Dear Folks, It’s 4:30 on a Saturday morning.  Ever since I got back from Thailand I haven’t been quite sure what time it is, so I’ve just let myself be awake when I’m awake and go to sleep when I’m sleepy (a good way to live, even when not jet-lagged).  This morning I’m wide awake.  It will be light in about half an hour.  It’s foggy — yesterday we had a much-needed rain after a long hot spell.  I’ll write until things dry off a bit and then go out and plant the fall garden — spinach, dill, lettuce, arugula, tatsoi, Chinese cabbage, winter radish, and turnips.

It’s been an eventful month.  Among other things, we’ve had a Wedding.

Karel and Stephanie are now Mr. and Mrs. Pluhar.  It was a sweet wedding, homegrown, with hand-sewn dresses and home-made food and flowers from Edgewater Farm down the road.  Stephanie and her mom and friends did most of the work and managed to maintain near-sanity even during the last hectic week.  The rehearsal dinner was a cook-out on our farm for about 35 people, and a lot of Pluhars stayed here for the weekend, which was fun.

Our main worry was Heather.  She was one of two flower girls.  “I’m going to get married with Karel and Stephanie,” she told everyone for weeks beforehand.  One of Stephanie’s friends made her the most beautiful dress she has ever had — long and blue with little pink flowers and lace and flounces in back — well, our eyes just opened in wonder when we saw it!  (Since the wedding we haven’t been able to get her out of it.)  “I’m going to be SO beautiful!” said Heather.

Well, she was, and even more so was Stephanie in her long white gown with a crown of flowers in her hair.  The worry was whether Heather would stay put in the pews after she carried her little basket of flowers down the aisle.  She almost did.  If it hadn’t been a long Catholic mass, I think she would have made it.  We got nearly to the final prayer before she tugged loose from Sylvia, tore up to the front of the church and finished the ceremony in Karel’s lap.  After that she was fine.  At the reception at Stephanie’s folks’ house she climbed trees and danced to the country band and ate cake and had a high old time.

I was surprised how emotional the day was for me — and for a lot of us — and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.  The last time I was together in a church with all the Pluhars was at Anna’s funeral just 18 months ago, and Anna was very present for us at this gathering as well.  (For new readers of this letter, Anna was Karel’s mother and my dear friend and a resident of our farm.)  She would have been delighted at this marriage.  Ellen Williams, Stephanie’s mom, stood up at the reception and told about plotting with Anna how to get Karel and Stephanie together — a story that made us laugh and cry at the same time.

All day I was picturing how Anna would be bustling around arranging things if she had been there, and how her high-pitched laughter would have been ringing out.  She would have rejoiced at how handsome Karel looked, and how slender and graceful and beaming Stephanie was, and how her grandson Jefferson has grown, and how beautiful her daughter Andrea looked, pregnant with her second child, and how carefully Karel and Stephanie went through the Catholic preparation for marriage (which was very impressive — the Church sees to it that you don’t marry lightly).  I should have been happy, knowing how happy Anna would have been.  But what I mainly was thinking, very selfishly, was how I miss her.  I found out that I’m still not done grieving.  And Don and Sylvia and I also finally absorbed on that day the fact that Karel and Stephanie are leaving the farm.  So we all had to go off on little walks and cry for awhile, which seemed strange but necessary on such a happy day.

Well, in spite of the mixed emotions it was a good party, and Karel and Stephanie went off for a honeymoon to Maine, and I went home and froze seven quarts of peas and went to Thailand.

Here’s how you get to Thailand from Plainfield, New Hampshire.  You get up at 2 in the morning and drive to Boston, in order to make a 6 AM plane to Cincinnati (green countryside, big river).  Then you fly to Portland Oregon (another big river and patchwork clearcuts in the green mountains and white, spectacular peaks of Rainier and Hood, and the busted-off peak of Mt. St. Helens).  Then you change planes for an 11-hour flight to Seoul, Korea (fog, big city, chintzy airport playing “Wheel of Fortune” on multiple TV monitors).  You don’t remember much about the flight to Taipei, Taiwan (lots of fish farms on the coast, even chintzier airport) or the final flight to Bangkok.  You stagger off the plane into a steaming tropical night at 11 PM Thai time (lord knows what time it is in New Hampshire or even what day it is) and there’s your friend Chirapol waiting with a big smile to meet you.  At that moment you wake up and feel fine and know that the whole trip was worthwhile.

