Dear Folks, I’ll make this a traveling letter this month, adding to it on planes and in airports, thanks to my Mac Powerbook, which now goes just about everywhere I go.
It’s a gorgeous May afternoon, the kind that makes you think you never, ever want to leave the Upper Valley of the Connecticut River. While thinking that, however, I’m sitting in the Lebanon NH airport, seven miles from Foundation Farm, waiting for a plane to Boston, which will connect with a plane to Frankfurt, which will connect with a plane to London. I need to use this interlude before boarding just to take mental leave of the farm.
When I pulled out of the driveway ten minutes ago, the sun was coming out after a morning of soft rain perfect for setting out seedlings. I spent this morning clearing out and planting the Fred Hager Memorial petunia garden. (He was my grandfather — I explained that story in a newsletter last year). The Fred Hager garden runs along the edge of our front yard. Every year I put there red, white, and pink petunias, which I start from seed in February.
Our two big dumb dogs sat happily beside me as I worked in the rain, and we all listened for new birds arriving. Wood thrush! Yellow warbler! Oriole! I’m always especially happy to hear the burbling, cheery oriole. And that new sound high up in the maple tree, what could it be? Better go get the binoculars. Hmmm, looks like a female Blackburnian warbler. Is that what Blackburnian warblers sound like? Do the females sing? Have to check it out on my Cornell bird tapes.
I worked surrounded by daffodils and narcissus at their peak. Overhead the white blooms of the wild shad trees were just fading, the crabapple and pear and plum trees were just opening, the apple blossoms were in pink bud. The maples and ashes were draped with dangling blooms, light green and dark red, respectively. The long view from our front lawn to Mt. Ascutney 15 miles away was a sequence of lacy yellow-greens. The geese, as undaunted by the rain as the dogs and I were, paraded through the front orchard, mumbling their goosey disapproval of the dogs and me and every creature that isn’t a goose. Quite a sight — blindingly white geese on blindingly green grass.
Heaven. I could have gone on gardening forever, and the state of the gardens could keep me busy forever. As the rain ended I rushed to the vegetable garden and got some seeds of Mandan Bride grinding corn and the first green beans into the ground. No time to plant sweet corn or weed the strawberries or set out the broccoli and kohlrabi seedlings waiting in the greenhouse. They will have to wait another week.
I dashed back inside occasionally, because the chicks were hatching. An incubator has been sitting on a table in my study for 3 weeks, harboring a dozen Dark Cornish eggs from Sylvia’s little flock. (She saved a rooster and 4 hens from the meat birds she raised last year.) Yesterday morning they started peeping. I never knew that eggs peep before they hatch! All day we watched through the incubator windows the unimaginable, magnificent, inexplicable, everyday miracle of chicks pipping their way out of eggs.
It takes a long time. You dare not help, because you can kill the chick if you do. First the egg rocks and trembles a bit. Then a little hole appears. At odd intervals little chips leap out of the edge of the hole, as it is patiently extended into a crack that works its way around the egg. The egg cheeps louder and louder, between long periods of rest. When the crack reaches most of the way around, the egg starts rocking even harder, and Heather presses her nose against the window and announces, “It’s going to crack out now!” And it does, with a sudden lurch. A limp, wet, scraggly, ugly, exhausted chick is suddenly lying there, to the applause of the whole farm family. After another rest it flops around, trying to get to its feet and knocking the remaining eggs around. They all cheep in annoyance.
As I left this afternoon there were six chicks out and drying and beginning to look cute. Two eggs were cracked most of the way around, and two more had initial pips. Sylvia was beginning the process of bird-shifting. She has to transfer the chicks that arrived a month ago from Murry McMurray (White Giants, Buff Orpingtons, Partridge Rocks, and some funny-looking banties with pompoms on their heads) from the brooder in the basement to the chick-house outside. That will clear the brooder for the new hatchlings. Meanwhile Sylvia set a broody hen on another clutch of Dark Cornish eggs just a few days ago. (A hen works even better than an incubator, doesn’t require electricity, and takes full and ferocious care of the baby chicks, if you can catch one in that strange hormonal state called broodiness, which makes her intent upon nothing but sitting on eggs for 21 straight days.)
