Dear Folks,
I’m somewhere over the Midwest, returning home from Colorado — the longest journey I’ve taken in six months, which is some kind of a travel-abstinence record for me. It’s been a lightning trip. Got on a plane in Lebanon NH Friday morning, arrived in Aspen at noon (their time), spent the afternoon and evening with a bunch of Monsanto executives. Spent Saturday at Rocky Mountain Institute. Now it’s Sunday and tonight I’ll be back on the farm.
MONSANTO EXECUTIVES????? Those of you who know me must have wondered whether you read that last paragraph right. Monsanto, which makes bovine growth hormone, about which Dana has written numerous columns of merciless condemnation? Monsanto, the maker of Roundup and Nutrasweet, neither of which Dana would touch with a ten-foot pole? Monsanto, which has genetically engineered a soybean that is uniquely resistant to Monsanto herbicides, thereby hooking the farmer into a pesticide/seed package available only from this giant of worldwide agribiz?
Yes, Monsanto, despite my previous assumption that even if I ever wanted to talk to them, they would surely never want to talk to me. This improbable encounter was all Peter Raven’s fault.
Peter is the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, a long-time fighter for biodiversity (especially for rainforests), a colleague of mine on National Geographic’s research committee, and an old friend. He’s also much more tolerant than I am about multinational corporations, given that he raises large amounts of money from them for his Garden, especially from Monsanto, whose corporate headquarters are in his St. Louis backyard. This relationship between Peter Raven and Monsanto has proved fruitful and flowerful in more ways than one. Monsanto, Peter told me over the phone recently, has been burned by the negative reaction to bovine growth hormone. They see the writing on the wall when it comes to large-scale pesticides. They are talking very seriously about becoming a company that is a leader toward a sustainable economy. They really want to learn from people who understand what sustainability is.
That was surprising and tempting news, but I wouldn’t have considered going, except that a) Peter is one of the most persuasive people in the universe, b) he also invited David Pimentel, Paul Hawken, and Amory Lovins, all of whom I admire, and beside whom I would not look so loony, from a Monsanto point of view, and c) the meeting was in Aspen, which would allow me to stop in and play with my buddies at Rocky Mountain Institute, one of the great planetary centers of sustainable thinking.
Well, it was a thought-provoking meeting. There were about 30 top Monsanto execs, from the pesticide division, the biotech division, the plastics division, the Nutrasweet division, the pharmaceutical division (Searle). There was a refreshing, more-than-token number of women, blacks, Hispanics, some of whom I thought were the sharpest people there. They were, above all and no surprise, human beings. When I hear of Monsanto slapping punitive lawsuits on little Midwestern dairies that dare to label their milk BGH-free, I think of it as a huge, hostile force. What it really is, of course, is a bunch of lovely and talented people caught in a system and a culture that makes them act collectively in perverse ways.
As Paul Hawken pointed out (afterward), in the mega-corporate world there is no real freedom of speech. There is a constant subterranean suspicion that one’s decisions and actions hurt people and nature. There is a constant terror that competitors, regulators, customers, stockholders, or incomprehensible international financial fits will doom your project, your job, or your whole company. There is a sinking feeling that one has lost one’s soul. Really, I could weep for these nice people.
Well, one by one we enviros poured forth our paradigm, which must have sounded like Martian from their paradigm. I especially wish you could have heard Amory and Paul, the last two speakers. Amory, in Amory’s way, turned on a fire-hose of theory, numbers, and case studies of how industries can stop wasting energy, materials and money — like 50-80-90-95-99% of the energy, materials, and money they use. One of Amory’s latest kicks is the design of a supercar, a completely new concept in automobiles, made of crash-resistant, non-rusting, light-weight plastic (which Monsanto makes), powered by an on-board electric generator and regenerative braking. He’s working with the Big Three U.S. automakers, and they’re listening, believe it or not, though they’re having a hard time absorbing the idea that they might make cars without stamping steel. A few years ago, when Amory started talking about supercars, he said they could get 150 miles/gallon. It wasn’t long before he was up to 180 mpg. In Aspen last Friday he was talking 300 mpg — and Amory doesn’t make these numbers up, he sits down and calculates them. His staff told me later they were horrified to hear him recently, at another meeting, talk about approaching 1000 mpg. They’re trying to get him to sit down and explain to them what new calculation produced that result. After a long history of hearing Amory put out unbelievable numbers that turn out to come true, we haven’t stopped being surprised by him, but we’ve stopped doubting him and started asking to see the numbers.
Many times I have watched Amory pour out shocking numbers to an audience, watched their chins drop and then their eyes light up as they began to glimpse the opportunities. That experience is one of the great thrills of the modern world. It’s worth a long trip, even worth a few days away from the farm in high summer — the ultimate sacrifice — to enjoy it. After his talk the Monsanto people were abuzz.
