Hi, dear folks!

I’m roughly over Cleveland on a TWA jet headed for St. Louis (3 hours late). On my way to Monsanto, about which more later. Late because Boston is foggy. Foggy because the greenhouse effect or El Nino or whatever has brought the warmest, longest January thaw I’ve ever seen. Last Sunday and Monday it was 60 degrees at the farm! In January! In New Hampshire! We were breaking all-time high temperature records by TEN DEGREES at a whack! The snow is gone. We’ve had a whole week of totally undeserved Mud Season.

I tell you, it gets harder and harder not to believe in global warming.

Well, I’ve been places and done things since last we talked. Early this month I took off for Brussels, a city I haven’t visited in 30 years. It is a thoroughly international place now. When I got there I took a walk to find some supper and quickly found myself on a streetcorner from which I could see Greek, Chinese, Indian, French, Italian, and Thai restaurants. The people on the bustling sidewalks were of all kinds and colors. Africans owned most of the little grocery stories.

I liked that. I also liked the city of Ghent, not far away, where my meeting was — a city whose medieval heart is still intact, with canals and granaries and cathedrals and clocktowers 400 years old or more. I get real impressed with that kind of thing. Imagine anyone nowadays thinking of building for the next 400 years. Sometime when it isn’t the middle of winter I’d like to go back to Ghent, and to nearby Brugge, and walk around slowly and not have to get back to a meeting.

The meeting in question was a strange one for me. Last summer I got a call from a charming Czech named Bedrich Moldan (Czechoslovakia’s first environment minister after the Velvet Revolution) asking me to serve on a SCOPE (Scientific Committee On Problems of the Environment) panel to help the U.N. come up with a set of scientifically valid indicators for sustainable development.

I do not need more to do. I certainly don’t need more travel. But indicators are a central interest of mine. My systems training tells me that nobody can solve a problem without good information about what’s going on. The most effective interventions you can make in a system is to provide better feedback. One of the most destructive events of this century was the invention of the over-aggregated, misleading indicator called GNP and the subsequent obsession of policymakers in making that indicator go always up. I have been agitating for a long time to change the GNP to some better measure of the welfare of humanity and of nature.

So I said yes to Bedrich Moldan. The Ghent meeting was my first opportunity to meet with the other members of the SCOPE task force and with UN officials and delegates from national governments to talk about this new set of indicators.

What was so strange for me was the UN minuet. Over the past ten years, as I have shifted my life toward the farm and free-lance writing and the informal Balaton Group, I have been getting out of practice in bureaucratic behavior. To go from my simple life to a high-level UN meeting was like going to another planet. We addressed each other as “the distinguished representative from Brazil” and “his excellency, the Natural Resource Minister from Costa Rica” and “Dr. Meadows.” We were awash in initials — UNEP and UNDP and DPCSD and OECD and UNSTAT and UNCED. Indicators of sustainable development suddenly became ISDs.

Worst of all, we had to tiptoe around our real mission in order not to offend the easily offended representatives from the national governments, who were, it turned out, the real targets of this meeting, which was not in fact about drawing on scientific knowledge to develop sustainability indicators. Rather it was about getting governments to permit the UNCSD (Council on Sustainable Development) to authorize the development of sustainability indicators.

Maybe it’s worth going into the politics here — the politics I was having to learn very quickly in the middle of the medieval city of Ghent.

It seems that one Mahbub ul-Haq, once the Planning Minister of Pakistan, now a high official at the UNDP (UN Development Program) invented a new indicator awhile ago called the HDI (Human Development Indicator). It is a simple combination of life expectancy, per capita income, and literacy — numbers that the UN has been publishing for years for all nations. The UNDP put them together into the HDI and published a list, ranking the world’s nations according to HDI rather than GNP. Some nations, most strikingly Brazil, did not fare well by this comparison, and all hell broke loose in the UN. The cause of indicators was set back, I am told, by years. (This story affirms my faith in the power of indicators. The shaming of Brazil and other high-growth but wildly inequitable nations was undoubtedly just what ul-Haq had in mind. And of course I have something similar in mind in developing ISDs!)

When the CSD (Council on Sustainable Development, remember?) started talking about ISDs (indicators of sustainable development, remember?) the member nations that had been burned by the HDI (human development indicator, remember?) blew up. We do not like indicators, they said. We don’t want international beauty contests. (We don’t want to look bad. If we’re developing unsustainably, we don’t want to know about it.) This meeting in Ghent was an attempt to woo them back.

So we had to talk a lot of nonsense. We had to pretend that ISDs were only for the use of national governments, for their own information, to work toward their own goals. We will provide a “menu” of data, from which governments can pick only what they want to know. If they don’t want to hear about their disappearing forests, well, OK, they don’t have to. If they don’t want to report their carbon dioxide output, fine with us. You’re in the driver’s seat, most distinguished representative from Brazil.