As you can see, we are beginning to build a chicken empire of awesome proportions.
As I was writing the above, I have been transported to Boston, where it’s cool and bright and the Lufthansa flight is about to board. Having discharged my sadness about leaving the farm at this most exciting time of year, I’m ready to be on my way. I’m off to launch three foreign editions of Beyond the Limits — London, Amsterdam, and Berlin in a week. Dennis is already in Japan launching that edition. Jørgen will be with me in London, I’ll meet Dennis in the Netherlands. Jørgen was also going to be with us there, but his Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, has asked him to go to Rio to represent Norwegian green businesses at the Earth Summit, so he’ll only be along for the London part of the trip.
May 17, London
It’s cool and bright here too, a beautiful Sunday afternoon with all the people out in the parks. Chestnuts and lilacs and golden rain trees are in bloom, and roses — ah, the English roses! They grow them like trees. I wish I knew how they do it.
I arrived groggy and headachey after the overnight flight. I worked my way from Heathrow to my hotel by randomly hopping buses that were headed toward the city center. They were local buses, which went through neighborhoods that looked, from the people and shops, just like Lahore or New Delhi. Only the types of trees were British, and the architecture of the buildings. The smells were of Indian spices, and the women on the streets looked like butterflies in their saris.
Finally I arrived in the city center, which looks firmly like Old England. I crashed for a few hours, and then took a long walk. My hotel in a great place, near Marylebone High Street, with Hyde Park on one side and Regents Park on the other. I stopped in at Marylebone Parish Church for evening vespers. Four other people and I were there to sing the hymns.
Tomorrow I have just two meetings, with the British publisher (Earthscan) and with some petroleum economists. On Tuesday Jørgen arrives and our schedule is packed. It will be most interesting to see whether the European reaction to the book will be different from the American one. My guess is that it will be. I already saw here this afternoon an hour-and-a-half-long TV show that was far more intelligent than anything I’ve seen in the U.S. It had Maurice Strong, Al Gore, and Sir Crispin Tickell, and a long sequence about the U.S.- Mexican border, where the Third World meets the First and all the problems to be considered at Rio are visible within a few miles of each other. We are together, all of us in this world, the program pounded home. We have got to get our WHOLE act together.
I continue to be both disheartened and encouraged by the U.S. reaction. There have been NO reviews in most major publications, though hundreds of review copies of the book have gone out. I would suspect a conspiracy not to review it, but I guess what is really happening is that every publication is waiting for the Earth Summit. There has been a Business Week cover story (about UNCED, with a good mention of Beyond the Limits) and a Newsweek one is coming up next week, if some other event doesn’t take over the cover. I had a good, but exhausting, trip to St. Louis and the Missouri Botanical Garden (the garden part was great!), and I continue to participate in radio shows, but TV is still looking for the “news hook.”
The most frustrating thing about the US media is their knee-jerk tendency to set up every story like a sports event. It’s as if reporters can only recognize a story when there’s a fight going on. In that respect Larry Summers of the World Bank, our critic at the Smithsonian presentation, did us a great favor. By pitching into us, he created a story that went out on the AP wire. Every reporter I talk to asks me which of our critics they should contact, or how I respond to them. I plead with them not to set the story up that way, but they can’t resist the “let’s you and him fight” cliche.
The worst example happened on an NPR “Talk of the Nation” show. They wanted to set me up against Dixie Lee Ray, the former governor of Washington State, an ultra-right-wing anti-environmentalist. I refused. I said I wanted to talk about my book, not a loony interpretation of my book. I told the producer that if she wanted to stage a fight I could recommend some environmental pugilists, but that I just wasn’t one. I suggested some respondents who might want to correct or extend some points we made, but who would at least UNDERSTAND the points we made.
