Chuck Blitz’s house, Santa Barbara, California
Dear Folks,
This is going to be one of those rambling on-the-road letters, otherwise I’ll find it impossible to remember everything.
It’s hard for me to believe I am where I am right now. The doors are open to let in the breeze, the air smells of sage and rosemary blooming just outside in the garden. I’m sprawled on the polished wood floor of a brand-new house that’s almost all windows, looking out on craggy mountains, a green valley, and an ocean studded with oil rigs. Mists half-hide the offshore islands. I can see an orange tree, hung with great golden fruit. All day there were hang-gliders floating overhead. I was out on the deck soaking in the sun. And yesterday morning when I left the farm to get on the plane, we had just shoveled out another foot of snow, and it was 15 below zero.
Especially in January, I can never quite believe that California is real. Or that people actually live here full time. I wonder how they ever develop any character.
I’m here for the next working meeting of our consumption consortium, which, for the time being, we’re calling Enough! The meeting is hosted by Chuck Blitz, who lives in this beautiful house and uses it to put on meetings mainly about re-invigorating liberal politics. In addition to our usual gang of suspects (Betsy Taylor, Vicki Robin, Alan Durning, Bob Engelman, Jacqueline Hamilton) there are a number of people we invited, and also people chosen by Chuck who are movers and players in advertising and politics — “image people.” We have one of President Clinton’s major pollsters and a former communications director of the Democratic Party and an unrepentant creator of a lot of the ads that have plagued your life and mine.
It’s an interesting mix. Some of the new folks to the discussion are taken aback, to put it mildly, by the idea of a campaign to reduce consumption. They are used to constructing campaigns about what’s feasible, not what’s sustainable or equitable or soul-satisfying, and they don’t see any great public demand for less stuff. But their reactions, negative or positive, are valuable to us, to give us a sense of what we’re up against. They’re being honest with us. They don’t like the name Enough!, they don’t like talking directly about consumption (“It sounds too much like tuberculosis”), they think we should hit both the environmental and the quality-of-life arguments very hard.
Vicki Robin turned them around from hostility to curiosity, when she calmly described her experience with hundreds and thousands of people who are hungry for a better goal in life than accumulating things. These people aren’t necessarily rich, she said, most of them are middle class and hassled, and they are insulted by the cynical image of them that the advertisers seem to have.
Out of this meeting will come some ideas, some co-conspirators, and some funders, I hope. Some of the strategists are already beginning to think up sound bites about how only an idiot would buy $80 inflatable made-in-Indonesia-by-indentured-servants sneakers just to be cool. One great thing I see happening is that our planning group, having had that creative time together at New Road Map last month, is operating as a seamless team. The more objections arise about the difficulty of what we’re intending to do, the more sure we are that we intend to do it. We find ourselves saying to the critics, “look, we’re going ahead, don’t try to talk us out of it. Just tell us how to deal with the difficulty you’re pointing out.” Amazing how that simple attitude shift (from doubt to commitment) transforms a conversation.
We expect to have the office of Enough! (or whatever) up and running by June. What do you think is the best name?
Enough! (with or without the exclamation point)
The New American Dream
The Good Life
True Wealth
Beyond More
any others come to mind?
The folks at this meeting who intended to return to the East Coast tonight have all their flights canceled, because it’s snowing there. I have ten more days in this sunny place!
January 9, 1996, the Wilkinson’s house, Santa Barbara, California
I’ve come down off the high-priced mountain, to a place in town that feels more real, the home of Bob and Pam Wilkinson and their sons Willy (15) and Jonathan (10). Bob is a loyal Balaton member, one who helps in organizing and supporting our members and events around the world. We met him when he was founding the environmental program of George Soros’s Central European University in Budapest. Now he’s returned to Santa Barbara to teach in the UCSB Environmental Studies Program and to work on his PhD thesis. Pam is an accountant in the materials science department. They both work hard toward sustainability, suburban California style.
