Hi Dear Folks! I’m sitting at Logan airport, waiting to board Swissair for Zurich and my friend Joan’s house and a Balaton steering committee meeting.  The House impeachment hearings are playing on TVs all over the airport — they’re still going at 5:30 pm, and I heard them kick off at 10 this morning as I drove into Dartmouth.  My gosh, think of all I’ve gotten done during that time!  Is anyone watching this?  Haven’t those Congressmen anything better to do?  What a national waste of time!

In the real world of Foundation Farm, it was frosty this morning, sun sparkling on a crystalline scatter of snow.  There was a skim of ice on the pond, unfortunately — unfortunately because the geese and the one remaining duck are still down there, and they will be goners if the ice gets hard enough to hold a coyote.  I’ve been trying for a week to catch those birds and get them up into the barn.  All I’ve succeeded in doing is making them so wary that they won’t come near me.  All summer I brought them grain and they crowded around my feet to fight over it.  Now they stay on the island and honk at me.

Well, either they’ll be there when I get back next week, or they won’t.  That coyote seems to be making my farming decisions more than I am.

No, we don’t have any new calves.  The five we do have are chasing each other around the yard on sunny afternoons and eating grain and growing.

We do have a new horse though!  His name is Bill.  He’s a brown gelding, indeterminate breed, middle-aged, kind of fat, steady as a rock.  He looks funny teamed up with the classy Fjords, but Stephen and Kerry got him for exactly that purpose.  He’s a solid worker, and he calms the flighty ladies down.  Stephen has been using Bill and Cassima to plow up the remaining unbroken sod down at their CSA garden.  They’re doing a great job.  The plan is to keep three work horses, so if one of the mares is pregnant, they will still always have a working team.

Last weekend we walked the forest of the new farm with Greg Chase, the forester we hired to develop a management plan.  It was a great late-fall day, and it was so wonderful to be out in those woods.  The walking was easy because the Hartland cross-country skiers have been working hard on the trails, clearing and marking them and even putting in culverts over the little streamlets.  The ski trail system goes for miles all over town — there’s another trail system for snowmobiles.

Greg tells us we have 500,000 board feet of harvestable sawlogs on our land!  That’s enough to built about 50 normal-size houses, way more than we need for our houses.  So we’re thinking of getting a logging team going this winter, with a portable sawmill to cut and buck up pine boards and hemlock beams and start them drying, so we can use them when we get ready to build.

Whenever we get ready to build.

We’re into permitting, and it feels like wading into deep slush.

We need three permits that I know about.  The first is for our water supply, the second for discharging wastewater, the third is the Act 250 development permit, which covers everything you can imagine from traffic impact to school impact to visual impact.

Our water permit treats us as if we were developing a municipal water supply (which we are, I guess), so we are held to way higher standards than if we just put down individual wells for each of our houses.  We hired a hydrogeologist last spring, who did very cool studies of rock fractures and geomagnetism to figure out where we should drill.  (He found that our farm sits upon tilted layers of schist and limestone, and that it has outcroppings of garnet!)  By July he filed an application to drill.  The ANR (Vermont Agency of Natural Resources — get used to that abbreviation, I’ll probably be using it a lot in the months to come) water division sent out notices to all abutting landowners (we’re in a village; we have dozens of abutters).  Three of them requested a public hearing, which was held last week.  About 15 neighbors showed up with perfectly understandable concerns about the effect of our project on their wells.  (I wanted to say we won’t have nearly the effect of the 150 dairy cows who used to live there, but I decided not to bring up cows, since we’ll undoubtedly have a few ourselves — though more like 10 than 150.)

The neighbors were assured that, assuming we strike water in the first place, we will have to do 72-hour pump tests and monitor any impacts on their wells.  We also have numerous water quality tests to pass.  It sounds like a lot of work and expense, and it will be.  But these are all reasonable precautions.  I can just wish that the guy who put 13 two-acre lots on the prime farmland next to us had had to go through the same hoops.  (He didn’t, because his project was phased to avoid Act 250.)

This week we had our first meeting with the ANR wastewater people.  We’re hoping to convince both the water supply and the wastewater divisions that we’ll be using at least 40% less water than average households (because of our composting toilets, horizontal-axis washing machines, low-flow fixtures, etc.)  So we shouldn’t have to find such a big well (ANR assumes 150 gallons per day per bedroom), nor build such a big leachfield for our graywater.  This is new stuff for ANR, and the water supply people don’t necessarily talk to the discharge people, so I don’t know what will happen.  But they’re friendly.  They like what we’re trying to do.