So, they set me up against Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute! I had never heard of him, but I knew enough about the Hudson Institute that I should have refused. I didn’t. And it was a travesty. He had clearly not read Limits to Growth or Beyond the Limits, or any scientific account of the greenhouse effect or ozone depletion. (Nothing to worry about; it just gives sunburn, he said). It didn’t take long before he equated me with Marx and accused me of wanting to take the world back to communism and set up Environment Police. Ira Flatow, the host, was astonished to hear Red-baiting on his supposedly science-based show!
Avery interrupted me, he was rude, he threw out inaccuracies faster than I could clean them up. I understood what it must have been like for scientists in the 1930s in Germany, with fascist voices drowning out all reason. By the end of the show I was shaking with anger. That’s it, I said to myself. This is not fun and not constructive. I’m creating publicity opportunities for people who don’t care in the least about truth or civility. That’s the last time I do this.
Of course that mood didn’t last. When fascists sound off, the last thing one should do is shut up. After a day of licking my wounds, I got more energized than ever, more determined to use every opportunity to be heard, and to do my best to get the community of good people I work with to speak out too. That’s the mood I’m in now; of course it won’t last either. One of the enduring lessons from this process is: MY MOOD DOES NOT MATTER. Whether I feel I’ve done a good or a bad job makes no difference. All that matters is to keep at it, do my best, participate fully, be as truthful as I can, and LET GO OF THE RESULT. I have to tell myself this about ten times a day.
May 21, London
It’s 5 AM British time and I’m standing in front of the KLM counter at Heathrow waiting for it to open and check me in to Amsterdam. The last three days in London have been a whirl, and almost entirely a pleasure. The weather was unbelievably warm and bright for England (people speak of the greenhouse effect here too). I have talked with (a partial list) the economics editor of the Guardian, reporters from the Times, the Telegraph, the Independent, the Mail on Sunday, Reuters, and the magazine of the British equivalent of the Humane Society. (Animal lovers in Britain are a formidable force). I have been on TV-am (the equivalent of Good Morning America) and on the BBC Woman’s Hour and BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4. I have gone to Oxford for a lecture and book-signing at that great temple of the literary world, Blackwell’s bookshop. Jørgen and I gave an evening lecture at the Royal Society for the Arts, to a collection of Lords and Ladies and environmentalists and economists and journalists and old friends and Buddhist monks. (I am not kidding. There were some of each there.)
The British press is an order of magnitude more intelligent than the US press. With a few exceptions it was enjoyable and exciting to talk to them, especially the print reporters. The broadcast reporters have some of the same tendencies I have already complained about — setting up boxing matches, reading out a set of ready-made questions no matter what you answer, not allowing enough time for a complex subject, not reading the book beforehand, not THINKING. But the newspaper interviewers drew Jørgen and me into interesting discussions, many of which made US think.
We have gotten excellent coverage here, including major articles in the Times and the Guardian, and there are more articles coming. I have the sense of honeymoon — that the people who are aware and interested in us are writing favorable things, and that the opposition hasn’t mustered its forces yet. But that is the dynamic we expected.
It has been great fun, as always, to work with Jørgen, who does everything with an irrepressible bounce. He follows an interesting tactic. He announces flatly that he doesn’t expect in the slightest that humanity will take notice of warnings or act rationally, much less morally, to get itself below the limits of the earth. He says, in a delightful way, with a lilting Norwegian accent, that therefore a collapse of industrial civilization is simply inevitable. There is something in the way he does it that causes everyone to rush forward and explain to him how wrong he is, and how good humanity can be.
I suspect that only Jørgen can pull this off. I typically do just the opposite — I talk about how sure I am that humanity has a basic rationality and morality, and that I expect a sustainable world to be so attractive and a collapse so awful that of COURSE people will choose sustainability. At which point the audience arises as one to tell me how perfidious and shortsighted and irrational people are.