It’s surprising what one can do on a California town lot. There’s a vegetable garden in front and a fruit orchard out back. We can go out and pick lemons, limes, tangerines, oranges, grapefruit, persimmons — and at other times of the year almonds, walnuts, avacados, cherimoyas, and a bunch of things I never heard of. Pam bakes her own bread, Bob is building a deck and garden shed on the side of the house. Pam used to have a sprout business in the back yard, sprouting dozens of kinds of seeds, packaging them in attractive mixtures and selling them at the bustling local farmers’ market. In the study, where I’m sitting now are shelves of books and piles of paper that look just like the ones on my desk at home. (Sustainability workers are hard on trees.)
On Sunday we went to the Santa Barbara zoo. We drove along the enormous beach, crowded with bicyclists, skate-boarders, artists selling their work. Coming home we drove down the main street of town, a uniform light adobe color, stores and restaurants clearly catering to a high-class tourist clientele. Old mission, old town hall, with colorful Spanish tiles and ponderous dark carved wood furniture. The yards bedecked with heavily bearing orange trees and blossoming jasmine and poinsettias 10 feet tall. Can this be January? On the same planet where my farm is? (I called Chrissie and Scot, and they said it was 40 below the night I left. And the furnace shut down and a pipe froze. All fixed now. Thank heaven they’re so capable!)
Yesterday Bob and I spent the morning planning the Balaton conferences and sending email around the world. Then he took me to the university, to see the greenhouse and organic garden he started with students years ago, and the solar collectors on the dorm roofs. (Bob used to be the dean in charge of campus buildings. He installed water- and electricity-saving devices and solar hot water systems way ahead of his time.) I gave a lecture on systems to an environmental studies class, and we had a reception where I got to meet the faculty — and my old friend Garrett Hardin, whose writings have delighted and instructed me for years. On campus the sidewalks were dotted with squished olives that had fallen from the trees. (Couldn’t we pick them and press them into oil? I asked Bob.)
Today we took a deep breath and drove into L.A., two hours away. There is nothing I can say about that city that you haven’t already heard, except that the reality is more overwhelming than any of the images in your head (unless you live there). Jammed-up freeway at 11 A.M. Air so thick that skyscrapers two blocks away are barely visible. Miles and miles and miles and miles of slurb. I’m glad everyone doesn’t move away, because I don’t know where we’d put them, but I seriously wonder why they don’t.
We were there to visit the L.A. Times, one of the great papers of the world (meaning one that runs my column sometimes). They have editorial lunches when people come to town, to get ideas for news and commentary, and I wanted to push the editorial page to run my column more often and the syndicate to make me one of their regular columnists. The syndicate ducked a meeting with me, as they have for years. The lunch went fine — they wanted to hear about the consumption stuff, and I was full of it after last weekend. I’m beginning to be able to anticipate and handle the standard reactions. Isn’t this an elitist movement? But people really want the credit cards and the stuff in their lives. But what about jobs? But why should we give up everything we’ve worked so hard to get? And, usually unsaid, but clear in the questioning, hey, this conversation is about me!
I notice that when I start talking about regaining control of one’s finances and especially one’s time, the female heads in the room start nodding. Most of the heads in the Times lunchroom today were female, and one of the men, who was not exactly sold on my argument, noticed the nodding heads, and asked, “why are you all agreeing with this?”
As for the Times running the column more, I had a short but good talk about that with Bob Berger, the head of the editorial page. He was far more complimentary than I would have expected (my experience of him has not been warm and fuzzy). He thinks my writing is fine, what he doesn’t like is when I get too chummy or too righteous. He wants more of an acknowledgement that there’s another side to the story, and then a direct confrontation with the other side. “The opinion page is for argumentation,” he says.
I’m not sure what to do about that. Confrontational feistiness is not my favorite style, because self-righteousness is an arena of constant struggle for me. In the Enneagram classification (an ancient Sufi division of people into nine basic categories), I’m a One — an imposer of order and logic, a control freak, deeply concerned with issues of right and wrong, always in danger of going off into judgmentalism (granddaughter of a Baptist minister). None of that will come as a surprise to you, my faithful readers! It’s perfect for a One to take on the task of writing an opinion column. But also dangerous.
Tomorrow Bob and I will spend a quiet day working on Balaton stuff and visiting friends and farms, and the next day I rent a car and drive up the California coast (I tried to take a train, but in California driving seems to be the only way) to San Francisco.
