Dear Folks,
Ah, June! This is the time when we remember why we endure five months of winter to live here. Everything is overwhelmingly green, the birds are singing, the air is sweet, the salads are beginning to flow in from the garden. Fresh young dill. It’s worth at least one month of winter just for the fresh dill. And spinach galore. And funny, delicious new greens — arugula, tatsoi, cress. I like the arugula so much that I munch it every time I pass it in the garden. And the first tender lettuce leaves, sweet little turnips and radishes, chives, and fresh mint. It’s worth another month of winter for just-picked mint.
Everyone has his or her own garden this year. As usual, Suzanne has the kitchen garden, where she specializes in salad greens, sweet peas, and morning glory, and continually beats back the invading horseradish and catnip. I have the main garden downhill from the house, which stocks the freezer and root cellar for the winter. John is making a market garden down by the brook, and Brenna has her own patch there full of her favorite munchies (cherry tomatoes, radishes, and kohlrabi). Kate is running the herb garden.
Even Dennis has a garden. He has taken on the barnyard, where the sheep deposit manure all winter. Dennis used to help me till it up — a big job, because it’s unusually stony, even for New England. But then he got into planting it himself and kicked me out of the operation. He is interested in only one crop. Sweet corn. He fills up the place with sweet corn, licking his lips the whole time. He has engineered tents of old tobacco netting to keep the crows away, and has reinforced the fencing to keep out wandering chickens and ducks. Then for good measure he put up a scarecrow, made from his old overalls, and a horrible rubber Halloween mask with a green face and flaming red hair, and a hard-hat.
He first undertook this enterprise last year, and the result in August was a series of sweet corn pig-outs. We would pick bushels and have nothing but sweet corn for supper. We’d each eat 6 or 8 or 12 ears and freeze what was left. We’re still eating that corn out of the freezer now. I got Dennis to cut back a little on the corn this year and stick in a few pumpkins, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. He thinks it’s perfect to have nothing for dinner but sweet corn.
My garden got off to a terrific start, but then the slug problem reappeared. Something got off balance in my carefully-nurtured organic soil last year, and the result was millions of slugs that did in about half my crops. Their babies are back this year, though I did everything I could to discourage them, including holding back my normal deep mulch. Last year I was so busy I had to give up and let the slugs do what they would. This year it’s a fight to the finish. Every day I think of a new tactic.
Here are some things that don’t work against slugs: wood ashes, garlic and red pepper spray, rotenone, hand-picking, little saucers of beer for them to drown in, pyrethrum and rotenone mixed, foliar seaweed spray, and ducks as predators. I wish I could tell you what does work. Maybe in the next letter. I’m out of ideas for the moment, but I have not given up the fight.
I am going through everything in my Dartmouth office, trying to throw most of it out, preparatory to moving out sometime this summer. It’s a peaceful parting; the Resource Policy Center is no more, and there’s no reason for me to have an office in the Thayer School. I don’t even feel comfortable there any longer. But 15 years of accumulated books and files is a lot to confront. Going through it is a bittersweet experience. I’m finding correspondence about Limits to Growth from 1971; notes from Aurelio Peccei, who is now dead; my first Dartmouth contracts; lecture notes for courses I haven’t thought about for years; readings and clippings I thought I’d lost. The best finds are the student papers — I saved copies of the best papers in each course. How wonderful they are! What marvelous young people I’ve been privileged to teach!
These clearing-out sessions usually end up with me in tears, not from sadness, but from the magnificence of the human beings I’ve been involved with. What a lot of effort and achievement (some of it even my achievement) is represented in those files, and what wonderful memories.
Needless to say, I’m not throwing much out. The best I’ll be able to say at the end of the process is that I’ll know where everything is again.
I may be moving all those papers home (where there is no room for them) or I may be moving them across campus to the Environmental Studies Program, which is where my remaining contact with Dartmouth is centered. I’m beginning work on a textbook with two of my colleagues there (on basic environmental science, to accompany the WGBH television series). So it may make sense to shift the files over there, though most of them are of sentimental value only.
Wim Hafkamp, a member of the Balaton Group from Holland is visiting us for about ten days, partially to help out on a resource management workshop we’re doing for the United Nations next week, and partially for a vacation. Some vacation! He spent all day yesterday out with Dennis, felling trees, chipping up the branches, and hauling the firewood home. The day before he drove to Boston with me for a brainstorming session at WGBH with Greg Watson and John and Nancy Todd.
