Dear Folks, Sylvia likes to make fun of the to-do lists I’m always making to remind myself (and everyone else) what needs to be done on the farm.  They do tend to be long lists.  You would consider them overwhelming, if you’ve never seen us knock off most of the items on a single weekend.   You’d understand why Sylvia thinks it’s funny to scrawl on the bottom, “eliminate blackflies” or “mop up ocean.”

Well, today Sylvia appeared with her own list, half serious, half Sylvia’s special form of humor, a fine summary of the quirks of this farm in May.  Here’s her list, exactly as she wrote it, with explanations from me in parentheses:

Restack all wood & bring wood up from forest.  (Some of our firewood stacks were careless, and they’ve either collapsed or are threatening to collapse.  The wood in the forest is from our “mini-clearcut” — a big stand of red maple that the forester told us to cut — Don has been taking the trees down and Sylvia has been splitting and piling them, ready to load in the truck and bring up to the woodshed.)

Set up cute yard for chix.  (We ordered from Murray McMurray 25 of their “mixed brown egglayers” pullet collection, plus 25 straight run Dark Cornish meat birds.  “Pullets” means females, for you non-farm folks, and “straight run” means both sexes, unsorted.  They came in the mail, one day old.  Willy the postmaster called to tell us to come get a cheeping box.  They’re a funny-looking bunch, all colors from classic yellow chicks to black ones with yellow bottoms to brown stripey ones that look like baby pheasants.  We’ll have the excitement of seeing them turn into the most colorful flocks of chickens in Plainfield.  They’re about to outgrow their brood box in the basement, and they’re getting their feathers to keep them warm, so we have to move them soon to their chick houses out in the orchard.)

Find a good tree for tire fwing.  (Heather doesn’t swing, she fwings.)

Set up tire fwing.

Set up a tent for Heather.  (Sylvia has mowed out a secret spot in the middle of the tall grass, which is Heather’s magic playground.  Soon she’ll have a tent there.)

Rebuild Ruth’s gates (where the horse Beau Geste lives — our nextdoor neighbor Ruth Whybrow lets Sylvia use her horse barn in exchange for keeping it in repair.)

Rake manure out of small pastures & spread on asparagus — because we LOVE it!

Pull Beau’s mane & braid it.

Plant lots of beans in the garden (far from winter squash).  (Last year the pumpkins surged into our long rows of green beans and made picking them almost impossible.)

Apply mulch hay.

Keep applying mulch hay.

Continue to apply mulch hay.

Apply mulch hay as needed.  (To understand the joke here, you have to know that we are “Ruth Stout mulchers.”  The reference is to the first and best garden book I ever read, How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back by Ruth Stout.  According to her instructions, we pile deep blankets of old hay right up against the plant rows.  The hay smothers out weeds, holds in moisture, and slowly decays to provide nutrients.  It makes the garden trouble-free, once the mulch is on, but putting the mulch on such a huge garden takes us most of the month of June and a LOT of hay!)

Throw out rotten eggs far away in the forest. (Our tricky hens hide clutches in strange places.  Sylvia found a whole bucketful the other day up in the hayloft in Ruth’s barn.  They may have been there for months.  You would be amazed, if you broke one, how foul it smells, how long the smell lasts, and how far it penetrates.  I speak from experience.  The only thing to do with them is to carry them very gently to a place very far away.)

Annoy the geese.  (Doesn’t take much to do that.  Cleopatra is in a trance on her eggs in the barn, and her daughter has a nest right next to her.  We suspect that our new young gander — named Mark Antony — hasn’t actually managed to fertilize any of them.  He kind of didn’t catch on to that job until very late in the season, after the ladies were already setting.  We don’t expect to have goslings this year.  But Antony defends the nest like Saddam Hussein defends his personal bunker.  You just have to walk in the general direction of the barn to draw a hissing gander attack.  Heather finds this an enticing mixture of fun and terror.  She likes to get Antony all excited, which then gets her all excited, which then gets him more excited — etc.)

Well, my own list for this weekend is very simple: get all the rest of the seeds in the ground and then get the weeds out, and then start mulching.  I’m continuing my bet on the greenhouse warming by doing everything two weeks early, and I’m sorry to say that I’m getting away with it.  I put the peppers and tomatoes out in mid-May — this on a farm that’s notorious for June frosts!  Normally my biggest planting, the frost-sensitive beans, cucumbers, squash, and flowers, goes out on the last day of May.  This year half of that stuff went in last week and I’ll finish everything but some greenhouse flowers today.  Those experimental seeds I fearfully sowed on April 7 are now giving us wonderful salads.  In the pre-greenhouse days I couldn’t even FIND the garden on April 7 — the snow was still on it!

This hustling of the season is great news in the short term.  We have gained two weeks at each end of the growing season — an extra MONTH of frost-free weather.  The apples blossomed early, the asparagus came up early, the maple trees leafed out a week early, the lilacs, usually the glory of Memorial Day, are already nearly gone.  It was 95 degrees here this week.  The early corn is four inches high — normally I’d just be planting it now.