(“Wait a minute,” I whispered to Bedrich Moldan, early on, before I caught on to the politics. “This is a lie. We’re not here to tell governments what they want to know. We’re here because scientists are seeing things that governments SHOULD know. We want to stuff some information down their throats.”

“Shhhhh,” Bedrich said.)

Well, for the first day I wasn’t happy being a diplomat. I wished I had stayed home, or gone to some scientific meeting where there’s at least a general thrust toward trying to find and articulate truth. But finally I stopped resisting and decided to be where I was and enter into what was happening and see what there was to learn. So I gave myself the role of seeing whether I could “Balatonize” (i.e. humanize) the meeting. I started talking to each person informally at coffee breaks or meals, to find out who he or she really was. At that point I started to have fun.

Underneath their official masks, there were a lot of great people in that meeting. A co-conspirator of Jaime Lerner in making the Brazilian city of Curitiba one of the best-functioning cities in the world. A guy from Environment Canada who puts out one of the best sets of national-level environmental indicators I have seen. A deliciously bright and rebellious NGO interloper from the U.K. Rodrigo Gamez, the cheery head of Costa Rica’s extraordinary biodiversity prospecting effort. (I wrote a column about him a few months ago.) A sweet Kenyan who mans the Nairobi office of IUCN. A researcher from the World Resources Institute who writes far-out political-science-fiction novels in his spare time. (Over a few beers we thought up some great plots, one of them involving an affair between Hillary Clinton and the Prime Minister of Japan.)

One afternoon I got Bedrich Moldan to tell me about his experience as one of the chief negotiators of the meetings leading up to the Rio conference — and how frustrated he was by the diplomacy and posturing and obstinacy — and how he learned to keep pressing through the murk until there was a result.

I developed a lot of respect for him and the other experienced negotiators in the room. Over the course of three days they managed to squeeze out a document signed unanimously (after everyone had squabbled over nearly every word) urging the CSD to go ahead and develop ISDs. If we’re lucky, the CSD will do so at its April meeting, and by 1996 the scientific community will agree on an initial set of indicators, and by 1997, the 5th anniversary of the Rio conference, the nations of the world will be reporting them. Bedrich heaved a great sigh as we parted, saying, “We moved ahead a long way here.”

He was right. But I thought of the exponential growth of the world’s problems and wondered whether any process that moves at such a snail’s pace can possibly be effective. I gained an enormous new appreciation for the Balaton Group, where nobody is representing anything official, and everyone can be real.

Anyway, my concern now is that the scientific community be ready with a list of indicators — measurable by any nation, clear and compelling to any politician, accurately warning of unsustainability — a radar system for the world, signaling the icebergs ahead in time to turn the ship. Good indicators are not easy to come up with. If any of you have suggestions, I’ll be glad to hear them.

If I have to travel away from the farm, the best way to do so is to combine an official purpose that pays the way with a “heart” purpose that does the real work. The SCOPE trip was perfect in that respect. The day after the meeting was over I got on a train and headed for north Holland, to the city of Groningen, where my friend and fellow Balaton member Wouter Biesiot lives. Wouter is part of an impressive interdisciplinary group at the University of Groningen that does environmental and energy analysis. I go there whenever I can to learn what they’re up to, give a seminar to their students, and swipe their recent publications and data. I did all that this time, but that was not the main reason for going. The main reason was to celebrate the last week of Wouter’s chemo treatments.

He was diagnosed with colon cancer a year ago, had emergency surgery, and has been getting weekly chemotherapy ever since. From a distance I’ve been sending books, flowers, good energies, whatever I thought might help. The opportunity to be in north Europe just as Wouter was ending his treatments had to be a literal Godsend — God sending me to Wouter.

I won’t violate the privacy of Wouter and his family by going into detail about my time with them. I’ll just say that they have come through this harrowing year beautifully. Wouter, who was always a neat guy, is now aglow with love and with appreciation for life. The family, each person separately and all together, have discovered how much courage and strength they have. The day I left they were throwing a party. The house was bedecked with flags and full of flowers. I felt blessed to be there, and I left filled to the brim with love and strength, which that wonderful family had given ME, out of their courage and their joy.

I stopped for another day in Utrecht to visit another Balaton member, Bert de Vries, and another great Balaton family. Then I trained back on down to Brussels and flew home. It was good to get back, even to a January Mud Season.

January 23, 1995

Here I am in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, at the retirement home called Go-Ye Village, in the room of my dear stepfather Karl Quist. It’s just after dinner. My Mom is reading in the corner, and Karl has turned on soothing music to distract him from the noise of his oxygen pump and the searing pain of his bedsores. It’s a lovely room; there’s a bright Christmas poinsettia still blooming; he’s doubly well cared for by the staff and by my Mom; but this is a hard place to be. There’s so much that can’t be helped. So much exercise in “accepting the things that cannot be changed.” So much learning about love and patience and loss. I’m blessed to be here, too. I seem to be blessed wherever I go, which we all are, actually, if we could just come to believe it.