Paul Hawken I had never formally met before Friday, though for years I’ve talked to him by phone, read his books, and bought his products (Smith and Hawken garden tools, and before that organic grains from the Erewhon Trading Company). I’ve been entranced by everything I’ve known about Paul. He has been one of the few people in the business world who gave me hope that there could be significant overlap between the doings of business and the welfare of communities, people, and the planet. And I wasn’t disappointed by meeting Paul in person. He’s a gentle, formidably bright and articulate, visionary soul. His vision of what business can and must do, not just to be responsible in the world, but even to save itself, is exciting and compelling. He’s laid it out beautifully in his book The Ecology of Commerce, about which I wrote a column last winter.
So these poor Monsanto people had to sit and listen to me lay out Herman Daly’s principles for sustainability (don’t use renewable resources faster than they can regenerate, don’t emit pollution faster than the planet can render it harmless, etc.) and say that no company, no community, no farm (except traditional ones that we consider “primitive”) and no nation is anywhere near sustainable operation at the moment. Then they had to hear Amory tell them not only that they were wasting a huge fraction of the energy they use, but that Roundup was a dead product, and furthermore the very kind of thinking that leads to herbicides is dead. Then they heard Paul say that most of the ways of thinking that lead to modern industrialism are dead, that we need to put huge taxes on most industrial products, that corporations should lose their charters if they don’t act like responsible citizens in society.
They took it very well. That night, as we all sat drinking beer around a campfire with mountains rising above us, they talked to us a little tentatively at first — the way you would reach out to touch an object you expect might be very hot. But they talked, and with good will. There were some great debates around that campfire, about Roundup and BGH and recyclable plastics and potatoes in which are implanted a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis, so they will make a toxin that kills off Colorado potato beetle. (I, who had spent the previous day in my garden crushing with my fingers the obnoxious orange slimy grubs of Colorado potato beetle wondered whether I would buy that product when Monsanto puts it on the market.)
They told us about their huge, successful effort over the past three years to reduce emissions at all their facilities by 90 percent. I asked them whether it was possible for them to understand that I received that news with three heartfelt reactions. 1. It was a magnificent achievement, and they should be declared heroes and the whole planet is grateful. 2. If it took only three years and an affordable amount of money, why the hell didn’t they do it long ago instead of pouring out poisons and fighting the Clear Air Act? 3. That kind of end-of-the-pipeline fix is the tip of the iceberg of what they need to do to become a force for sustainability in the world.
We all learned a lot. I’m fairly sure they will call on Amory and Paul for more direct consulting at corporate headquarters. It was worth doing. I pray for their souls.
I got to stay that night at Farley Sheldon’s — Hunter Lovins’s mother and a great source of love and goodness at RMI. The next day Amory and Hunter and Paul and I and David Orr, and some folks from EPA and from the Idaho National Energy Laboratory and the great RMI staff talked all day about whither sustainability, and whither RMI and whither large corporations. Hunter, especially, is looking for the leverage points, the places where we few sustainability freaks, with our limited resources, ought to direct our attention. Should we work with the corporations, or should we let them topple from their own rigidity and incapacity to learn and work instead with the little mammals ready to flourish after the dinosaurs fall?
Paul pointed out that there are 80-100 million businesses in the world. The top 500 corporations produce 25% of the gross world product and account for only 1/10 of 1 percent of the employment. The top 10 corporations combined have an annual revenue larger than the 114 smallest countries combined. They’re a force we cannot ignore.
We didn’t come to any grand conclusions. There’s only one conclusion to come to: we should work wherever and whenever we can, and each of us should concentrate on what WE’RE best at, most interested in, most credible at. Paul and Amory should work with corporations. David Orr should work with universities. I should work with the media. Et cetera.
So I’ve just had one day of intense cross-paradigm communication and one day of intense within-paradigm communication, each of them enjoyable and necessary for entirely different purposes. It is important that I do these things, even though I get so absorbed with my farm and my writing that I never want to leave the Upper Valley of the Connecticut River.
Meanwhile, in the Upper Valley of the Connecticut River, our big construction project is proceeding slowly but surely. As always in an old house, when you begin fixing one thing, you discover you have to fix a dozen things. Connecting the little back house to the big front house would have exacerbated a drainage problem — we sit on a southwest-facing slope, and the hill drains down and puddles against the sills on the northeast side of the house. So we had to bring in a bulldozer, re-contour the slope on that side, and make some drainage ditches, one of which will run cleverly (we think) right under the connection bridge. In doing the wiring and plumbing in the back house, we’ll have to rewire and replumb nearly everything. In the middle of all this we discovered a crack in the kitchen chimney and had to call in a mason to rip the chimney down to the roofline and rebuild it.