Everyone in the Valley is talking about the weather change, mostly in approving terms.  This is all a thrill in May, but I shudder to think what July is going to be like.  And I have to admit to checking up constantly and nervously to be sure that nature around me is still all right.

Will the spring peepers sing from their puddles again this year?  It’s the first sign of real spring around here, a month-long evening symphony.  I know that acid rain is wiping out little amphibians like the peepers.  I breathed a sigh of relief in early April when they sang again, but then I listened anxiously.  Are there as many as there were last year?

Then I watched the maple trees unfold with a fearful eye.  Are the pear thrips going to move in and defoliate them?  The poor trees haven’t really recovered from the last thrips attack that terribly hot year of 1988.  The sugarers are muttering that the maples are weakening.  But the leaves came out safely this year, and the Valley is now summer-green.

Will the oriole make it back?  Yes!  There he is burbling from the highest maple.  What about the yellow warblers down by the brook?  Thank God, they just showed up, back from Central America or wherever.  There’s the veery panpiping from the woods.  Hurray!  I can’t imagine May without the mad call of the veery.  There’s the whitethroated sparrow!  There’s the ee-o-lay of the woodthrush!  There are rose-breasted grosbeaks at the feeder!  What a beautiful sight!

I do a spring-long checkoff list, imagining all the manmade horrors of the journey from the south.  Most of the migrants have checked in.  But I haven’t heard a whippoorwill or seen a redstart in years.  They used to live here.  Where have they gone?  Does anyone miss them but me?  I listen to the morning chorus, which really does sound to me much thinner than it used to be, and I wonder if I’m just imagining things.  Maybe my daily immersion in environmental statistics is just making me paranoid.  But of course I know that the loss of songbirds and the slower growth of maples and the disappearance of frogs and salamanders are all documented.  I may be exaggerating the decline of nature with my own anxiety, but I’m not making it up.

So I listen with a sadness that’s just about unbearable.  How will I be able to explain to the children of the future what a complete, joyous May morning sounds like?  How can I describe the gift of the oriole’s song, liquid gold pouring down on me as I work in the garden?  How can I reach city people of today, who have never heard that golden warble, who wouldn’t recognize it even if they were here on the farm beside me, and who are eagerly wiping it out, in their pursuit of more tangible kinds of gold?  I wonder as I walk outside into evening air that smells of lilacs and sounds of the fluting of thrushes: What is all this worth?   Why is it that my fellow-humans even talk of it in terms of “worth?”  It’s Godgiven and so precious that nothing I can do or say can begin to capture the feeling in my heart when I behold it — or the feeling of grief when I imagine the people now alive who have never been privileged to behold it, and the people in the future who may never be able to behold it.

Well, I’m sorry.  I hadn’t expected to pour all that out when I sat down at the computer on this May morning.  It’s funny what this monthly obligation to write you discovers in me.  It’s probably therapeutic to let it all out.  I have not been in a good mood lately — I guess I’ve already made that clear.  It’s not only mourning for the state of nature, it’s my normal May hysteria.  May is the most beautiful month here, and I’m always too busy to let it fully sink in.  The farm work is insistent — if you don’t get the seeds in and weeds out in May, you lose an entire year.  On top of that, Balaton work and writing work has reached a high pitch.  It’s all wonderful work.  I’m one of the few people on earth who gets to chose every bit of work I do, and who loves it all.  But right now in the month of May, about exactly one year after I swore I would never get into this state again, I have to admit, it’s all Too Much.

I’ve made two journeys since I last wrote you, both very worthwhile.  One was to Denmark for a conference to prepare a statement about energy policy in preparation for next year’s UN Conference on Environment and Development in Brazil.  The Denmark conference brought together people from non-governmental organizations around the world.  At least half the people there were from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  Nearly all were clear about the energy policy they want, and embattled.  They want no nuclear power.  They want high energy efficiency.  They want renewable sources.  I was amazed how much wind and solar and biogas are already in use, especially in Africa.  Those sources are by far cheaper to local folks than stringing wires and poles to a big grid far away — not to mention how much cheaper they are for governments to build than big dams or nuclear or coal plants.  Even in India, where there is a grid, it is so badly managed, the current so variable, that people prefer their own dependable local generation sources, even if they’re more expensive.

It was an inspiring meeting.  I learned a lot and met some great people, some of whom I hope will become Balaton members.  But it took a week out of my spring.

I spent another two days in New York, for several purposes.  I met with Peter Matson, our agent for the Limits reissue.  I met with my editor at John Wiley about the textbook I’ve been working on for years.  The first six chapters of it have just been reviewed by college professors, who have unanimously said that there’s nothing like it anywhere, that it’s so thought-provoking and challenging that their students may not be able to handle it, and that they loved reading it.  Wiley is excited by the reviews and is pushing me hard to get the thing finished, but alas, it’s on the shelf until Limits gets off my desk.

