casts just below the knee this Tuesday. We’re not sure what that will mean in terms of mobility — you can’t go easily to crutches when you have no unbroken leg to favor. So we’re all, especially Kerry, learning to take this recovery step by step and day by day.
She is staying cheerful and busy. Scot’s friend Cam Webb, also an ecology grad student at Dartmouth, has hired her to type in tons of data on Indonesian trees, to help him with his thesis research. So she is earning a little money. Cam’s wife Kinari has found a knitting shop in Woodstock that provides wool and pattern and pays $30 or so for knitted-up sweaters for display — so Kinari, Chrissie, and Kerry are all busy knitting. Kerry’s little sisters, Angelica and Rachel, 11 and 12, had a school holiday last week and spent it here. They’re remarkably well-behaved young ladies and they’ve been not only a help, but great cheerers-up for Kerry. Several evenings I came back from Dartmouth and found Kerry happily cooking dinner, with the girls as her legs. They fetched ingredients, bowls, utensils, while Kerry directed, chopped, and stirred. They even baked bread that way!
Our dear visitor Mary Williams has gone back to Virginia, but she promises to come back and help through the growing season. She not only survived a New Hampshire January, which is what she came to try out, but she actively thrived, taking the dogs for joyous romps in the snow, and helping with animal chores and shoveling and cooking. Her friend Don Faulkner came up for several days toward the end of her stay, so he could attend one of our community meetings and also the winter Vermont NOFA (New England Organic Farmers Association) meeting.
Though Mary is gone, we’ve gained another person, plus a dog, plus a parrot! Anne Miller has been attending our community meetings since last summer. She has lived in Plainfield, Vermont, for years, gardening and acting as a researcher for a project on Agent Orange and dioxin. This month she suddenly needed a place to live, and we have a place to live, so here she is! Her dog is a big, black, gentle old fellow named Whistle. Her parrot is a green, cheeky critter called Bird. Bird has an amazing vocabulary, a lively imagination, and a good memory. Anne has taught her to whistle the opening of “A Bicycle Built for Two,” and now I’m teaching her to sing “Un Bel Di” from Madama Butterfly. Her vibrato is perfect.
Emmett, a bird-dog of unremitting intensity, is completely perplexed by Bird. He’s used to chickens and ducks outside. His favorite activity in the world is to chase any fowl that gets out of the fence, and to play with it, innocently but bumptiously, always to the distress, sometimes mortal distress, of the bird. We have tried and failed to cure him of that pleasure and have decided tight fences are easier than training the bird-dogging instinct out of a bird-dog. But Emmett doesn’t know what to make of a chicken in the house, much less a green one, much less one that talks and bites. We have been watching their interplay with anxiety, and we think Bird is winning — but just to be sure, when we’re not around Bird stays upstairs in a cage behind a closed door.
Anne is getting settled. It will take awhile, as it always does with new people, to understand all that she brings to the household. Her passion for gardening is clear, and so is the display of self-raised food she brought along. Exotic varieties of potatoes, even sweet potatoes, old Indian corns and squashes, sun-dried paprika and chili powder, great hot salsas, many kinds of dried herbs. We’re going to have an interesting gardening summer!
Meanwhile Scot is scuba diving in Jamaica, teaching Dartmouth’s winter term off-campus course in tropical ecology. He’ll be home in mid-March. For the last 3 weeks Chrissie has been in Okinawa, yes, Okinawa, off Japan, visiting her sister, who lives on a US military base there. She’s due home tonight, and I have no doubt we’ll hear interesting stories from her. Chrissie will start in soon now working over at Edgewater Farm, seeding millions of bedding plants in the greenhouses. And Stephen will be working with our neighbor Jim Taylor, doing maple sugaring.
Wow! Spring really IS coming!
As for me, I’ve mostly been home, except for one weekend in Washington with the Systems Group on Forests. Some of you may remember a meeting I attended over a year ago at Rocky Mountain Institute, one that arose out of a dispute between the Rainforest Action Network and the Mitsubishi Corporation, a big tropical timber trader. My friends Amory and Hunter Lovins were asked to mediate the dispute, and one of the consequences was that the two US Mitsubishis — Mitsubishi Motors and Mitsubishi Electronics, neither of which have anything to do with rainforests — sponsored a group, chosen by the Lovinses, to come up with some expert wisdom on how, if at all, tropical forests should be harvested.
