Dear Folks, Sunday morning, slightly rainy, thank heaven. We’ve had two brilliant, dry weeks, and the garden is very thirsty. A female cardinal is chipping at the birdfeeder just out the window to my left as I’m writing, and a multicolored bunch of hens is scratching under the lilac bush. Basil is snoring under my desk. The house is very quiet.
In spite of dryness, the Valley is green, green, green. The overwhelming green of a New England June always takes me by surprise, no matter how many times I see it — as do the blaze of October and the first snowfall of December. For some reason the browns of November and March never surprise me, I guess because I find them depressing. But I revel in, wonder at, drink in the green, and the blaze, and the white.
Isn’t it astounding to live in a place that completely changes color so many times a year? You can never quite go to sleep in New England, you can never stop wondering. Just when you’re used to one color and you’ve kind of stopped seeing it, bingo! Wake up! All change! Nature has just done another miracle!
I spent most of yesterday out in the garden, in intermittent drizzle, deliriously happy, mud from knees to toes and from elbows to fingertips and in splotches on my face where I swatted mosquitoes. There’s a lot to do out there. We’re through the seed-planting phase of May and the architecture phase of early June (when we put up bean poles, pea supports, tomato cages). Now we’re into the weed-fighting phase. That means first hoeing and then mulching. I’m a “Ruth Stout deep mulcher.” The first gardening book I ever read was the best — Ruth Stout’s How to Have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back. Therefore the month of June is the time when I lay several inches of old hay, no longer good for feeding sheep or horses, over the whole garden.
This is a big job, because it’s a big garden — or rather altogether the many little gardens make a big garden. The main garden, the side garden, the spring garden, the garden on the old barn foundations, the perennial garden, the herb garden, the rock garden, and the flower gardens around the house add up to an intensively cultivated quarter of an acre or so. They keep me hustling. I hate weeding, but I love mulching. I tuck hay around the little plants as if I were tucking them into a warm, protective bed, which is pretty much what I am doing. The hay smothers weeds. It shelters seedlings from wind and softens hard rains. It keeps roots cool, holds water, keeps earthworms happy. And it slowly decays into nutrients for the veggies. What a bunch of blessings! No wonder I feel good when I’m mulching the garden!
I could have stayed out there all day, but I had to stop in mid-afternoon to go to the annual meeting of our Upper Valley Land Trust. I am going off the board; I’ve been on it for six years and the bylaws, which I helped to write, say that’s the term limit. I’ll continue to work for the Trust, primarily as a fund-raiser, because I think it’s one of the most fun, heartening, and constructive things I do.
Whenever people say (as they often say when I’m out discussing Beyond the Limits) that human beings just won’t look to the long term, won’t sacrifice for the common good, won’t put the interests of nature ahead of economic interests, I think of our little land trust — and the thousand or so like it that have sprung up over the U.S. Starting from nothing, a bunch of us put our trust together seven years ago. By now it has PERMANENTLY protected 70 land parcels in this valley, totalling 5000 acres, all selected by landowners and communities for their special agricultural soils or forests or wildlife.
That protection costs money and takes lots of effort. Our trust now has four over-busy paid staff members, dozens of volunteers, and an annual budget of $200,000, all raised, of course, from community contributors. The land is protected through conservation easements, which keep it in private ownership but legally remove its “development rights” forever. The market value of the development rights the trust has acquired from our protected 5000 acres runs into millions of dollars. Some of that value has been bought, primarily from farmers, using New Hampshire and Vermont state land protection funds. The great majority of it, however, has been given away by landowners.
Don’t tell me people won’t act against their own economic interests for the sake of the long-term future!
Dennis and I are going to put this farm into conservation easements this year. It’s a fairly long process. We have to work with the land trust to design the exact legal stipulations of the easement (no buildings or roads or topsoil stripping or gravel-mining on any of the agricultural fields or in the forest, no more than two more houses to be built on our 75 acres ever, and those to be built only in the 2-acre area where the existing buildings are, etc.). We have to get approval from our local planning board. We have to get an official survey and appraisal of our property value with and without the easement. Then the land trust board has to approve of the easement, and the legal documents have to be signed and registered with our property deeds at the county courthouse. All that will be happening over the next few months.
As this letter already reveals, my mind has largely turned from limits battles to to rest of my life, to the farm, to the next books. That feels good! I’m working every day now on the Infamous Never-Finished Environmental Systems Textbook that you long-time readers of this newsletter have been hearing about for years. It will still be years, I’m afraid, because it’s a monumental task, but there’s only one thing that will get it done, and that’s working on it every day. I have the wild idea that I can also write two short books for Chelsea Green in my spare time, an idea that I must now demonstrate. As soon as the garden is mulched, theoretically at least, I should have some spare time!
The limits discussion still goes on, of course. I’m on the radio nearly every day in places like Salt Lake City and Medford Oregon and Australia and Denmark, but I don’t have to leave home to do that. The reviews are coming in, and they are beginning to be quite predictable. Here are some short excerpts for your amusement:
Forbes Magazine — “Marx in Rachel Carson’s clothing.”