I was even blessed to spend the past weekend with the top executives of Monsanto.

You may remember that I spent an afternoon in July speaking to Monsanto executives about Beyond the Limits and global sustainability, along with Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins and other buddies. I came away from that experience impressed by the humanity and seriousness of the people I met there, but wondering whether any of what we said could influence in any way the behavior of even the most well-meaning trans-national corporation. (Monsanto makes the herbicides Roundup and Lasso, and Nutrasweet, and a bunch of plastics and chemicals and drugs, and bioengineered bovine growth hormone, about which I have written a number of scathing columns.)

Well, the big surprise is that they invited me back. They have declared global sustainability as the context that should guide all decisions of the company. Now they’re trying to figure out what that really means. For this past weekend they invited me to join them, along with a Chinese-American expert on Chinese agriculture, and the great ecological economist Herman Daly, and the great botanist Peter Raven, head of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Peter has been the prime mover of this discussion at Monsanto from the beginning.

I suppose, though I was never told this, that what happened should be regarded as privileged information even in such a semi-publication as this newsletter. But I can say this. So far, Monsanto means it. The definition of sustainability they have adopted is a strong one, including Herman’s three points of using renewable resources only at the rate they are regenerated, using nonrenewable resources only at the rate they can be substituted, and emitting pollution only at the rate it can be safely absorbed by nature. (Monsanto has reduced its toxic air emissions by 90% in the past few years.)

The company is beginning to develop a vision of itself as one that puts together the deep, narrow knowledge of different areas of science in a cross-cutting interdisciplinary way toward the goal of ending hunger and promoting health — sustainably — around the world. !!! You should have seen the excitement in the room as that vision emerged. Imagine swinging the resources of a company like Monsanto around a goal like that. Eyes lit up; people stood straighter; one of them told me the next day he couldn’t sleep that night, he was so thrilled. Who wouldn’t be proud to work in such an effort? I was about ready to sign up myself.

Of course Monsanto is not about to stop making profits; it is a corporation, after all. We had sober discussions about the fact that the hungry people of the world are by definition not customers, because they can’t afford to be. About population growth, which seems to be a matter pretty much out of corporate hands. About the larger market environment that can punish a company that sets higher standards than its competitors. About the hubris of a big company going to a poor place and announcing that it’s there to solve everyone’s problems. The good news is that the Monsanto folks didn’t flinch (much, anyway) at any of these difficulties. As opposed to the UN meeting the week before, I felt I could speak the truth, even if the truth was hard, because I was working with people who were more interested in solving problems than in being politic, or creating an image.

It was incredibly heartening. It was only talk, of course, and everyone in the room was sobered at the thought of translating that talk into practical decisions. We’ll see how far they can get in that translation. I think they will not only get a long way, I think they’ll lead other corporations to do the same.

People ask me sometimes how I can keep going in a world that so often seems so discouraging. (I think I’ll write a column about that. ) The Monsanto weekend shows you one answer. There are a lot of encouraging corners of the world to hang out in, some of them in the most surprising places.

Tidbits of interesting information: Nutrasweet is a simple dipeptide of L-phenylalanine and L-aspartic acid. Its incredible sweetness (200 times sweeter than sugar) was discovered by accident by a chemist who synthesized it for another purpose and accidentally (very bad chemical practice) got some on his hands and put a little on his tongue. Two-thirds of Nutrasweet sales worldwide go to Pepsi and Coke for diet drinks. The little Nutrasweet packets you see for coffee (the blue ones, called Equal — the pink ones called Sweet&Low contain saccharine, which Monsanto considers The Enemy) contain only 3% Nutrasweet. The other 97% is an inert filler that goes right through you. Monsanto is developing a new sweetener, 70 times sweeter than Nutrasweet that they will not be able to put in coffee-sized packets, because the amount you’d need for one cup would be almost invisible. They expect the soft drink makers will be the only markets for that super-sweet stuff.

Well, it’s time to put Karl to bed and to put this newsletter to bed too. Isn’t it amazing how many wonderful people there are in the world, full of courage, full of love. In this room tonight in Oklahoma. In Wouter Biesiot’s household in Groningen. In Monsanto headquarters. At home taking care of the farm, so I can be here. Even in the UN bureaucracy. Yes, there is suffering. Yes, there are fear and uncertainty and enormous problems to solve and big blustering jerks making a lot of noise. But love and courage are sufficient to the task. As my friend Charlotte often says, “the Power behind me is stronger than any obstacle in front of me.”

Love to you all,
Dana