Well, the group met together once and then went off for a year, each to work on his or her part of the picture. The meeting this month was to come back with our various pieces, present them to each other, and see what they add up to. So Peter Warshall the ecologist wrote a great paper on what preserving biodiversity means in forestry operations. Jim Bowyer of the University of Minnesota forestry school wrote about the global demand for wood products. Sue Hall wrote about alternative sources of fiber and possibilities for increasing use-efficiency. And so forth.
I was impressed at our first meeting with the observation that even if Mitsubishi became the most responsible forest-products trader in the world, or even if it stopped trading in forest products altogether, that would have little effect. There is a much bigger system, driven by population growth, economic growth, return-seeking capital, and cost-cutting technologies, that puts constant pressure on companies everywhere to extract more and more from the earth, at lower and lower prices. If Mitsubishi doesn’t do it, Louisiana-Pacific will, or Korean or Taiwanese companies that have even less concern for the environment. If we stop making paper of wood pulp, we’ll make it of hemp or kenaf or straw and pressure the earth that way. I wanted to understand commodity systems as a whole, to find out why they behave the way they do (more! more! more!) and to see if there’s any way to structure them to live with enough.
So I talked some of my bright young friends at the MIT system dynamics group (namely Babette Wils, Don Seville, Jody House, and Liz Krahmer) into helping me make a simple, generic commodity-systems model. Though we were all working part-time and officially supposed to be doing something else, we got a good start on a model. That’s what we presented to the Forest Systems Group in Washington.
The presentation went well. The model, though ridiculously simple compared to the real system, is already showing interesting behavior. (Such as, a really successful consumer boycott of wood products, like the one Rainforest Action Network proposed, would hurt the small communities and loggers much more than it would hurt the companies.) The group, very bright and knowledgeable folks, enjoyed talking through the model and made lots of suggestions to improve it. I hope I can raise the money now to hire the team, or at least part of it, full time to make fully researched and much more detailed commodity models. If so, that will be the first official project of our new Sustainability Institute, which will be located someday, we hope, in our new sustainability community.
The community has been going through all kinds of ups and downs this month — and I’m sure this is only the beginning of ups and downs! If I remember rightly, last time I wrote we had just run our first budget and decided that we could have our dream community with a buy-in price averaging $125,000 each for 20 families. Since I was expecting, and dreading, much higher costs, that sounded great to me.
But then we ran into two snags. First, about half the potential community choked on the $125,000. These were the farmers, the mechanics, the librarians, the teachers, the very good folk who can’t imagine for the life of them ever taking on a mortgage like that — or who have conscientiously chosen not to. We want and need these people in our community. “Keep it under $100,000, or we can’t do it,” they said. “Better yet, keep it somewhere around $25,000 and let us build our own $40,000 house.”
Then we did the spreadsheet and realized how the cash flow worked out. Even supposing 20 families at $125,000, which we were no longer willing to suppose, guess what — all the land, planning and building costs come up front and the $125,000 payments start to come at the end when people move in. Meanwhile, someone is holding and paying interest on a $2 million loan.
That stopped us. For awhile I tried to wiggle out by assuming we give up the Hunt-Curtis place and find cheaper land. But that would save at most a few hundred thousand dollars, which didn’t help much, given the whole picture. And it would probably cost us more in development costs up front and in commuting costs forever, since the cheap land is hard to develop and far from the jobs.
Then we tried to figure out how to buy just the Hunt place, which is where we actually want to build, and give up the Curtises. I spent a week in deep depression, getting myself to let go of the Curtis land and wondering what to say to the lovely Curtises, who have supported this project mightily from the beginning. I spent nights tossing and turning, working through that spreadsheet in my mind, trying to make the numbers come out differently. And I contemplated the schedule we had made for ourselves, so as not to pay interest too long on that $2 million, and realized that we would have to be hurtling through important decisions that, for the sake of sustainability and community, we needed lots of time to make right. And someone, probably me, would have to spend full time managing a million details through the process.