There, to that chimney, went $1700 of my first MacArthur check. Another $530 went, happily, to a truckload of lime for the hayfield and upper pasture. (The rest went to the Balaton Group.) I’d been wanting to buy that lime for some time, and I was joyous to get it done, finally. We also took soil tests on all the pastures, so in the fall I can supply whatever else they need. The pastures are holding up well, but it’s been 15 years since they were seeded and fertilized with anything other than sheep manure, so it’s time to renovate them, probably as thoroughly as we’re renovating the back house.
Meanwhile in the garden, thanks to a lot of volunteer help, things are in unusual good order. Liz Krahmer has been spending the summer in Vermont and popping over every Saturday to help me weed, bless her heart. My New Zealand friend Jan Wright, who’s in Boston getting her Ph.D. from the Kennedy School, has spent the last week here, weeding raspberries, picking gooseberries, and taking care of all the animal chores while I was in Colorado. We’re having an extraordinary berry year. The freezer is loaded with strawberries and black raspberries, and now it’s filling with blueberries and red raspberries. The root cellar shelves are filling with gooseberry and black raspberry jam. This will make up for the fact that the pear and apple trees, sulking from two years of intense pruning, have hardly set any fruit this year.
Zucchini and cucumbers and broccoli are ripening in floods. The first cherry tomatoes have just turned red. The potato crop looks like it will be terrific, and this is the month when the pumpkin and winter squash vines take over the world. But there are whole crops that are failing out there — carrots, peas, bush beans, and many flowers. That’s because I have a horrendous outbreak of SLUGS. Millions and zillions of them. Oozing over everything. I’ve planted carrots three times and seen them eaten down to the ground three times. I’ve watched healthy young bean plants get reduced to green lace. I’ve put out beer traps, scattered wood ashes, even tried a pyrethrum-rotenone spray, the strongest medicine allowed to organic farmers. I’ve always had a few slugs around — given the deep hay mulch I use, they are inevitable. But in 22 years I’ve never seen an outbreak like this.
Conventional organic farming wisdom says that a pest explosion is a sign of imbalance in the garden ecosystem. I can’t figure out what the imbalance is. One factor could be the disappearance of the toads — a global mystery that could have to do with acid rain or increased ultraviolet light from the thinning of the ozone layer. Whatever the cause, I don’t know how to fix it. I haven’t seen a toad anywhere on my farm for the last 5 years — and they used to be all over the garden. I don’t know any other natural enemy of slugs. I could abandon the mulch, and that will probably be my next ploy, but it means an unremitting obligation to hoe an enormous garden every few days, and in drought years a commitment to watering, too.
If anyone out there has any ideas, I’d like to hear them!
For the first time in years I’ve been finding the time to spin wool, inspired by the beautiful fleeces that are coming off Wally’s daughters. I sit out on the screen porch in the evenings, enjoy the cooling air, and spin for awhile. One night about two weeks ago I was out there, and I heard a strange new bird. Subconsciously I monitor all the bird calls on the place, and when there’s a new one, the sound breaks through into my consciousness, and I go investigate. “That’s a funny one,” I thought. “It sounds just like a baby chick.”
I traced it to the barn, but the barn lights are off because of the electrical work we’re doing, so I had to go back to the house for a flashlight. By the time I followed the peeping to the darkest corner of an old hay manger, I knew what I would find. There was my Dark Cornish hen, which I thought I had lost to raccoons weeks ago, fussing proudly over nine newly hatched chicks. They’re beauties — the Dark Cornish half of them gives them stripes like little chipmunks, and the Partridge Rock half from our rooster gives them a red color. I moved them to the chicken house so they would go on escaping raccoons, and they’re growing fast.
Several times a week I go out bird-prowling with the binoculars and always see wonders. Hummingbirds zooming in on a bank of blooming red bee-balm. Black-and-white warblers flitting in the oak tree. The other day I heard a loud knocking in the locust trees and found a pileated woodpecker rooting out grubs and feeding them to a young one who was just learning to fly. Pileated woodpeckers are the best proof that dinosaurs and birds are closely related — they’re about three times the size of a robin, colored black and white and bright red, and shaped exactly like pterodactyls. I’m tickled that such a wierd, spectacular creature would choose our humble farm to raise its young.
Well, the plane is lowering over Boston and my computer battery is nearly dead. It will be good to get home, to absorb the welcome of the grinning dogs, to see how Jan has been doing, to see how the chicks and the pumpkins have grown, to put more beer in the slug traps. (Ruth Stout says, if the slugs want beer, they can come in the kitchen and get it, like everybody else!) Colorado is beautiful, and Rocky Mountain Institute is exciting, and Monsanto is challenging, but the Upper Valley of the Connecticut River is home.
Love,
Dana