For the Act 250 permit we have to prepare a document many pages long.  Our engineers will help us with the technical descriptions of the wastewater, stormwater runoff, grades, soils, roads, etc.  For the rest we have to talk to the school superintendent about absorbing our kids, to the town planning board about fitting the town plan, to the fire chief and police chief and historical preservation people and fish and wildlife people.  It’s a thorough grilling, forcing us and the town to think through every impact we might have.  Our application is publicly available, there are hearings before a citizen board, which has the power to deny our application to build, or to force us to mitigate some impact (like pave the dirt road we’re on, or screen the view of the houses from the road, or pay an impact fee to help expand the school.

Funny, on the bus down to Boston this afternoon I ran into the author of Act 250, my old friend and once-colleague at Dartmouth Jonathan Brownell.  I didn’t complain to him about his creation; rather I joked about being subject to it, and told him how much I admired the whole process.  The citizens of a town SHOULD ask all those questions about any development, and they SHOULD have the power to be sure they’re not paying for their neighbors’ impacts.  I think Act 250 is one of the best things about Vermont, despite the fact that it will cost us thousands of dollars and months of time.

One of our very systematic community members, Judith Bush, is coordinating our permit preparation, marking each question to be answered by one of us or our design team.  We’ll get it done, and I don’t expect we’ll run into trouble.   I can’t imagine any developer who cares more about doing a low-impact, careful job than we do!

November 24, 1998, Swissair, Zurich to Boston

Wow, so much has happened I feel like I’m on a different planet.  Does Foundation Farm really exist?  Do you have that problem when you travel, that the only place that seems real to you is the place where you are?

I’ve spent the last four days in intense Balaton conversation.  It’s not that I don’t have intense conversations other times with other people, but Balaton Group members have been together so long and share so many intellectual concepts and so much personal history, that we tend to communicate in rapid-fire symbols.  Like that joke where the people who know all the jokes in a book just say “Number 24” and everyone laughs.  In Balaton you just have to say “hierarchists” or “egalitarians,” and everyone knows you’re talking about Michael Thompson’s cultural theory.  Say “limits” and everyone instantly brings to mind the full systems argument in Limits to Growth.  Say “orientors” and we all think of the six dimensions of Hartmut Bossel’s theory of system viability.  Say “the Daly triangle,” or “least-cost end-use” or “living machine” or “nonlinear feedback loop” or “Max-Neef’s human needs,” and we’ve all sat together through presentations and discussions of these things; they’re the language of our interdisciplinary discipline.

So the talk flows fast and furious and fascinating.  I love it.  I love these people.  I especially love them when I consider how hard they work and how much they do to use these heady concepts to bring about social justice and environmental integrity in the world.

This Zurich steering committee gathering happens every year at this time to plan the coming year’s conference and other activities.  The steering committee is partly elected from the members, partly older members who just keep coming to meetings at their own expense because they take responsibility for the network.  Joan gives up her house to us, and we cook simple but elegant meals, work, and talk, talk, talk.

It might give you an idea of who the committee members are if I reproduce here for you the write-up I will do for the next Balaton Bulletin on the opening session of our meeting, which we always call “since last,” which means, “what I’ve been up to since I last saw you all.”  This is an abbreviated version, but I think it will give you an idea of the amazing scope of the group, and the density of its interactions with each other.  All names in bold are Balaton Group participants.

*  *  *

Alan AtKisson has become the Director of Arts and Culture for the Sustainability Institute (which was recently started by Dana Meadows).   The first two projects he is planning are an arts festival to be held next summer in Marion, Massachusetts, with the title “Arts, Culture, and a Desirable Future,” and a book currently under contract with Chelsea Green Publishing, which is intended to be a popular, witty, media-penetrating best-seller about the global situation.  Its not-serious working title is Beyond the Limits meets Jonathan Livingston Seagull.  Alan has also been:

– consulting with Tony Cortese of Second Nature on sustainability teaching and practice in universities — including upgrading his innovation game and fusing it into Second Nature’s training program,

– working with the Heinz Endowments and the city of Pittsburgh incorporating sustainability indicators and goals with all city activities

– working under a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant with recently flooded communities in the Red River Basin of the northern U.S. plains, sneaking sustainability into disaster mitigation,

Alan will be the opening musical act in the LEAD training seminar in New Hampshire.  (For more on that, see Dennis Meadows’s news below.)  He plans to record his Rilke songs in April.  And he has recently moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, where, not coincidentally, Melita Rogelj is working on her master’s degree at the School for International Training.

*  *  *

Joan Davis will retire in February from EAWAG (the Swiss Federal Institute on Environmental Research), where she has directed water quality programs for many years.  She intends to set up a consulting company called Aquatic Research and Consultancy, abbreviated ARC, so we can call her Joan of ARC.  The company will allow her to do full time what she has been doing on her own time — working with municipalities and industries to install devices that use electromagnetic fields to change the multi-molecular structure of water — which can make water a better solvent or cleaning agent, reduce corrosion and scaling, and otherwise enhance water’s valuable properties.