I went to Thailand for a historic event; the first regional meeting of the Balaton network.  I write about Balaton every September in this newsletter, because that’s when we have the annual meeting in Hungary (at Lake Balaton, which gives us our name).  It’s the high point of my year, because it’s the time to get together with my friends and partners all over the world who are working toward a sustainable world.  “Experts with a heart” is what Robert Gilman calls the group.  It’s my job — and now that I have the Pew Grant I can do it with pay — to further the group, to put out its newsletter, help arrange meetings, raise money, and do whatever I can so that its terrific members can be as powerful as possible doing their work in their home countries.

So most of the space in my suitcase for Thailand was taken up with things needed by Balaton members.  A hard disk and a lot of software for Aro in India, books and publications for everybody, and samples of recycled paper towels and toilet paper and phosphate-free soap and other ecological products for Chirapol, who is conducting a one-man campaign for responsible consumerism in Thailand.  (He goes on television and demonstrates high-efficiency light bulbs; he gets the tourist hotels to install them; he’s talked a department store into having a green consumer corner; he puts on energy-saving displays in the Buddhist temples.)

We have a problem with the Balaton Group, which is that it’s getting too big.  That’s good, of course, but it also means that everyone can’t fit into the meetings, and we’re afraid that at some point the family feeling of the group will dissipate.  One idea we have for getting bigger and reaching more people without FEELING a lot bigger is to have regional networks — there might also be issues for regional members to work on together that would not be relevant to the global network.

Balaton works by trial and error, so we decided to try the regional idea.  Another way Balaton works is that nothing happens until someone takes responsibility for making it happen.  The Asians were the ones who first raised the money for and organized a regional meeting.  They wanted their meeting to have a few representatives from the rest of the world to retain the global character of the network.  Hence they asked me to come.

The people there were from Thailand, India, Pakistan, China, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand (and my friend Joan Davis from Switzerland, also representing the global network).  We invited others from Indonesia, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, and Malaysia who couldn’t make it to this meeting, but who will be part of the network.  Asia is more than half the world, as I said at the opening of the meeting.  It contains within it all the problems and potentials of the world, many races, much cultural diversity, new and ancient technologies, deep spiritual traditions and rampant consumerism, all extremes of poverty and wealth.  Because of its dense populations Asia is also closer to many limits than any other part of the world.  Asia has to be the LEADER in the search for a sustainable society — for its own survival.

We started the meeting by getting on a bus for a 100-mile trip to a beach hotel southeast of Bangkok.  The trip took four hours, two of which were spent in one of Bangkok’s classic traffic jams.  It was a perfect introduction for our meeting.  You should have heard the conversation on the bus as we crawled along, gnarled up in knots of diesel-belching trucks and angry buzzing motor-scooters, peering through clouds of dust at huge construction booms on all sides, behind enormous billboards showing gleaming multistory condominiums and shopping malls to come.  We tried to reconcile these dream images with the stretches of squatter huts, the ugly cheap block apartments with laundry fluttering on the balconies, the thousands of street vendors with their piles of dried fish and bamboo tubes full of sticky rice.  It was as if someone were trying to dump Los Angeles straight down on Calcutta.

“I wonder how much of Thailand’s oil imports are going up in diesel exhaust without producing any movement at all,” mused John from New Zealand.  “Where’s the water going to come from for all these new buildings?  Where’s the electricity going to come from?  Where’s the sewage going to go?” we kept asking Chirapol, who didn’t know.

Capital is flooding into Thailand from Hong Kong and Korea and Taiwan and Japan.  Those places, with little land and increasingly expensive labor, have found that they can buy Thai rice paddies and construction workers and prostitutes for almost nothing.  So there is a boom.  The central plain of Thailand, the rice bowl, is turning into golf courses open exclusively to members of Japanese sporting clubs.  A thousand golf courses were constructed last year, Chirapol told me, and the Thai don’t even play golf, except for the high-flying businessmen who do it as a status symbol.  Along the coast honky-tonk beach resorts and 4500-room luxury hotels are engulfing fishing villages.  Their garish billboards show people with over-agitated smiles, most of them nubile young things in skimpy swimsuits, having fun, fun, fun on tennis courts and beaches — they look like our Coke ads except that the faces are Asian.

