Dear Folks, I can remember when winters around here were snowy from Thanksgiving to Easter.  I can remember the snow being so high we could ski right over the garden fence.  There were winters when the drifts mounted up higher than the kitchen window.  We used to have to wear snowshoes just to do the chores.

Sigh.  Now we have to wear crampons.  As we look out for the fourth winter in a row on a sheet of relentness ice, everyone in the Valley is getting depressed.  There are newspaper editorials saying, let’s undo this climate change, we hadn’t expected the greenhouse effect to be like this.  For two months now it has been alternating between thawing and raining, and then shooting down to 15 below.  There is no snow, and the glazed ground is as hard as steel.  I fell twice today just wheeling in a cartload of wood, though we had spread ashes on the walk (three times), and though I was hanging onto the cart.  Poor Sylvia has to climb the hill to the chicken house and to Beau’s barn on her hands and knees.  We don’t dare drive the tractor over the sheets of slanting ice to the place in the woods where we cut firewood.  We have been waiting to burn our brushpile until — by Plainfield regulation — there are two inches of snow on the ground, but it looks like that will never happen.  The fire chief tells us two inches of ice don’t count.

The only good side to the story is that the pond is just perfect for skating.  So is the whole pasture, for that matter.  So is the whole damn Valley.

Sylvia has the flu.  Brenna has the flu.  I have the flu.  Don is unemployed.  John is finding the house-inspection calls dwindling and the Culligan calls not very fruitful of commissions.  Heather, having recovered from the flu, and finding it not much fun to play on the ice outside, is bouncing off the walls.  We are not very happy campers around here.  Ugh!  January in New Hampshire is bad enough, but without snow it’s terrible!

Melinda is off in Washington DC, seeking a job.  She is hoping she can find something, anything, before she is scheduled to fly back to Hungary February 6.  Ambitious lady that she is, she has decided that she doesn’t just want to improve her English here, she also wants to earn enough to take back to Hungary to begin building a house.  She has already acquired the land, in a program Hungary has to help out Romanian refugees, but she must build within five years in order to keep the land.  So she’s trying to become a nanny, or a Hungarian translator, or just about anything that will allow her to save up some money.  I don’t know if she’ll find a job in time, given how many Americans are looking for them these days, but I have to say, I have rarely met anyone as determined as Melinda.

I’m teaching my winter term environmental journalism class.  Thanks to the Pew Scholarship I no longer have to do that to pay the property taxes, but it was too late this year to cancel the class after I knew about the Scholarship — and anyway, I love teaching.  The problem has always been that I put too much into it to have time for anything else.  The group this year is a lively one, 18 seniors, all environmental zealots and journalistic hotshots, though I never cease to be appalled at the terrible writing habits even of Dartmouth’s finest.  Somehow the U.S. education establishment systematically teaches innocent children to produce garbled writing.  I agonize over their papers, wondering how on earth to make them publishable, wondering if it’s possible to teach anyone to write.  I don’t know how I do it myself; I certainly don’t know how to get anyone else to do it.

Well, I give them lots of opportunity to practice, anyway, plenty of intemperate feedback (I am a complete bear about dangling participles), and lots of chances to talk to good writers.  At their suggestion I talked Phil Shabecoff into coming to speak to us — he was the New York Times’s superb environmental reporter, until the editors decided he was too biased on the side of the environment (!) and assigned him to the Washington bureau instead, at which point he quit.  So goes environmental journalism these days.

I’ve just finished correcting the page proofs of Beyond the Limits.  It may seem to you that I’ve been correcting BTL every time I’ve written to you for months now, but books do turn around many times between author and publisher before the glitches finally get out.  We have one more round to go, about a week from now, when I get the corrected, corrected, corrected proofs for indexing. I hope, but don’t expect, that I will find no more errors at that stage.  This book is worse than most, because we did it so fast, because we did the first computer page-making step ourselves, and because there are so many figures, captions, tables, computer graphs, and footnotes.  Just yesterday I was still finding millions mixed up with billions, and grain yields expressed as 6 kg per hectare instead of 6000 kg per hectare.  Yipe!  I wonder how many of those I’m NOT catching!

