Dear Folks,
Every year I remember, too late, my vow from the past year never, ever to leave this farm in May — or in the month between mid-September and mid-October. Those are the times of rapid change, the times when we wake up every morning to something new. In May the daily newness is in the arriving voices of the bird chorus, the flowers opening, the weeds sprouting, the opening leaves changing the view from every window. In the fall the changes are to some extent the reverse — the bird chorus thinning, the leaves dropping away — plus daily new ripenesses to harvest from the garden.
It’s no accident that the times of rapid change are also the times when the farm work becomes urgent. The transition between summer and winter around here is so fast, that you can’t let an opportunity slip for a week, or you lose it altogether. If the corn isn’t in the ground by May 30, it won’t ripen before the first frost. If the peas and spinach aren’t planted the minute the soil thaws, they will be blasted too soon by the summer heat. If I don’t get out the witch grass when it first shows its ugly green heads, it will send out insidious white stolons, and I’ll be fighting it all summer.
So I’ve been racing around this month, trying to spend every weekend and every evening when I come home from Dartmouth in the garden. I complain about that. I get a little tired and stiff. But the truth is, I love it.
It is so, so beautiful here in May. About two weeks ago I was flying home from Washington (not keeping my vow about staying home), and the little puddle-jumper plane from Boston was lowering itself over Grantham Mountain, and I looked out at the tops of the trees, all fuzzy with pink maple bloom and the delicate white blossoms of the wild shad. The forest looks like that — so gauzy, so gentle — for one week at most, one fleeting week of the year. Tears welled up in me. I guess they were tears of joy and sadness both at the same time, joy at the beauty, sadness at its impermanence — which is silly, of course, because that show is a lot more permanent than I am. The forests of New England have been putting it on every May without fail for tens of thousands of years.
Yesterday my neighbor Ruth and I were driving back from Burlington after attending Narayana’s triumphant graduation from UVM. The maples, now at the stage of lacy new green, were lit sideways with the evening sun. Interspersed among them were the grayish new leaves of the poplars, and the steady dark green of the pines. The low wet spots were carpeted with marsh marigolds, and the open fields were neon green. The landscape was aglow with a hundred gradations on the spectrum from yellow to green. It was breathtaking, and again tears came to my eyes. Why do I always cry at something beautiful?
Heather doesn’t cry when she’s touched with beauty, she breaks out into intense physical activity. The other day she came home from kindergarten, and we went around and smelled the lilacs, and I introduced her to the new flowers that had opened that day — Jacob’s ladders and the first pinky-white azaleas. She touched the showy azalea blossoms with wonder and burst out, “Don’t you just LOVE this WORLD?” and turned frenetic cartwheels all over the lawn.
Yes, Heather, I really love this world. I wish we could all remember to love it as much as it deserves.
The sheep shearer still hasn’t come, so the sheep are living in frustration in the barnyard, looking out at the greening grass and bellowing. When I get home at night I let them out for an hour to graze all over the neighborhood. I have to keep an eye on them, or they will eat Ruth’s garden, or stop traffic on the road, or take off into town. So I work at the front flower gardens where I can see them, and occasionally I have to go head them off from destructive directions. They stop traffic even when they’re not in the road; they’re so pretty spread across Ruth’s big pasture, the big grey and white Mamas and the little black and white bounding babies, pigging out on the green grass scattered with yellow dandelions. Cars stop, kids lean out windows, cameras come out, people ask me about them. I’ve already sold two lambs that way.
Sometimes I just sit by the side of the road and admire the flock. People stop and ask, “Are you their shepherd?” and I answer, “No, I’m their sheep dog.”
In spite of my resolution, I’ve had to do some running around this month. I was asked to speak at the Council on Foundations meeting in Dallas, an invitation I accepted readily because it gave me a free ticket to Tulsa to spend a weekend with my Mom and Karl. The meeting was held in one of those new hotels that is a city in itself — 1600 rooms, dozens of restaurants and cafes and shops, elevators creeping up and down the walls of indoor atria dripping with ivy, an automatic piano playing bland music all by itself to add one last fake touch to the artificial, air-conditioned environment. Places like that make my skin crawl. I can’t imagine why anyone would actually pay money to stay there, but then, where else can you bring together 1400 people from the nation’s major foundations? (Why you would want to do that in the first place is another question.)