Joan is also involved in numerous volunteer activities, including trying to educate consumers and utilities that “green power” can mean efficiency as well as hydro-power.

*  *  *

Bert de Vries spent  “three great weeks in China” this fall installing his IMAGE model of energy use and climate impact at the State Environmental Protection Agency.  He spent a week with Qi Wenhu, visiting Taoist temples among other things.  With regard to the latest IPCC meeting on greenhouse emission scenarios, Bert reports that the process was disappointing.  Nobody had given more thought to the story lines, especially the B2 scenario of a decentralized world that emphasizes green technologies.  “It’s fascinating to see how these things are just made up.”  The B2 scenario, which seems hard for anyone to visualize, was defined essentially by default, as a middle path between the other scenarios.  Strangely, the climate modelers are emphasizing that path for their climate calculations, mainly because it’s in the middle!

Bert’s computer game SUSCLIME has been adopted as a teaching tool by an economics professor at Tilburg University.  His home institute RIVM (the Dutch National Institute for Health and Environment) is now using PowerPlan and IMAGE for national planning.  These developments indicate that interactive modeling and gaming are finally being accepted as useful tools.  (“And it only took eight years,” says Bert.)

*  *  *

 Joan Dutoit  has been working “day and night” on an updated Energy Futures publication for South Africa (which she puts out every other year, alternating with a publication of Energy Indicators).  She is about to do a South African country study on climate change, interpreting all scientific inputs, in order to draw up a policy document.

 *  *  *

In mid-October Zoltan Lontay organized a three- day gathering of 250 Hungarian energy managers from private and public sectors.  The main message was that energy efficiency is the best tool to save money and improve the environment.  It is also needed to meet transboundary agreements on carbon and other emissions.  The new Hungarian government is working on a revised energy policy, and Zoltan is the secretary of the committees on district heating and demand-side management.  He has also prepared the energy chapter of Hungary’s national environmental plan.

Zoltan’s 15-member consulting group is advising three banks on energy efficiency investments.  The group has more than 100 other projects in the works, such as an energy audit for the biggest hotel in Hungary.  They won an EU research grant to make energy strategies for 10 municipalities in Hungary.  They are working with the biggest chemical company in Hungary, where they can produce  an “easy 5-10% energy saving.”  They are advising the Dutch government on which “joint implementation” investments would generate the most savings in carbon emissions.

In 1998 Zoltan’s group will bill $5 million in energy efficiency services.  His company is so impressed with him that his director says, “Zoltan, you are good enough to join the power plant division.”

*  *  *

Niels Meyer has started to write a history of Danish energy policy, the fight for renewable energy and against nuclear, how the NGOs worked, how battles were won to produce what is probably the most forward-thinking national energy policy in the world.  Revisiting that history is “nostalgic for us,” Niels says.

He has been fighting to preserve that policy in the face of a new liberalized electricity market.  He has consulted with the German energy minister to explain how the Danish policy distinguishes between renewable and nonrenewable electricity sources in order to enforce “green power” quotas.  (The German utilities have been claiming that it’s impossible, but Denmark is doing it easily.)

Niels has been participating in an EU workshop discussing the role of utilities in promoting renewables.  “It’s extremely interesting to hear from all the utilities.”  He is also providing data from Scandinavia for a Eurorex Internet data base on renewables in Europe.

*  *  *

Dennis Meadows also spent three weeks in China recently, working with 200 participants of the Rockefeller Foundation’s global LEAD program.  He led various team-building activities and helped the program’s new management, including Gillian Martin-Mehers rethink the program.  He will host the next LEAD global meeting next April at his Browne Center in New Hampshire.

Dennis is almost finished with the third section of his Systems Thinking Playbook — there will be 30 short exercises that teach systems principles through quick, fun group exercises.

*  *  *

Aromar Revi’s research group TARU is looking at the prospects for power sector privatization in the Haryana state of India.  TARU is doing the demand side analysis, Arthur Anderson is doing the supply side.  About 45% of current demand is from the agricultural sector and it has been almost completely subsidized.  Now the subsidy will be removed and electricity price will rise by a factor of five.  The farmers are blocking roads and trying to cut off the power supply of government officials.  For poor people in India power is now 10-15% of household expenditure, and people are disconnecting from the grid.  There is no lifeline rate, no safety net.  On the other hand, there is still a large tax advantage for wind power, so wind is a rapidly growing electricity source in India.

Aro’s group is working with Allied Signal on a high efficiency 75-kwatt (village-size) generator that can use both liquid & gaseous fuels and can give uninterrupted service of high quality.  They are adapting it for use with biogas and doing a strategic market development plan.