WGBH is doing a ten-part PBS series on the state of the world’s resources. Accompanying it will be materials for a college-level course, textbook, teacher’s guide, reading lists, and so forth. We know the series has to deal with the classic subjects — population, water, soil, food, forests, wilderness, energy, materials, waste. The question before the producers is how to do that so that people like YOU will tune in breathlessly every week. So I throw the question out to you. How might such a series be framed, or linked together, or introduced, or based to make it more exciting than the usual heavy Planet Earth-type show? Should there be a single host-speaker? A celebrity? An ordinary Joe (or Jane)? A cartoon character? Should the emphasis be on problems or solutions or both? What’s the “hook” that could get the whole nation talking about this series and tuning it in?
Well, if that gets your creative juices flowing, let me know what you come up with. We spent several hours talking about it on Friday, coming up with more ideas than could ever fit into one series, getting all excited ourselves, but not, I think, coming out with a clear idea of what will make this show click. More brainstorming is in order.
The columns on the lies of the nuclear power industry, which you are receiving in this packet, have just come out and already are producing a storm of reaction from the industry. The director of P.R. for the U.S. Committee for Energy Awareness wrote me a terse little letter that contains the following classic sentence. “No matter how I explain the linkage between oil and nuclear energy and the painstaking research that underlies every statement in our ads, I fear that your emotions will overwhelm my facts.” My emotions and his facts! And a letter from an acquaintance at Vermont Yankee says, “What about the downside major environmental problems that coal generation presents — the global greenhouse effect and acid precipitation? I though you were an environmentalist!”
Why is it that people in the nuclear industry only see two alternatives, coal and nuclear? Do they really have no more imagination than that? As you read my columns, do you get the impression that I’m advocating coal?
It was fun researching and writing those columns. I don’t usually get so nasty, but now and then when I have a really good villain to go after, it’s fun. Underneath it makes me sad that there’s such a deep paradigm gulf between me and the nuclear people. It’s a gulf that splits our society, and I would do better in my columns to try to reach across it than to lob hand grenades. I’ll take that as a resolution for the future. (Gee, but they do make me mad when they twist the truth so. It’s hard not to think of them as basically malevolent and manipulative. Now, Dana, DO NOT THINK OF THEM AS MALEVOLENT AND MANIPULATIVE. THEY ARE PERFECTLY REASONABLE PEOPLE, LABORING UNDER A PARADIGM THAT IS DIFFERENT FROM YOURS. But can they really, sincerely think all those ridiculous things? THEY’RE ONLY RIDICULOUS FROM YOUR PARADIGM. DON’T MALIGN THEM, AND THEY WON’T MALIGN YOU. But they lie! HAVE YOU NEVER, EVER BENT THE TRUTH EVEN A LITTLE TO MAKE YOUR SIDE OF THE ARGUMENT LOOK GOOD? Never as much as they do. AHA! Well, OK, I’ll try. But they would make it much easier if they’d lean a little across the gulf and extend a hand to me, and not imply that I have all the emotions and they have all the facts.)
Sorry about that excursion there. I hadn’t planned to do that. But that conversation goes on all the time inside me, and it seems that some of it wanted to get out.
Well, where were we? It’s a beautiful day, the sun has been shining steadily for a week, which means our hay should have been made, but Pat McNamara, who cuts it for us hasn’t shown up, probably because he’s making his own hay. Very frustrating. The gardens are dry and need watering — rare for June. They’ve given us a 40% chance of rain this afternoon. I think I’ll put a wash out on the line to boost the chances up to 100%. The baby chicks are growing, the delphiniums just came into bloom, a duck is setting on some eggs in the barn, our ewe Juney went badly lame but we nursed her for a week and she’s OK now and it wasn’t foot rot, which is the great fear of all shepherd. Dennis just made 13 quarts of Foundation Farm Famous Radish Relish, thereby neatly disposing of our annual June radish glut. I’ve found a good outlet for our excess eggs at our neighbor’s farm stand. My back is all sunburned from spending yesterday bent over in the garden pulling crabgrass and crunching potato beetles. Basil, Dennis, and Wim went running 6.8 miles yesterday. We all listened to the last live show of Prairie Home Companion last weekend, and cried.
That’s the news from Foundation Farm, where all the chickens are strong, all the sheep are good-looking, and all the dogs are above average,
Love, Dana