This time through, for the first time, I felt good about the book.  I didn’t cringe when I thought of it going out in the world.  I stopped thinking of it as the best we could throw together in a short time, and I began to be even a little bit pleased with it.  It’s a strong book, and clear, and powerful.  It says absolutely what needs to be said.  I think I’m finally ready to let it loose to seek its fate, which will be, you can be sure, one of intense vilification from high places.  The process will be interesting to watch.

I am just praying that we can use the opportunity this time to swing the global discussion toward the really central issues of poverty and environment, of solidarity with all people and good stewardship of the earth’s resources, of progress and where it is taking us, and of how much is enough — instead of silly diversions about growth or no-growth, about the validity of computer models, or about how technology and free markets can solve all problems.  There’s a chance.  With enough voices raised in the right places, there’s a chance of talking in political arenas about something real for a change.

One of those voices is going to have to be mine, and I’ve been dwelling in a kind of funk of anticipatory dread about that.  I’m a writer, not a speaker.  I’m a cheerleader, or maybe a strategist, a coach, not a person who’s good out on the field shoving through the opposition to move the ball down the field.  My talents do not lie in the direction of shoving, or in circulating in places of power.  I am comfortable in farm boots, not suits and heels.  “Bring two suits,” a TV producer has just said to me about a taping I’m doing in February, “so we can find one that matches the color of the set.”  As if I had two suits, or even one!

It’s going to be hard to keep my balance when the book comes out.  Already the excitement is amazing — translators working away, a European tour set for May, presentations in April at MIT, Harvard, and the Smithsonian, even talk of a tour to Australia and New Zealand.  (Wouldn’t THAT be fun?  Those are places I’ve never been, and places with lots of SHEEP!)  I wonder how I’m going to plant my garden.  I wonder if the windows will ever get washed.

I already spend about a hour a day TURNING DOWN speaking engagements.  I HATE speaking engagements.  Not only do they soak up time I need for writing or farming or just being quiet and restoring my sanity, but they also irritate me with their artificiality.  It seems to me that if people cared what I think, they would read my books or articles, which are much more carefully thought through than my speeches.  (I never prepare speeches, mainly because I never have time to.)  And I find something inherently wrong in a situation where one person does all the talking and everyone else listens.  There is something sad about people hauling me in to say things that THEY want to have said.  Especially given the topics I speak about, there is something unempowering and false about such a setup, as if I had the answers, and not the people I’m talking to.  And though I’m experienced enough not to get nervous any more, I’m still basically shy and don’t like to be the center of attention, and plane travel is disgusting these days, and nowhere is the food as good as it is here on the farm.

So, unless there’s a chance to make an enormous difference with a speech, I simply say no to every invitation.  If BTL enhances the volume of invitations (as it is already beginning to), I’m in trouble.  I’m going to need a recorded message on my telephone and a form letter, or it will take me THREE hours a day to say no.  I think my policy will be to charge an enormous speaking fee — $10,000 or so.  If anyone is foolish enough to pay that, I’ll give the money to the Balaton Group and feel good about the bargain.  I remember William Buckley saying once that if people really want to hear him speak, as opposed to reading what he writes, then what they want is not ideas, but entertainment — and so he would charge them the rates of an entertainer.  (That may be the first and last time I ever quote William Buckley!)

I do, after all, have four more books waiting for me, all under contract.  I assigned the month of January to cleaning up BTL and my life; I start the next book on February 1.  Actually, I’ll start one and return to another.  During the day at Dartmouth I’ll work on my textbook on resource systems.  (Remember that?  The one that was started to go with “Race to Save the Planet?”  It’s still only half done.)  And in my “spare” time, I’ll start a collaboration with Amory and Hunter Lovins, a simple, small book for the general public on least-cost, end-use energy policy.

I’m actually looking forward to it.  A month ago, exhausted from BTL, I wouldn’t have believed I’d ever want to write again!  But I am a writer, that’s for sure, and that’s what I want to spend my time doing.  Fortunately BTL has two co-authors who are excellent speakers and who seem to enjoy the speaking much more than I do.

Well, right now I have a column to write and papers to grade and a hundred picky corrections to make on BTL.  It’s going to be 15 below tonight with no snow in sight.  Nothing to do but keep moving, carefully, keeping my footing on the slippery slopes, and waiting for what could be a very interesting spring.

Love, Keep warm, The sun is on its way back,  Dana