When Jørgen and I are together, we get to present both positions and a good discussion gets going.
Another pleasure of this part of the trip has been our British publishing house, Earthscan. Somehow, delightfully, this book has attracted to it wonderful people, from our agent Peter Matson to our US publishers Ian and Margo Baldwin, to the many people who have helped with research, with funding, with publicity. Earthscan is no exception. One of the nicest nights here was a dinner at the country house near Oxford of Jonathan Sinclair Wilson, Earthscan’s director. The house is just what you think of, when you think of cozy Britain. Big garden, great arching trees, kittens, wholemeal bread, gracious and lively, nontrivial conversation.
It is so wonderful to be able to do a project with real human warmth supporting you all along the way. The Earthscan staff has certainly supplied the warmth for this part of the journey.
May 21, Berlin
Well, having been in Holland for about nine hours, I am now in Germany with Suzanne and Dennis.
Dennis and our good Dutch friend, colleague, and Balaton Group member Bert de Vries met me at the Amsterdam airport and we drove to Bilthoven, a suburb of Utrecht, where Bert’s institute — the National Institute for Health and the Environment, abbreviated RIVM in Dutch — is located. It is a massive research center that does some of the best environmental analysis in the world. If only every nation would do such a good job of analyzing its limits as the Netherlands has! For nearly every pollutant RIVM figures that Holland must cut emissions by 60%, 75%, 80% in order to stop making the environment worse. Bert and his colleagues gave us a lot of help finding data for Beyond the Limits, which today I have now seen in its Dutch version, Die Grenzen Vorbeij.
It’s anywhere from an hour to two hours between Amsterdam and Utrecht, depending on the traffic. The traffic in Holland is unbelievable. The only place where I’ve seen worse is Bangkok. The Dutch countryside is flat and green and covered with cows and SHEEP! And LAMBS! Some of them even BLACK LAMBS!
Within five minutes of arriving at RIVM I was huddled over a computer, discussing with Bert’s group the extensions they are making to the World3 model that forms the basis of Beyond the Limits. They are evolving it into its next stage, World4. It was a delight, after these days of talking in strictly nontechnical terms, to engage my brain again in the details of analysis. Tom Fiddaman, Dennis’s assistant who did much of the computer work for Beyond the Limits has now moved to Holland to work with Bert. Sitting there in the RIVM office, with Bert and Dennis and Tom was like resuming almost uninterrupted the conversations we were all having together in New Hampshire last fall.
We only had an hour or so for that pleasure before rushing to the presentation for several hundred scientists, journalists, and politicians. Maybe it was my mounting sleep deficit, but I found this event not very satisfying. European formality had loaded the program with official speakers, including the director of the Institute and a representative of the Environment Minister and a representative to the European Parliament, all of whom (including Dennis and me, of course) spoke beyond the allotted time. Since we had a tight departure to make the flight to Berlin, that left no time for audience discussion, and hardly any time even for us to talk to the good old friends who materialized here, as they have everywhere on the Beyond the Limits trail. I don’t like it when I don’t get to hear what the audience is thinking.
Furthermore, I felt a strange lurch, from being, along with Jørgen, a central object of media attention in England to being invisible in Holland. Everyone referred to Professor Meadows and Mrs. Meadows, never imagining for a moment that I might be a professor too. Everyone talked about the book of Dennis Meadows. Everyone was surprised when we announced that I would also speak on the program. I found the phenomenon funny rather than maddening. In a sense I asked for it, twenty years ago, when, out of my lack of self-confidence, I let Dennis do all the speaking. His name became famous in Europe, not our names. And of course European men are good at assuming that women are on teams only to prepare coffee and do typing, so that’s what they assumed about me.