Fortunately, a number of the foundation people and the other speakers are my good friends, so I had a good time on human terms, if not on environmental terms. I participated in one panel on jobs and the environment, and another on transportation systems, both of which made me think hard. I had dinner one night with Herman Daly of the World Bank and the next with Bill Moody of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. And I got to see my Oklahoma folks. So the trip was worth it, even if it took me away from the farm in May.
I made a day trip to New York for a quick appearance at the Ford Foundation, to talk about Beyond the Limits and sustainable development — worth it because I got to have dinner with Fran and David Korten. And another quickie to Washington for my first meeting of the National Geographic Society Committee on Research and Exploration. The bad news is that these committee meetings are going to be monthly entries on my calendar. The good news is that they’re fun.
I like everything I do with the National Geographic — it’s a class outfit, full of nice people and great maps. The Research and Exploration Committee has the lovely function of giving away about $3.5 million a year in grants to people who want to search for sunken ships in the Danube or dig up interesting mounds in Syria or trek across the Canadian treeline looking for signs of climate change. We have to read about 35 proposals a month and try to allocate the money where it will do the most good. I found that frustrating this first month, because I wanted to go on all the expeditions myself. But I began to get the hang of it, spot the padded budgets, sort out the serious investigators from the folks who just want to go on a junket. The best part is the other members of the committee, some of the nation’s great archeologists and geologists and biologists and geographers, who know much more than I do about which mounds in the Middle East are worth digging up. I took on this responsibility reluctantly — who wants to go to Washington once a month, when they can play on a farm in New Hampshire? — but I’m going to learn a lot from it.
The textbook proceeds, slowly but surely. Diana and I FINISHED ANOTHER CHAPTER this month, the one on economics. Now we’re deep into energy, a chapter I drafted about three years ago but now find unsatisfactory, so I’m rewriting it. The energy story, especially on the efficiency side, has changed significantly in just three years, and in good-news directions. Every year it’s cheaper and easier to save energy.
It’s good to revisit this chapter, because now I can see what about it is timeless — and therefore belongs in a textbook — and what is already out of date — and therefore shouldn’t have been in there in the first place. For instance, I shouldn’t have a list of exact energy efficiencies and their costs, which will be out of date next year. I should have a graph of their rate of change instead.
Working on this book sends me into shock over and over as I get into a new subject and discover how terrible is the state of information about it. You would think, wouldn’t you, that after 20 years of Amory Lovins and an increasing chorus of others harping about energy efficiency — after hundred of publications pointing out that energy is a means, not an end — after I don’t know how many meetings and demonstrations and theoretical arguments pointing out that FIRST you look to see what you need energy FOR, and THEN you go find the source that most elegantly meets each need — you’d think that environmental textbooks would all begin talking about energy with DEMAND, not SUPPLY, and with a simple table showing what end-use demand looks like, and what are the basic thermodynamic qualities of each use. Obvious, right?
Wrong. Every one of the dozens of elegant, four-color print college-level environmental textbooks spends 90% of its energy space talking about oil and gas and coal and nuclear and solar and all the nifty technologies of SUPPLY. Not one contains the numbers of end-use demands — for lighting, for space heating, for process heat at various temperatures, for motor turning, etc. I couldn’t find one that presents the basic point about matching energy qualities — why it doesn’t make sense to heat up a nuclear reactor to tens of thousands of degrees just to heat up a room by a few tens of degrees. (Amory calls that cutting butter with a chain saw.) I spent a whole day looking and couldn’t find an energy end-use list ANYWHERE, except the outdated one in Amory’s 1977 book Soft Energy Paths. No wonder our energy policy is still so antediluvian! We’re not only still thinking backward, we’re still teaching the next generation to do the same!
Well, when I start fulminating with so many capital letters it’s time to quit. I’ve sent to the source — the Rocky Mountain Institute — for an energy end-use list. The witch grass is growing out in the potato patch; I can hear it from here. I have to go pick rhubarb and freeze it. The plants in the greenhouse need watering. We’re going to go this week to the farm of our friend Curley, who has presented me with a weanling pig for my birthday — we’re going to buy another one to keep it company and co-raise them with Sylvia’s sister Binky and her family and split the pork chops in the fall. I’ve already named the pigs: Rush Limbaugh and Dixy Lee Ray.
I’d better get moving. There’s lots to do, and I’m fired up to do it. And everything we do on the farm these days is done to the smell of lilacs.
Love,
Dana