In a classic example of bad planning, the beach resorts are packed up against a new deep-water port and oil refinery.  New rail lines and highways are under construction to link these facilities and the tourist places to the city.  But none of them are finished yet.  And all the existing roads seem to be torn up.

“I didn’t know Thailand had sunk so far,” said Aro.  “It’s very sad,” said Lawrence from Papua New Guinea.  “You see what a lot of work I have to do for my country,” said Chirapol.  “I go to bed at 2 at night, because I can’t stay awake any more, and every night I think I haven’t done enough that day.”

One afternoon Chirapol took us on an excursion, a masterpiece of contrast.  We started at a Buddhist temple, quite a new one, constructed for the increasing population of the tourist district.  It was garish — Thai temples of all ages are that anyway — Thai Buddhism is a long way from the ascetic Zen tradition.  But it was solid, deliberate, MORAL, it gave us a sense of a rudder down and some steering underway, which sense was absolutely missing from the go-go construction zone on the coast.

Then we drove past a few remaining rice and cassava fields (the cassava for export to Europe to feed cows) on our way to a forest preserve, which one of Chirapol’s students runs.  The preserve is on one of the sharp hills that jut up out of the central plain — the only places where there are forests left.  We walked up the big stones of a watercourse, about the only open walkable place in the jungle.  I saw in half an hour more kinds of butterflies than I have seen in a lifetime in the United States.  Strange noises echoed from the interior — I couldn’t tell the birdcalls from the insect calls.  It was hot, dank, fecund, peaceful.  This was the Thailand that God made here, and the temple was the Thailand the Thais made here.  And then Chirapol took us to downtown Pattaya, the Thailand that the foreign investors are making here.

Cross Atlantic City with Waikiki with Los Vegas with Coney Island with San Francisco’s Chinatown with the strip development on the edge of any American city (complete with Kentucky Fried Chicken and Dunkin Donuts), smash it together so it’s very dense and a few stories high, and you have Pattaya, a tribute to all cheap forms of human gratification.  Fast food, fast alcohol, fast souvenirs, fast gambling, every possible variation of fast sex.  It goes for blocks and blocks and blocks along what was once a nice beach, now littered with plastic.  At this point conversation in the bus just stopped.  And we plunged into a deep, depressed silence when Chirapol took us up to the hills above Pattaya, the high-rent district, a tribute to all expensive forms of human gratification.

Chirapol ushered us into the Royal Cliffs Hotel.  Vast air-conditioned lobbies humming low sweet muzack.  Columns of orchids and palms.  Elegant shops selling the upscale name brands of the world.  We filed out onto a walkway from which we could see above us a huge white curve, five stories high, of hotel rooms with balconies overlooking gardens and pools and outdoor cafes.  Below us were ANOTHER five stories, looking down on a swimming pool the size of a lake, in a curving irregular shape, with jacuzzis in some of its bows and concrete peninsulas on which were tables where people sat to drink elegant cocktails.  Far below was the sea.  No one was paying much attention to the sea.  Its main role was as a ventilator to bring fresh breezes in and a barrier to keep unanointed people out.  There was no way to tell that this hotel was in Thailand.  It might have been in Florida or Hawaii or the south of France or any place where rich people congregate.

Our Balaton folks regarded all this in silence.  Ben, who is desperately searching for $15,000 to organize some backyard pig-raising coops in the Philippines.  Sreedhar, who is working in the Himalayan foothills to resettle villagers displaced from a new power dam.  Hongying and Wenhu who must live with the daily indignities of life in Beijing.  Lawrence, who is trying to stop in Papua New Guinea the very kind of logging that must have brought the beautiful tropical timbers that glorify this hotel’s lobby.

“Asura,” said Aro finally under his breath.  “What does that mean?”  I asked him.  “Seductive evil,” he said.

How to turn these enormous riches toward the enormous unmet needs of Asia?  How to channel the tremendous energy of these flows of capital toward a sustainable world, instead of one that perpetuates injustice and destroys the environment?  “How can I tell an investor in Australia, asked Michael, “how much damage his money is doing in Thailand?  How can I tell him where to put his money so it does good?”  It was the theme of the meeting.