Jørgen had told me in England, with a laugh, that he underwent a similar lurch when he came to work with us last fall. He had been for 15 years a leader of a research group, a tremendously successful university president, and a businessman — the person who took responsibility, gave orders, and was at the center of attention and respect. But when he and Dennis and I got together to work on Beyond the Limits, we all snapped back into our relationships of 20 years ago — Dennis the boss, I the wife, Jørgen the graduate student. Like when you get back together with your parents and lose all intervening accomplishments and maturity and become in some sense a child again.
Jørgen never mentioned at the time how that felt — and like me he wasn’t bothered by it, he mostly thought it was funny. Today I was tired enough to be glad not to be in the spotlight. I never thought of reminding the Dutch that I was also a doctor, a professor, and the author of the book, until later, when Suzanne told me how the Dutch treatment of me made HER mad. That was a good lesson for me. I have to learn to speak up for myself, not on behalf of myself, but on behalf of all women! (How long will it take you, Dana, some readers of this newsletter are now thinking, to learn that????)
Anyway, the Dutch book is launched. Dennis had been there three days, so there was plenty of discussion and press attention. We were flashed back to the Amsterdam airport, ran for the plane to Berlin, and here we are.
May 23, Frankfurt
I’m in the Frankfurt airport waiting for the flight to Boston. The German launch in Berlin yesterday was the most fun of the whole trip. It was in the hands of good friends — Balaton member Hartmut Bossel and Balaton member-in-spirit Udo Simonis, who is Germany’s foremost ecological economist, a professor at Berlin’s Science Center, and a sweet person. He met us at the airport, and I felt as if I had known him forever, though until then I knew only his work.
West Berlin has always been a green, lovely, lively city, and now that the ominous shadow of the Wall has been lifted from it, it is one of the nicest cities of the world, I think. I had only been there in the Wall days, so I expected to be in the presence of people in celebratory mood, people who could easily believe in miracles such as sustainable development.
Not so, however. The city was blooming, rich, at least on the West side, full of shops with the most expensive and exotic clothing and food, but totally matter-of-fact, and even a bit resentful. A TV crew told me they had interviewed people on the street the week before and 80 percent of them had said they wanted the Wall back!!! I couldn’t believe it! How quickly people forget their history and their pain! How blindly our consciousness focuses on the gritty annoyances of the present and ignores both the past and the future! Of all the negative comments I heard on this trip about the perversity of human nature and the improbability that we would ever choose a sustainable future, this was the most depressing.
Well, we had plenty of hopeful experiences too. The day began with another presentation, similar to the Dutch one the day before and the British one at the Royal Society, to selected journalists and scientists and government people — and good old friends. Joan Davis came from Zurich, Otfried Voigt from Frankfurt, and Hartmut Bossel, who helped organize the event and was also a speaker, from Kassel. It was so GREAT to be able to watch their dear faces out in the audience, and to spend some time with them afterwards.
This event was more disciplined yet less stiff than the Dutch one — or maybe I was just better rested. Anyway, I thought all the presentations were good, and the discussion that followed was energetic and fascinating. Then Dennis and I spent most of the rest of the day separately and together doing radio and TV interviews, one after another, right there in the Science Center where the presentation had been. In America the media are so arrogant that they expect you to come, at their behest, on their schedule, at the last minute, to them. In Europe they are willing to come to you.
Another big difference between the European discussions and those in the US is that the Europeans don’t waste any time wondering whether there are earthly limits, or whether technology or a free market will save us. They don’t want us to respond to our critics. Rather they want to talk about what we should do and whether we can really do it. They think in a more complicated, less ideological way than even the same kinds of academic and journalistic audiences in America. It’s shocking to see from the vantage point of Europe how degraded the American public discourse has become. But it’s hopeful to know that the shared human consciousness hasn’t deteriorated everywhere.
I felt the contrast of the two sides of the ocean viscerally last night, as we were having a celebratory dinner with our publisher and our friends in a Berlin restaurant. Newsweek had arranged to call me there to tape an interview for a radio program to accompany the issue they are bringing out next week. (In this case they KNEW I wasn’t going to come to them, so they managed quite handily to connect to me.) After a week of relaxed, substantial conversations with the European press, there I was back with an American interviewer.