New York Times Book Review — “A bromide-laden cautionary tale.”
London Sunday Times — “Powerful and well-written.”
London Times Saturday Review — “Absurd revivalist conclusion. They make it sound as though nothing can be achieved unless we all become scientologists. Sceptics will turn away, feeling the evidence is tainted.”
Los Angeles Times — “If I could, I would assign a reading of Beyond the Limits as homework to both houses of Congress, the President and the U.N. General Assembly. And you too. Read it. There will be a planetary discussion following.”
Library Journal — “While its graphs and tables may intimidate some, Beyond the Limits is clearly written, non-polemical, and rewards the patient reader.”
Philadelphia Inquirer — “Let’s hope that U.S. leaders … somehow find the time to read this important book during this election year
Lawrence Summers, Chief Economist of the World Bank — “Beyond the Limits is beyond belief.”
Somehow I have the feeling that I’ve seen this movie before!
The once thing about the reviews that really disturbs me has to do with the tendency of our detractors to discount us because our “predictions” of 20 years ago haven’t come true. That’s actually a dodge so they don’t have to deal with our real arguments, but it’s also a falsehood — a double falsehood. First, we didn’t make “predictions,” we sketched out many possibilities. We offered choices; we didn’t “predict” what the world would choose. Second, as we demonstrate painstakingly in Beyond the Limits, the world has, unfortunately, followed with amazing accuracy one of the possibilities we outlined — the business-as-usual, continued-growth one, the one that leads to collapse.
Our critics apparently don’t comprehend either of those points — it’s as if they haven’t read either book. Perhaps they haven’t, but more likely they CAN’T — their paradigm blinders don’t allow them to admit the enormous anomalies we present them with. So what they do that drives me crazy is, they MAKE UP predictions that we are supposed to have made — that the world would have run out of oil by now, that minerals prices would be sky-high by now, that all of India would be starving by now, that the world would have collapsed by now. Of course, Limits to Growth says nothing of the kind. Having made up absurd prophecies for us, then they point at those prophecies and say the equivalent of, “See? None of these things has happened! Those limits people are wild-eyed alarmists! Don’t listen to them!”
Someday someone should write a book about the wild and wonderful ways by which human denial manifests itself.
Right, I remember. That’s a book I’ve promised to write.
The most insidious part of this pattern is that human denial is amplified by human laziness. These false claims against us become part of the printed record. They are preserved in newspaper morgues and now in NEXIS, the computerized media research service used by all reporters. So a young and lazy hotshot, who was in first grade twenty years ago, punches “Meadows” or “Limits to Growth” or “Club of Rome” into the computer, and up come all these authoritative-sounding claims that we predicted the sky would fall. The young reporter, never thinking to look up what we DID say, carries on the tradition and writes an authoritative-sounding, condescending piece about exaggerating environmentalists. Which goes into NEXIS. And so history is written.
The only way I know to stop it is to write a piece myself, telling everyone clearly what we DID and DIDN’T say, and publishing it somewhere so it gets into NEXIS. I tried to do that last week, but what I produced sounded too defensive (I was mad at the New York Times, which was the most recent perpetrator at the time). I have no idea how to sound not-defensive, when defensive is exactly what I’m being. So I’m stuck. Any suggestions would be received with gratitude.
Well, today those problems feel unreal and unimportant, just things that happen in peoples’ minds. What’s real and important is what happens on farms. We are eating enormous salads every day — nine kinds of lettuce, fresh dill, fennel, radishes — ten minutes from garden to table. Little turnips are now about the size of golf balls, just right to cook with onions and their own greens. Yum! Vitamin City! We’ll go to Edgewater Farm this week to pick gallons of strawberries for freezing. In the perennial garden the peonies and Siberian irises are in bloom. Every night the yard is full of fireflies. Who cares what’s in peoples’ heads?
Heather runs around the farm like a happy savage, usually naked, climbing trees, chasing baby chicks, nibbling dill, spraying herself with the sprinkler, swinging on the tire swing her Dad put up for her, dressing up the poor dogs in fancy scarves and funny hats. Don is busy painting houses and tracking next fall’s deer, Sylvia is busy cleaning houses and riding Beau. Yorinde Voigt, the 15-year-old daughter of a friend in Germany has come to stay with us for a few weeks, to Brenna’s delight. The two girls are doing a lot of bike-riding, tennis-playing, swimming, and late-night VCR watching. John has taken them both to New York this weekend for great adventures — which means, in the 15-year-old scheme of things, shopping. Yorinde’s father and I used to play Bach and Handel together years ago, he on the blockflöte (recorder) and I on the piano. Now Yorinde is an excellent cellist, and she and I are playing everything from Bach to Heifitz. It’s wonderful to have someone in the house to make music with!
The days are long, the air is clear and cool. Taking a long breath is as heady as drinking the best champagne. It’s good to be back home.
Love, Dana
