Dear Folks,

It’s only February, but the first lambs are in the barn!

They were born yesterday. I found them out in the barnyard, wet and wobbly when I came out to do the morning chores. We had barely started watching for them. They’re the result of an accident. A kindly neighbor mistakenly let the errant ewes into the pasture with Wally the ram early last October. I discovered the ewes down there within an hour or so and got them separated, but that hussy Rosemary refused to leave. She was in heat, and it was clearly too late to prevent this early lambing. So I left her in with Wally, brought the others back up the hill, and hoped there would be only one set of untimely lambs. That’s the set that was just born. Twin ram lambs, little white fellows with gray noses, Wally’s final legacy to this farm.

Just last weekend Scot and I tipped over the ewes, checked their udders for signs of pregnancy (it was clear that Rosey was far along), trimmed their hooves, gave them worm pills, and cut off a little bottom wool, so if we have to intervene in a delivery, we can see what we’re doing. (That last step is called “crutching.”) We’re pretty sure — well, we hope anyway — that the other ewes will be delivering at the time we intended, the end of March, exactly five months after we brought in the new ram Satchmo.

The two small Wallys are now tucked with their woolly mom in one of the new barn stalls that Scot has made. Scot has been remodeling the barn, making it much more efficient for moving around, separating, and protecting sheep and geese and ducks. He just got the lambing stalls finished last weekend. Whew!

More hot news! Scot and Chrissie have moved into the back house! Anybody who has been reading this newsletter for at least a year must have been wondering if we would EVER finish the job we have been doing out there. Well, of course we’re not QUITE finished. (Does anyone ever wait till a remodeling is 100.0% finished before moving in?) There are still a few doors to paint and hang, there’s a bathroom mirror to install, we need to make some curtains, the windows should be washed. But in the middle of last week Scot and Chrissie couldn’t stand it any more. They brought in a table they had just bought. Then they brought down a small rug. Then they installed their bed, just to see what it would be like to sleep in the new room. When the computer and books moved down, I knew they were home.

We’re all pleased with the “new wing.” It used to be a little detached house with one big and one small room, built about the turn of the century by then-owner and summer-resident Mrs. Davadge-Taylor for her Swedish maid. (So goes the legend in the town, anyway.) Over our years here we gradually winterized it, installed a woodstove, repaired its roof, set it on a firmer foundation, and joined it by a deck to the main house. Sylvia and Don Spain lived there for five years, while their baby Heather, who slept in the little room, grew into a kid. When they moved to their own place a year ago, I asked John to REALLY fix up the back place.

It took a year, and it was a production. I’ll spare you the many stories I could tell about the process, though some of them are pretty funny. I’ll just say that John did his usual meticulous job. Most everything that was torn out was reused or recycled; just about everything that was put in came from John’s favorite store: Vermont Salvage. We have a beautiful newly finished ash floor that used to be in a school gym. The doors Chrissie and Scot are stripping and repainting have hung in other houses. The new two-room “wing” is now well insulated, on an even firmer foundation, with the drainage around it properly channeled. (Our farmhouse sits in the middle of a southwest slope, and handling runoff from the uphill side is a perpetual problem.) The little house is now attached to the main house by a hallway with a walk-in closet. It has its own bathroom, and its own entrance with a mud room, and big energy-efficient windows that let in floods of western light. The place has a solid, calm, safe feeling.

As Chrissie and Scot settle in downstairs, their room upstairs is coming open for whomever God sends next. (That’s our admission policy.) I’m going to get that room painted and nice now. John, who occupies the other, larger, room upstairs will be moving out in May to go live with his lady love Chris — we’ve been wondering when that would happen. So we will be seeking new farm-mates, in particular someone who can begin to approximate John’s many building and fixing skills, and who might love to take over his big carpentry shop downstairs.

Since this newsletter has proved useful in finding farm-mates — it brought us Chrissie and Scot — I’ll repeat here the “ad” I sent out a year ago. See if you can do so well a second time, folks!
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WANTED

Housemates. Farm-mates. People who are interested in sharing the adventure of living in community. People who would like to work toward a sustainable, productive, healthy way of life on 70 mostly wooded acres in a small New England town a view of Mt. Ascutney and Dartmouth College 20 minutes away.

Singles, couples, or small families welcome. Children welcome. Animals welcome. (We already have a goodly population of dogs, cats, chickens, geese, ducks, and sheep.)

No smokers please, no substance abusers, no one whose existence depends on the continuous accompaniment of loud music in shared spaces. We lean toward vegetarianism but are open-minded; applicants need to be at least vegetarian-tolerant.

We offer both private space and shared space, individual cooking and communal cooking. We share the operating expenses and the work of running a small farm; we also share an abundance of organic produce, flowers, beauty, and fun with fuzzy or feathery creatures. If you’re a tinkerer, there are great opportunities for developing renewable energy sources, including solar and hydro.

It costs little in money to live here, but quite a lot in responsibility. We are looking for people who are mature enough to clean up after themselves, put tools away, fix things that get broken, do what they say they’ll do, and complain to the person who can do something about the complaint. We need people who actively like to work, preferably those who have farming or mechanical skills, though we’re willing to teach you what we know. We offer in return the companionship and partnership of other responsible, industrious people.