January 11, 1996, Commonweal, Bolinas, California
Boy, was that ever fun!
I left the Santa Barbara airport in a rented car at 8:30 this morning, and arrived in Bolinas, north of San Francisco, about 5:30 tonight. I came all the way up on Route 1, hugging the ocean. I feel saturated with sun and brown suede mountains and shining, vast, uncaring sea.
Somehow I have always pictured the California coast as rugged (which it is) and thickly forested with redwoods (which it isn’t, except for a spot around Big Sur). What it really is, what most of California seems to be, is a cowscape. Heavily grazed chaparral. No chance for trees or even bushes to get a start. Though I was enjoying the bright January sun, I was rooting for trees all the way north. They did begin to appear, at first hiding in deep valleys and hugging the north sides of hills, finally covering whole hillsides, as long as there were no cows around. But the trees are at best coastal. Always on my right were the inland hills, scrubby or grassy or bare. This is a geologically new landscape, steeply shoved up, still sliding down, not much soil. It’ll take a million years or so for erosion and succession and roots reaching down and microclimates catching more water before this is a forested coast. It would go faster if they’d get rid of the cows.
The driving went fast for awhile, and then, as the steep hills began to rise straight out of the ocean, it turned pretty hairy. I enjoyed swooping around the curves and getting new views ahead and behind. Whenever I got tired, I waited for a low place where I could scramble down to a beach, and I let the Pacific wash over my toes. Blue, clear, cold water. Hypnotic rhythm of breakers rolling in. Refreshed me completely. And on I went.
It was exciting to go past places that were only myth to me — San Luis Obispo, and Esalen, and Big Sur, and Carmel. Watsonville in a huge flat valley planted from end to end with artichokes. Santa Cruz, surrounded by acres of Brussels sprouts. One place was so mythical I had to stop — Monterey, site of one of my favorite books, Cannery Row. John Steinbeck would gag at the cute tourist shops that have moved into the old fish factories — but the buildings and even the railroad line are intact and fun to see. I spent an hour in the new aquarium, a tribute to Doc’s biological supply house. Sting rays, sea otters, sharks, and a silvery school of anchovies spinning round and round a cylindrical tank, looking like some kind of animated sculpture. Cool!
I managed to slip through San Francisco just ahead of rush hour and headed over the Golden Gate Bridge (Beautiful bridge! Beautiful view of the bay and the city!). The mountainous curves weren’t over — some of the worst ones were on the way to Stinson Beach, with the sun setting into the ocean off my left shoulder. As I came past Bolinas I picked up Michael Lerner hitchhiking home! Perfect serendipity, a lovely welcome to Commonweal, since he is my main reason for coming here. There’s much to tell you about this wonderful place, but it will have to wait. All that driving plumb tuckered me out.
January 14, 1996, Commonweal
I just got back from a long walk over the bluffs, down the cliff, and along the beach, great rollers crashing in, fascinating litter of kelp and shells and rock, deep perpetual thunder of the surf. It’s a foggy day, the first since I got to California that hasn’t been glorious sun. In the chaparral little wild irises are blooming; in the duff under the pines are brilliant red (poisonous) Amanita mushrooms. I needed the walk to clear my head after a weekend of very abstract talk, and to try to understand what happened.
First about Commonweal. It’s a magical place, a shining star on the sustainability map and also on the map of places that operate in a community of high purpose. Michael Lerner originally founded it as a retreat for youth at risk and their parents and people who work with them. Then he added the Cancer Help Program, which I hope you all saw in operation at the end of Bill Moyers’ PBS Series Healing and the Mind. Then, with a growing understanding of the process of healing and the capabilities of this place, he started working on global environmental issues. I came here the first time for a seminar he held on international environmental policy.
Commonweal is an old RCA ship-to-shore radio installation on a steep bluff overlooking the Pacific just north of Bolinas, just south of Point Reyes National Seashore. There’s a field of transmission aerials (with cows grazing among them), a grove of huge, sheltering pine trees, a few simple buildings, in one of which I’m typing now. An enormous expanse of space, beauty, wind, waves. And Michael and his wife Sharyle and the staff here fill it with love and service.