Aro is starting a project with the Swiss Technical University (ETH), the University of Tokyo and MIT, looking at how environmental risk is factored into international investments.  The project started with interest in green investment on the part of Swiss and German banks.  He is also doing “3-4 master plans for Indian cities” and a project with University of London on the history of capitalization of India.

*  *  *

Since September Chirapol Sintunawa has organized two team-building workshops, one for a Thai hotel company and another for a power generation company.  His “Green Leaf” program to certify environment-conscious hotels has just completed its first round of auditing.  Four hotels earned the top “5 leaf” ranking.  Fourteen earned 4 leaves, eighteen earned 3 leaves, five earned only 1 leaf.  Thailand’s prime minister will present the certificates in an award ceremony.

Chirapol thinks he may have found the land he needs for an environmental training center, on the river just a 5 minute drive from his house.  He will soon host a LEAD Asia meeting and conduct a team-building workshop for the participants.  Gillian Martin-Mehers and Masayo Hasegawa will be there.

Chirapol’s colleagues have asked him to serve as dean of the Faculty for Environmental and Resources for the next 2 years.  The Thai government, on the other hand, is making problems with his next $2 million grant for environmental and energy conservation education.  One of their conditions is that Chirapol stop appearing on television, which he has no intention of doing.  “If I don’t work on that project, I still have many things to do,” says Chirapol.

*  *  *

Bob Wilkinson is studying with NSF funding the potential impacts of climate change on the California economy.  With EPA funding he is conducting a series of workshops, assuming those impacts and asking, what could we do to solve present problems in a way that will also reduce greenhouse gas emissions?  Mathis Wackernagel (who has moved to Redefining Progress and working on sustainability indicators) is helping Bob plan these workshops.

Bob has taken over the Rocky Mountain Institute water program, which he will direct from Santa Barbara.  He is consulting with EPA on long-term water policy, emphasizing the energy link — how much energy can we save by saving water?

One of the small grants the Balaton Group gave with Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation funds brought Alan AtKisson to Santa Barbara several years ago to talk about sustainability indicators and the Sustainable Seattle project.  That small seed has now grown into a serious community indicator project.

Bob is working with Drew Jones, who is developing an interactive city growth model for the Sustainability Institute, to test the model with the help of city officials and citizens of Santa Barbara.  He is also working with Peter Schwarz of the Global Business Network to go to the Netherlands and learn about their Green Plan and then lead a three-day exercise to develop a green scenario for the world.

*  *  *

Well, that gives you an idea of the folks I get to play with.  And you thought I was a busy person!

In Zurich we made an ambitious plan for the next two years, to use the intelligence and experience of this group to articulate a serious, believable, desirable “green vision” for the world, doing it region by region, with people from the regions participating of course.  The Balaton Group is in an interesting and sometimes frustrating place right now.  After 18 years it is stronger and more effective than ever before.  And yet the people who have been leading it and funding it — me, Dennis, Joan, Niels, and others — are getting older and feeling that we should let go (but not quit) so the leadership will rise from the next generation (Aro, Chirapol, Alan, Bob).  Neither part of that process — the letting go, the taking on of responsibility — is real comfortable.  But it’s happening.  And the younger folks are having way more ambitious ideas than I would ever have dared to try.

That’s good!

Well, when I get home tonight I’ll have about 300 e-mail messages to sort through, and then tomorrow I clean the house and cook for Thanksgiving, which is Thursday.  We’re having a houseful, and Kerry’s sharing the cooking, but there will be lots to do.  We have a cellar full of pumpkins and potatoes and leeks, and a garden still full of greens and Brussels sprouts, and a freezer full of corn and cider (and chickens, but we’re going to buy an organic turkey), so a feast will reliably emerge.  My bell-choir plays in church tomorrow night, and we’re practicing twice a week for our Christmas concerts (which we give all over, to nursing homes and other churches, as well as our own church).

Then on Friday I have to plunge deep into Beyond the Limits.  We have a generous grant to revise and update it for the year 2000 — and also to prepare Alan’s book, mentioned above.  The revision is my job, and it’s driving me crazy.  If I would just update the numbers and quit, it would be feasible.  But of course I can’t help rewriting.  There are parts of that book that, upon rereading, I just hate.  But the rewriting gets me seriously stuck.  So I shift from one chapter to the next, and now I’ve reached a stuck point in each of them.  I have one month to get myself out of this dilemma, because I start teaching in January, and Diana, my research assistant, is expecting a baby the first of February.

Somewhere in all this, I have to get this newsletter printed and mailed.  Well, if you’re reading this, you’ll know I accomplished at least that!

Love, Dana

P.S. — At Foundation Farm, Thanksgiving day.  The weather warmed up, the geese and duck are still on the pond sticking out their tongues at me.  The house is clean and warm and full of good smells and good music and good people.  Happy Thanksgiving!