Financial arrangements are negotiable. You can invest in your own living space and co-own the common space, or you can rent, or you can exchange work for rent. You are not expected to be a full-time farmer (unless you want to be). You are expected to contribute the equivalent of one day a week to the work of the farm.

Operating rules are also negotiable. We are open to experiment; we judge the worth of rules not by their ideological purity, but by whether they work to the satisfaction of the members of the community.

We have no gurus here, and no single spiritual tradition, but we do our best to lead good lives for larger purposes than our own comfort, in ways that contribute to the surrounding community and to the world. We try to be kind to the land and to other people, and to build our happiness on love and service, rather than on buying and owning fashionable things. In 22 years, no perfect angels or realized Buddhas have lived here, and so you will need to be able to get along with imperfect angels and as-yet-unrealized Buddhas. If you can love us, and yourself, for the struggle, for being on the path, for making progress, then we will be able to make progress happily together.

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Other than moving and lambs, it has been a quiet month in Lake Wobegon, oops, Plainfield. My traveling has been limited to short shots; I’ve mostly been home working on my BOOK AGAIN, hurray, hurray! (In another month I won’t be so enthusiastic.) For those of you new to this letter, or so old to it that you can’t believe I haven’t finished that darn book yet, it is a textbook on environmental systems. I’ve been working on it for years. It’s turning out to be a magnum opus, probably over 1000 pages. It’s quite wonderful, I think immodestly, a mixture of regular environmental science, plus ecological economics, plus systems theory, plus a bunch of neat case studies that read like my columns (quite a few of them ARE my columns), plus a big dash of epistemology (how do we really know what we know? how do we get unstuck from our paradigms?), plus the best inspirational and thought-provoking quotes I know. I think it’s a treasure house, meaning that I’m putting in all my favorite treasures. I enjoy working on it, but it gets so overwhelming some days that I can’t get myself to face it. No one has ever thought through environmental science from a systems perspective, and I find it slow going. But it’s a wonderful learning process for me, and I hope for the students who may someday read it, if I ever get it done.

I’m on Chapter 16 now, which is agriculture. My research assistant Diana and I have been looking forward to this part, because it’s where our hearts are. It includes the basic stuff about how plants grow, what soil is, what are the purposes of and problems with fertilizers and pesticides, etc., and the principles of organic agriculture, with case studies. Then Chapter 17 takes up the larger question of why we raise so much food but don’t manage to feed everybody — the systems problems of the market and the maldistribution of everything from land to biotechnology. The unit ends with two visions of the future of agriculture, direct extensions of the “hard path” and “soft path” visions we already laid out (thanks to Amory Lovins) in the energy chapter. Then, a thread that runs throughout the book, a query about mindsets — about what leads different people to embrace or be repelled by these different visions.

There will be 21 chapters altogether, so the end is in sight. I decided that I have to finish this book before I go off and buy new farms or start new institutes. If I stick close to home, it’ll take another year. It’s a great excuse to stick close to home.

For some months I have owed an answer to one of you, who asked for a definition of the word I probably use more often here than any other — sustainability. It has become an international jargon word, with about as many meanings as there are people who use it. Those of us who have talked about sustainability for a long time have stopped defining it. We sometimes say that it’s like jazz, or quality, or democracy — you don’t know it by defining it, you know it by experiencing it, by grooving with it, by living it — or perhaps by mourning its absence. But anything you say in words isn’t Sustainability, it’s only Words. Those who Know do not speak, those who speak do not Know.

That’s a cop-out, of course. There’s a perfectly good official definition, which comes from the 1987 report of the International Commission on Environment and Development:

Humankind has the ability to achieve sustainable development — to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

This definition has two parts — meeting needs, and doing so in a way that preserves the natural, human, and societal resources from which needs are met. It’s important to remember that, because the public discussion too often splits between those who want to meet needs and those who want to protect the environment, as if doing one is incompatible with doing the other. The difference between traditional environmentalists and “sustainability folks” is the ability to keep the welfare of both humans and the environment in focus at the same time, and to insist on both.

In my own mind I supplement that official definition of sustainability with Herman Daly’s clear and undeniable explication of what it means in physical terms:

1. Renewable resources shall not be used faster than they can regenerate.
2. Pollution and wastes shall not be put into the environment faster than the environment can recycle them or render them harmless.
3. Nonrenewable resources shall not be used faster than renewable substitutes (used sustainably) can be developed.

By those conditions there’s not a nation, a company, a city, a farm, or a household on earth that is sustainable. Virtually every major fishery in the world violates condition 1. The world economy as a whole is violating condition 2 by putting out carbon dioxide 60-80% faster than the atmosphere can recycle it. But to make things worse, I would add two more sustainability conditions that I think are obvious.

4. The human population and the physical capital plant have to be kept at levels low enough to allow the first 3 conditions to be met.
5. The previous 4 conditions have to be met through processes that are democratic and equitable enough that people will stand for them.

Sustainability means all that to me and more, it means a complete vision of the world I want to work for and live in. It contains components of spirituality, of community, of decentralization, of a complete rethinking of the ways we use our time, define our jobs, and bestow power upon governments and corporations. “Sustainability” is a terribly inadequate word for what I mean. Any word of six syllables is way too long to organize a popular movement around and at the same time way too short to encompass a whole vision. And too many people hear it as “sustaining” the world we have now, whereas I really mean fomenting a revolution.

Gotta stop and get this manifesto to the copy shop.

Love, Dana