The meeting that brought me here was organized by two people I respect greatly — Charlie Halpern the director of the Nathan Cummings Foundation and Bill Cronon the ecological historian. (If you want to read great history, read his Nature’s Metropolis about Chicago, or his Changes in the Land about New England.) A few years ago Bill organized a bunch of fellow historians and some environmentalists to come together in a term-long seminar about the word “nature” as a cultural and historical construct — what it has meant to different people, how it has changed over time. That produced a multiple-authored just-published book called Uncommon Ground. The purpose of this meeting at Commonweal, as far as I could understand it, was to extend the findings of that exercise to more activists, so the historians could tell the environmentalists how, by understanding the cultural context in which they work, to be more effective.
I have plenty of my own criticisms of the “environmental movement” (one of them being that it’s not a movement), but I found the invitation, the book, and what I understood of the process that preceded it to be just on the edge of offensive. Who are these pointy-headed academics, who write essays that are way too long and abstract, to tell the likes of Carl Anthony and Denis Hayes and Vic Sher — all of whom were at the meeting, all environmental greats in my book — how to do their work? How does the insidious academic virus of deconstructionism tell us how to get rid of Newt Gingrich? What do historians know that system dynamicists haven’t figured out long ago?
Well, you’re right, that was a pretty prideful attitude to take into a meeting, and I’ve exaggerated it here. Given my respect for Cronon, I hoped to get some great new ideas. And I think my edge of pridefulness was a simple, honest reaction to theirs. I’ve run a few prideful meetings myself (let’s get Them together to receive wisdom from Us). They have all been disasters, and in a way this one was too. At the final session Bill asked for a go-round of honest assessment of the usefulness of the meeting, and I was stupid enough to give mine. (Some day I’ll learn not to take seriously peoples’ requests, however heartfelt, for honest assessments.) I said it was useless. As far as I can tell, the central wisdom they wanted to impart is the paradigm that there are paradigms, that we impress our preconceptions on the world and filter information through our biases, that culture, language, myth, model, consciousness are the founts out of which all human systems and actions spring forth. Those have been my guiding principle for decades. My problem is not to see the world that way. My problem is to get economists and clear-cutters and the World Bank and the right wing to see the world that way.
I’m not at all sorry I came, of course. I love just being at Commonweal and being with the people who attended the meeting. I came earlier and am staying later than anyone else, so I have quiet time at this lovely place, and it feels like a much-needed vacation. Michael Lerner and Sharyle and I had some good talks and cooked up some good schemes, especially about sustainability indicators (that alone was worth the whole trip). But I am sad, as are we all, that minds definitely did not met here. While I was walking on the beach I was trying to understand why not. (Meetings that backfire are always the most interesting and instructive, if you can just figure out why they backfire.)
My guess is that we produced a classic example of a frequent and disheartening human failing. We wanted to present our enthusiasms and excitements, without taking the time to understand the enthusiasms and excitements of the others — or whether they already had, or had any interest in receiving, what we wanted to give. It’s so sad to see people undercut each others’ sources of aliveness, and none of us intended to do that, but we did, and I was one of the main perpetrators. The historians came to me like a child running up with a newly-discovered treasure, and I said, “I already knew that,” and “how does it help me stop the logging in the old-growth forests, restore salmon to the Columbia River, or write next week’s column?” A totally honest reaction, but crushing. I have lots of experience of that feeling, as crusher, as crushee. They crushed me with a paper they passed around — one of many post-modern demolitions of Garrett Hardin and the tragedy of the commons — which is a sacred text to me, and one that I believe they read only through their own unexamined preconceptions about what they assumed (wrongly) his point to be.
Sigh. Aren’t academics tendentious? This is why I avoid English departments.
So in spite of good intentions and shared concern about the environment, it was not a happy meeting — unless we can learn from it. Learn how to honor each others’ passions. Learn how to admit honestly our opinions about others’ passions without sucking the life out of them. Learn how to go on valuing our passions even if everyone doesn’t share them, or even if someone else discovered them first. Learn to honor the little wondering child and the all-knowing god, the front-line warrior and the contemplative searcher after wisdom, the activist and the philosopher in each of us.