Bing! we were going at that loud, fast, overexcited, super urgent pace that you hear on every TV and radio show. The interviewer jumped into the next question before I had finished the previous answer. He didn’t listen to a thing I said. He focused on critics and disagreements. He challenged me on issues the Europeans had taken for granted — that there IS a greenhouse effect, that the plight of the poor DOES directly and concretely affect the rich, that growth CAN’T and SHOULDN’T continue forever. He was more interested in the consequences for the coming election and for US business than he was in the fate of the planet. And, with a bias that’s hard to explain, until you’ve experienced its absence, he imbued every question and comment with a sense of fatalistic impossibility. He ASSUMED as unspoken background to every word he said, that the Rio conference will be a failure, that no one can or will do anything to change, that the present world is the only one we’ll ever have — and that the present world can go on as is indefinitely.
I felt as if I had suddenly been dunked into cold water. I walked back to the table with my nerves jangling. And I felt very sad. It’s so HARD to point to the shared social consciousness in a way that allows anyone to see it. It’s impossible to say, especially in an interview that’s going 90 miles an hour, that not only the facts in the last question have been wrong, but that its implicit PREMISES were wrong. I was thrust back into the question within which I have been living for two months now. Can one challenge a paradigm through information systems that are themselves living monuments to that paradigm? Is the media filter so powerful that nothing alien to it can get through at all?
In all the discussion — and it is the main topic of every discussion everywhere we go — about whether humanity can bring the economy below the limits, can end poverty, can create sustainability, I have heard not one argument that convinces me that the task is impossible, not technically, not economically, not politically. The only impossibility I see is in the PROCESS of the discussion, when it goes through the media, which, in this age, it must. Honestly, I think the ONLY obstacle in our path is our own public discourse — not only its content, but its form, the model that it provides in its own working of who human beings are and how they should interact and what they can create, not only from nature, but from human nature. I feel helpless to express what is so wrong about our public conversation, and I feel powerless to demonstrate, within the institutions and process and pace of that conversation, how to do it better.
Well, if I can work it out, that is the subject of a book I have already promised to Chelsea Green, the book I thought I was writing until Beyond the Limits came along, the PERSONAL book about my experiences and observations as a simple Bozo on the bus whose life was shaped at an early age by the curse or gift of The Limits to Growth. I’m beginning to see how that next book will be shaped. A year ago, I was calling it in my mind Daughter of Limits, and then Twenty Years Closer. Now, more or less as a joke, I think of it as Behind the Limits.
Now here’s the hopeful side of the story. While the press has been demonstrating an unworkable system of information flows and of human relations, our friends have been demonstrating a workable one, one that models many important aspects of a sustainable world. Everywhere we go in the world, and even when we stay at home with our FAX and e-mail connections, we move within a clear-thinking, committed, informed community of endeavor. The Balaton Group and other friends we have encountered over the past 20 years form a network that has rallied, not in any planned way, but naturally, as friends do, to support the BtL effort, as it supports other efforts by other people working toward sustainability.
In Germany when Dennis and I walked into the conference room and were greeted by the welcoming hugs of friends, an observant reporter remarked to me, “It’s like you’re all members of the same family.” That’s exactly how it is. It is a family in the very best sense of that word. In fact that reporter’s remark solves a problem for me. I have loosely called our shared community of concern the “Sustainability Movement,” but the term has never been right, because we are not organized, not political, not confrontational enough to be a movement. From now on I’ll just say we are the “Sustainability Family.” A family is just the right analogy for the HUMAN transformation we are working for. The working principles of the sustainable world are not confrontation, struggle, or competition, they are connection, spontaneity, joy, and love.
It’s so simple, really. It’s what we all know inside ourselves, though our society works very hard to make us doubt it.
You can speak out too, on behalf of love,
My love to you, Dana