It was all wrong. If anything in this community makes me, or anyone, toss at night and go into depression, it’s not right. So I looked hard at the situation and asked what would make me happy and the group happy, and came up instantly with another idea. I sat down and added up the assets I can put my hands on — the $100,000 from the Schweisfurths, the $100,000 endowment of the Sustainability Institute, my share of the sale value of Foundation Farm, the expected resale value of the Curtis house to a community member, and a $200,000 loan that has been offered me for this project. It just added up to the purchase price of both farms. So I asked the community what they would think if I (plus the Sustainability Institute) just bought the property outright, no contingencies for permits or loans or financing. With the farms secured, and their carrying costs manageable, we could take our time to work out all the design and development problems.
Well that felt right to everyone. So I’ve written a final offer letter to the Hunts and I’m anxiously waiting for their answer. If it’s a yes, then the Curtises are ready to receive their offer letter. We will pay some hefty and nonrefundable deposits up front and then close with the Curtises next fall and with the Hunts next spring, a year from now. That will mean moving from Foundation Farm then, because I’ll have to sell it before I can afford to close on the Hunts.
We are on tenterhooks, hoping this works. It may not — the Hunts are hard bargainers and we haven’t given in to all their conditions. They may not like the schedule and want to close earlier, which would be impossible for me. So, more ups and downs ahead.
Meanwhile, the group, assuming that we will actually own the land one of these day, is forging ahead on the difficult, wonderful design/money discussions. Boy, when it gets REAL, all our lip-service about sustainability gets challenged and all our crazinesses about money and property get smoked out! I fully expected to lose three-quarters of the group at this point. To my surprise, though, they’re hanging in, disagreeing, but honoring all sides of the disagreement.
Yes, it makes sense to pay more up front for green materials, for energy-tight construction and triple-glazed argon-filled windows, for professional design. But not if it means working five extra years in a job you hate that perpetuates unsustainability elsewhere in the world. Not if it means paying years of interest to a bank that will turn around and lend the money to build a shopping mall. Yes, it’s better not to dilute sewage with drinking-quality water and then leach the nutrients away deep underground, where they will not return into life but will pollute aquifers. But it costs much more to build a greenhouse-enclosed solar aquatic treatment plant, or even a constructed wetland. Yes, we should build the common house first, to get immediately into the habit of sharing and doing things together. But first we need our own places, and if we’re short of money, the common house can be postponed — which is why every co-housing group builds it last, or never.
After we air all these considerations, we take a deep breath and admit that the world has set us up to get caught in these dilemmas, but maybe, if we’re creative, we can find ways around them. This is why we need time. And we need to talk about what comes up within us. Last week I tentatively broached, in our active email discussion, the question of whether some of our commitment to low income has to do with validating our inner feelings of low self-worth. That set off a storm of truly moving, very honest, sometimes painful responses. I was astonished, and deeply touched. This is community, already.
I’m beginning to think we should maintain the email even when we live together, because it enforces what we often fail to enforce in our face-to-face meetings — the reflective silence before responding. I can read some of the passionate postings several times and absorb them and probe myself before I respond. And some of us (including me) are far more eloquent in writing than we dare to be in a group discussion. AND, of course, face-to-face meetings give us tone of voice and body language so we can really understand. Clearly we need both.
We’re beginning to get some wonderful ideas, such as our own credit union to float our own mortgages to each other — those of us who have been saving for financial independence would feel much better about using our money that way than financing the US Treasury, and we could offer interest rates lower than bank mortgages, to help the farmers and other lower-income people, while still doing as well as 30-year Treasury bills. We could jointly pay for farm management and mechanical maintenance and librarian duties in the community (we’re going to have a humongous library!), to help some of our folks have a more steady income. We could create jobs through the Institute and farm-related activities like cheese-making or bread-baking that could help folks take on mortgages without committing themselves to years of work that compromises their principles.
Right, I know, all dreams so far, and it’s becoming clear in this project how many snags can come up between dream and reality and how much time it takes to make things happen. But the crew is hanging in there, they’re paying in what is for them a big commitment — hundreds and even thousands of dollars to get going on the planning, as soon as the land is secure. I have no idea what is going to come out of this process, but already it is a great adventure, well worth the investment. My sense of reality and possibility and inevitableness, though it can get thoroughly daunted by spreadsheets, never really falters.
More next time!
Love, Dana