Here’s what I wish I had said at the conclusion of the meeting. The paradigm that we see the world through paradigms, that all we have in our heads is imperfect models, that we are deeply enculturated, that our very language, the images that haunt our dreams, our “knee-jerk” reactions, our choice of professions and our entire worldview are enormously programmed by our cultural history and our particular stock of experience, the idea that everything we think we know about the world, however hard-won, however true it feels, is demonstrably not the world, perhaps not even close to what is really going on in the world — all that is one of the most shocking and important and useful revelations in my life. (And it is also, itself, a model, a paradigm, a way of seeing the world, not the world.) I got it, as most scientists do, from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and it was ground deeply into me by the practice of computer modeling.
I think the single most important way to make our world better would be to imbue everyone with the paradigm that there are paradigms. I would give every child the gift of radical worldview flexibility, the ability of cross-paradigm communication, and the deep humility that goes with those skills. (I try to do that with my students). I would like to work with historians, anthropologists, scientists, modelers, anyone else to loosen up my own and everyone else’s worldviews. But in my experience, environmental activists are not the place to begin, because the ones I know already see the world this way. Their primary problem is that their opponents do not (or don’t admit that they do). If we’re going to deconstruct someone’s worldview, how about that of politicians, journalists, real estate developers, miners, loggers, bankers, commodity traders, CEOs of large companies, advertisers, and above all, economists? If they would admit some ideological flexibility, I have no doubt that environmentalists would follow. But they would be fools to let down their epistemological guard unilaterally.
I thoughtlessly labeled the meeting “useless,” because I didn’t see until too late how useful it could be. One of the reasons I didn’t see it was that the organizers were not clear. Another reason was that my intellectual pride was hurt. I’m ashamed of myself about that.
I think I’d better email what I just wrote here to Charlie and Bill.
January 16, 1996, Institute for the Future, Menlo Park, California
My time in the sun seems to be over; it’s gusting wind and spitting rain, and I’m breaking out in an itchy rash that I assume is poison oak. I’m deathly sensitive to poison ivy, so I know the symptoms all too well — though obviously I don’t know poison oak when I see it. So much for scrambling around happily in the California scrub!
I’m in Silicon Valley, on the edge of Stanford University. I just finished a lovely meeting, almost the antithesis of the previous one, though the subject was even more abstract and even more ambitious.
The Fetzer Institute, based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, has concentrated on mind-body-spirit-healing projects, including funding Bill Moyers’ spectacular television series Healing and the Mind. The Institute is now trying to figure out how to enlarge the mind-body-spirit-healing focus to the social level — media-environment-consciousness-sustainability. They invited a small group, including three readers of this newsletter — Alan AtKisson, Duane Elgin, Bill Leland — for a day’s meeting to kick around the possibilities.
What made this meeting so beautiful? Maybe it was the almost complete absence of an agenda — the assignment was to explore ideas, not to come up with a manifesto for Fetzer. We could focus on process, not product, which can be a dangerous freedom, leading to wandering irresponsibility. But I don’t think it did today, perhaps because of two other factors that made this meeting special — the participants and the facilitator.
In addition to the friends I’ve already mentioned, the participants were all what I might call transformation experts, conflict resolvers, accomplished facilitators themselves, people who normally dwell in the realm of consciousness. (Not “culture,” with the implication of trappedness, which the historians bring to it, but “consciousness,” with the implication of expansion, liberation, enlightenment.) These were people who had worked with their own psyches enough to be able to bring their honest feelings efficiently and meaningfully into the conversation, and at the same time to control emotional outbursts and associations and egos that cause group work to go bouncing off in unproductive directions. So it was a disciplined and yet totally uninhibited working group.
The facilitator was a remarkable Japanese-American woman named Tomi Nagai-Rother. She covered the walls with big sheets of paper and made drawings, cartoons, icons, symbols, artistic creations as we talked. That was amazing, both her skill in doing it and the experience of watching our mental pictures weave into a joint picture on the wall, one we could return to, point at, and build upon, and one that got more and more profound — or so it seemed to me, anyway. In the middle appeared an open circle, which we refused to fill in with words or pictures, but which we referred to alternatively as The Nexus, The Universe, The Source, God, Love, Everything, Nothing. Around that dynamic, empty, mysterious center swirled all our images, from the environment to the Internet, from community to system dynamics to treetrunks to stars.