I had a lovely dinner in New York with the board of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, one of the principal funders of the Balaton Group — it was nice to be able to say thank you in person.  And we had an interesting meeting at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, one of the series of meetings that’s trying to pull together a North American network, or movement, or organization of troublemakers around the vision of sustainability.  I had been at the Cathedral before — it’s one of my favorite places in NYC, and it has the best bookstore for the literature of sustainability I’ve ever seen.  But I had never met the Dean James Morton before, which was a pleasure.  And John and Nancy Todd, David Orr, Greg Watson, Steve Viederman, and other old friends were there.

It was a good meeting.  The Cathedral stands ready to be an organizing center on the East Coast, as Commonweal does on the West Coast.  I’m encouraged.  I said to Steve Viederman after the meeting that it is now time to stop TALKING about this network and to go ahead and DO it.  Which we will.  You’ll hear more about it in the coming months, as well as about the Asian network, whose meeting I have been organizing for Bangkok in July, and the worldwide network, whose meeting I have been organizing for Hungary in September.  Oh dear.  I get tired just WRITING about this past month!

What’s really taking the time these days, and what’s really obsessing me, is Daughter of Limits.  Yes, thank you, dear feminists in my readership, I had already started calling it that by the time I got your surprised notes.  It only stayed Son of Limits for a day or two, till I woke up.  Amazing how deep these things are acculturated into us, isn’t it?  About the time I changed the name, I also took Dennis’s name off as author, which made it easier to write, because I could just be speaking for myself.  It got more honest and direct and I hope more hardhitting that way.  I didn’t have to try to filter everything through two minds instead of one.  And for me that was one more step, the last one I hope, away from my old habit of hiding behind Dennis.  Ah me.  Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever learn the big lessons of my life!

If it weren’t May to pull me into the garden, and if there weren’t two Balaton meetings coming up to organize, and if my friends didn’t call me to other meetings, and if I didn’t have columns to write, I would be spending every waking moment on Daughter of Limits.  (Peter Matson is calling it The New Limits.  This week I am calling it Twenty Years Closer.  For awhile I called it Twenty Years Closer to the Limits, but I decided that was too gloomy for the message, which I’m trying to make a balance between gloom and promise.  Then I called it Twenty Years Closer to the Future, but I decided that was vapid.  If I keep it just Twenty Years Closer, I can then make the central point I want — closer to the limits, closer to the collapse, or closer to the sustainable future — whatever we choose.)

I can’t believe how thoroughly I’ve been sucked into this project, and what a job it’s turning out to be.  I’ve written about 100 single-spaced pages of a completely new book already, with about another 100 to go.  I can’t get it out of my mind.  I had been needing to do this for a long time, and I just never knew it.

Peter has sent out my outline and first few chapters to publishers and is getting back a revealing response.  Here are a few returns from major publishers:

“Though it is easy to see why The Limits to Growth may have hit with a bit of a thunderclap twenty years ago, its messages, both negative and positive, might be less startling today, as we have seen those limits borne out.  The New Limits is basically a restatement and updating of the original.”

“The authors write passionately and well, but this idea seems a bit of a stretch to me.”

“The reaction here to the proposal was lukewarm, and there is the difficult fundamental issue of how one can factor human inventiveness and unpredictability into computer models of the future.  Nevertheless, I do think that this book has an important role to play in our ‘cybernetics of mind,’ and I wish there had been more house enthusiasm for it.”

“It seems so largely a defense and history of the old Limits and forges into little new, exciting, unexplored territory.  The first book was striking in its fresh vision and approach; here they seen unable to go far enough beyond ‘We told you so!'”

All of which really makes me stop and think.  First, it gives me valuable hints about what to emphasize in the writing.  (There’s a LOT that’s new!  But I did start with history, and that may have been a mistake).  Second, it prepares me, I hope, for another round of people not reading what I write, because what I write goes so against the way they normally think.  To interpret the draft those publishers received as “I told you so!” means that, despite my very strong statements to counter the idea, people are still reading us as forecasters, predicters, crystal-ball gazers, whose pronouncements are either right or wrong.  What I failed to get across the first time and am bending over backward to get across the second time is that we were not predicting, we were offering a choice.   The message is not that we were right, but that the choice is still there.  I START the new draft with that point.  The fact that people still don’t get it just reminds me again of the power of the cultural idea of a preordained future.  It tells me that people are still unempowered about creating their world.  It means I have to hit that point even more head-on, even more strongly.

So I thank these publishers for their dumb responses.  Fortunately, there are a few others who actually want to publish the thing.  It seems that the big rich ones who could give us a nice advance and a lot of publicity are also the dumb ones.  It’s small publishers who get what we’re about, and who are excited about what we’re trying to do, and who really want the book.  Well, that’s how it was last time too.  Anyway, replies are still coming in to Peter.  We’ll probably have a publisher, and an advance to pay our research assistants, within another week or two.  Dennis is coming up next week to work with me on the rewrite of Limits itself, which also looks more extensive than we first had thought, and for which he will take major responsibility.

I have no idea how I’m going to get everything done that I’m committed to do for the next six months.  But I have to say, things sure are getting exciting!

Love, Dana