We stayed in a hotel several stars down from the Royal Cliff, an old, modest, small, and perfectly comfortable place which probably won’t last long, given the monoliths rising all around it.  It took us only one day to abandon the air-conditioned meeting room and gather on the beach.  We played Fishbanks, a game Dennis and other Balaton Group people developed to illustrate the tragedy of the commons. Then we talked about the system structure underlying the tragedy, and the many ways that tragedy is playing itself out in Asia — from overfishing to over-logging to overpopulation.  “How has China brought down its birthrate?” Nic from the Philippines quizzed Wenhu.  “Really, please tell me, we need to know.”

We shared “good news stories” from our homes, and there were plenty of them to tell — urban self-help movements in Karachi slums, dairy co-ops in India, anti-logging movements in Papua New Guinea.  It didn’t take long before the Balaton magic began to work, a simple magic, which just comes from putting people who are passionately committed together and letting them discover how they can help each other.  I had the fun, after getting the meeting going, of leaning back and letting it run, just listening and making notes of ways I might further the ideas that were bubbling up.  (Anyone out there know where I can get $15,000 for Ben’s co-ops in the Philippines?)

Well, I think the experiment was a success and the Asia network will develop in its own way.  Asia is different, and special, and its way will not be the same as the global network’s — it didn’t work too well, for example, to end with group singing because the only songs everyone knew were American, which was ludicrous.  It worked better when Chirapol taught us Thai dancing, which was probably also ludicrous to anyone looking on, but fun.  They have decided to have another meeting in Thailand next year and in Beijing the year after, and they have selected a steering committee and listed about 12 topics they want to explore further together.

It was a long way home.  It’s kind of hard for me to get my mind and heart back to the farm, when parts of them are still in Thailand.

Well, the farm is getting along all right, though it has been depopulated for most of the month.  Sylvia managed to keep up with the broccoli and beans while I was gone, and even the zucchini.  We ate our first tomatoes and sweet corn this week, which is truly astounding — three weeks early. The baby chicks are growing up.  It has been hot and dry and I worry about the pastures, which are turning brown; rains have come just enough to keep things alive but not enough to replenish the water table.  The pond is about six feet down and we still have all of August to get through.  I’m hoping the Kuwait oil fires and Mount Pinatubo together might put enough junk in the air to slow down this greenhouse summer. (I’m not sure I really hope that!).

It’s hard to get back to the discipline of the Limits books, but I must do so, because the deadlines are extreme.  We have a publisher now, and it’s a nice one — Chelsea Green Press of Post Mills Vermont, neighbors and friends of ours.  (How did a little whippersnapper press scoop up the rights to Limits to Growth when all the nation’s big publishers were offered them?  It’s a mystery to me and some kind of statement about modern publishing.)  Three months ago when I started this project I was so excited that the words leaped out onto the page.  Now I’m in agony.  I’ve never done anything so hard.  I hate every word I write.  I want to do anything else but this.  I don’t want to get up in the morning.

I’m scared, scared, scared — that I won’t make it good enough, clear enough, honest enough.  That the very idea is stupid.  That no matter how good, clear, and honest I make it, we will get clobbered, as we did last time.  Or maybe that no one will notice and no one will care and no one will even bother to clobber us — my fears are not at all consistent!  Most of all I’m scared — this is what really keeps me awake at night — that somehow, inadvertently, by being honest and telling all and fully putting myself into this effort — I will inadvertently provide the critics with the ammunition to distort, label, ridicule, and discredit the whole conversation again.  The message we are carrying is one that powerful people don’t want to hear.  It could backfire badly.

And yes, I know that I must write from my convictions, not from my fears.  You can’t imagine what a hard struggle it is these days to do that.  I call upon my Higher Power, but there are days when I can’t hear it because of the chattering fears.  And there’s nothing to do but go on, humbly, asking for guidance, praying that this is the right thing to do, and that Dennis and I will do it as well as we can.

Whew!  Thanks!  It helped to share that.  Don’t worry, I think these are the normal dire thoughts that all authors experience, just magnified a bit because of the history and the memories behind this particular effort — and by the fact that I care too much.  Do your best and let go of the results, I try to tell myself.  Every form of ancient wisdom counsels full engagement in the process but detachment about the product.  Let go and let God, says my 12-step group.

Good advice.  I can only pray to be given the grace to follow it.

Love, Dana