Gee, it was fun. I can’t begin to summarize what we said, and I can’t guess what on earth Fetzer is going to do with it, if anything. But I do love being liberated to talk about the deepest foundations of my faith and hope, with people who come at that conversation not with embarrassment or cynicism, but with joy and conviction that human consciousness is fundamentally keyed into (or at least key-able into) divine truth. There is a fine line between faith and flakiness, and I am rarely in the presence of even one other person who can stay right on that line and keep me there. I spent this day in the presence of many people who did that. It was a privilege. This is the kind of conversation out of which industrial civilization can save itself, but it’s so darn hard to have it.
I told them at the beginning that I hoped the day would be a total failure and not lead to any future activity that I would have to cram into my overcommitted schedule, and that the only way to frustrate that hope would be to talk meaningfully about what to do about overcommitted busyness. Actually, I think, both my hope and frustration were realized. We did talk about busyness, among many other topics. We talked about SLOWING DOWN as perhaps the central and most unheeded motto of the sustainability discussion. And we didn’t plan any more busyness for any of us. We just came together — in one day! — as a loving though probably evanescent, human community.
Whatever else that day did, it centered and rejuvenated me.
January 17, 1996, Border Environmental Cooperation Commission, Nogales, Mexico
A turbulent passage through the storm to San Francisco, Phoenix, Tucson, and now one block over the border to the Mexican Nogales, a stark contrast to the Arizonan Nogales we can see from here. When you stand on the border and look sideways at the fence, newly reinforced (“militarized” is the word they use here), undulating up and over the scrubby hills, you can see the winding paths that cut straight through it — paths beaten by the feet of innumerable illegal immigrants. On the US side is a rash of huge new houses and retirement communities up in the hills, where the views are of the mountains and the desert, not of the scruffy Mexican side, with the big maquila factories and the crowded, noisy, dusty, colorful town. The streets are jammed with betting parlors, bars, and little stores stocked with millions of Mexican blankets, ceramics, jewelry, and other garish stuff for tourists. The beggars are mostly women with Indian-looking faces and small, listless children. First world to third world, bing, within two blocks.
I am here for a meeting of the BECC, the new body created by one of the big bribes that allowed NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) to pass. This was the bribe to the environmentalists. It will amount to about $3 billion when fully funded, half from the US, half from Mexico, to create a North American Development Bank (NADBank), similar (not too similar, one hopes) to the World Bank. Its purpose is to make loans to clean up and develop this desecrated thousand-mile border. The BECC is a commission of Mexicans and Americans, appointed by their respective presidents, who are to review and approve NADBank loans.
I’ve been invited by the Udall Institute at the University of Arizona in Tucson to be a speaker and facilitator for a half-day discussion with BECC and NADBank officials on sustainable development. Sharing this task is one of my favorite people, Alicia Barcena, who has just left her post as head of the Earth Council in Costa Rica to return to her native Mexico. (She got back just two weeks ago.) The reason both Alicia and I accepted the invitation was because the other did. We have never had more than an hour together at a time, usually in the middle of a busy meeting, but somehow, like hours with Michael Lerner, or Bob Wilkinson, or Vicki Robin, or Betsy Taylor, or Alan AtKisson, or many of the other incredible people I have intersected with on this trip, those rare hours can inspire months and years of my work and my life.
Crossing the border means everything runs on Mexican time, which means hours late, so Alicia and I, while waiting for the meeting to begin, got our hour — actually two — of private talk. You will probably hear, in future newsletters, of the consequence of that talk — it did NOT fulfill my perpetual hope of never again hearing a nifty idea that I will be impelled to go work on. Alicia will continue to support the Earth Council, and will be working with Elizabeth Dowdeswell, the director of UNEP (UN Environmental Program) on a program of global citizenship (!!!). But above all she will be working with her husband and two sons on whatever must be done in Mexico. They’ve been away five years. She’s starting by just being there and listening. She was delighted to be able to come and be immersed in the problems of the border area.
And immersed we were. Again, what a remarkable meeting!
The good news about the BECC is that 1) it is an opening, at last, for citizen input into whatever passes for planning on the US-Mexican border, 2) it has the word “environment” right in its title, 3) it has the whole border as its mandate, 4) US and Mexico have equal participation and power, and 5) it has real money to loan or spend. The bad news is that 1) it is strongly influenced by all the pernicious political forces that have deep roots on both sides of the border, 2) most of its members think in the standard big-engineering sewage-treatment-plant (and lucrative contract) mode, 3) only one of its members is a woman.
She is quite a woman, though — Lynda Taylor of the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As far as I can tell, she is the only BECC member who understands the environment and sustainability, and the only one who represents the people, rather than the economic powers, of the region. For a year, against the steady opposition of the rest of the board, she has been pushing to write loan criteria not just for economic payoff but for sustainable development. She had gotten the rest of the board to allow a kind of “honorable mention,” a gold star for more sustainable projects, which wouldn’t influence the allocation of money at all. Which means it wouldn’t affect the design of projects. A pitiful degree of progress. I would have quit in frustration long ago. But Lynda, amazingly, has stuck it out, and that has allowed her to slowly infiltrate the minds of the BECC. She set them up, so Alicia Barcena and I could knock them down.
We each made our presentations, and then there was a long, spirited, Spanish-English (simultaneous translation) conversation. Alicia and I were very blunt. How can you justify investing in a project based on a water supply you know will be gone in 20 years? she asked. I asked, why on earth, with these good criteria you’ve drawn up, which reflect the deep values and the real welfare of the communities you represent — communities whose tax dollars you are spending — why not let these criteria decide which projects get funded? Both those questions were met with embarrassed laughter — they were the points Lynda had been making all year. Apparently she had been making them tactfully though, because the laughter was good natured. One of the male BECC members explained to Alicia and me, with a smile, “it’s been all of us against Lynda.”
Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, I felt something slide in the room. The questions weren’t hostile any more, they were respectful. People were thinking hard. How, really, with real money at stake, with real projects on the drawing board, how do we make this sustainability thing happen in our poor, toxic, water-starved, burgeoning communities? It was the RIGHT QUESTION. And we all got to the point of seeing (it was clearly an immense relief for them) that they didn’t have to start right off with a perfect answer. They could make mistakes, they could try the criteria and revise them, they could announce sustainability as the goal without having a detailed map of how to get there.
That just loosened up everything. Lynda was suddenly the heroine of the hour. She called me later to thank me. She thinks a corner has been turned. She asked me to send the Act 250 criteria that have governed approval of development projects in Vermont for 25 years. (The BECC commissioners were impressed when I told them that the criteria didn’t stop development at all, they just greatly improved the quality of development.)
It was another moment in this long trip that felt like it was worth the whole bother and expense and maybe even all the jet fuel. After the meeting broke up we all went out as the best of friends for beer and enchiladas.
Hey, maybe one worthwhile thing is coming out of NAFTA after all!
January 21, 1996, Foundation Farm, Whew! Back home! Two days of sorting mail and cleaning house, and I’m back to thinking that only New England winters are real, and the West is one big act of the imagination. I returned to a classic January thaw, complete with heavy rain and a flood that put Daniels Road under water. (No real problem in the winter, because the soil is too frozen to wash away.) Then the temperature plunged from +50 to 0 in a few hours, and we’re back to normal. There’s still plenty of snow, but now it’s all crusted and dirty. But new stuff is lazily drifting down as I type this morning.
Chrissie and Scot welcomed me with a surprise — A LAMB! A month and a half early, totally unexpected. The next day — TWO MORE!! And it looks like there may be more coming. We always separate the ram from the ewes on the first of September to prevent just this from happening, but this year our ram Satchmo seems to have come into his fall fertility a bit early. (It was such a hot, dry summer, we never would have expected it.) Scot calls the little ones out there (two black, one white, two male, one female all doing fine) “Satchmo surprises.”
The hens are laying like crazy, the ducks and geese waddle on the crusted snow, the cats cuddle with us in the evenings, Emmett has relieved Basil of bouncy-greeting duty, but Basil still welcomes me with a grin and a lick. The Christmas tree is down, the spring seed order has arrived. Thanks to Scot and Chrissie everything has been kept cozy here. It’s so good to be home!
Love, Dana
