Dear Folks, Well, things have quieted down. They always do in November, when the world starts to freeze, we give up on the garden, we move the animals close to the house, we start lighting up woodstoves. Because of the short days, we can’t do morning chores till seven, and evening chores happen before five. That makes long, quiet nights, time to discover what’s in the piles on my desk, time to read and knit. The November weather, constantly gloomy with spits of sleet or snow, means that farm days tend to happen indoors, as we clean, repair, restore order to the chaos that inevitably develops during the busy summer.
To my orderly soul it feels good!
Most of the clean-up is still ahead. We’ve barely turned the corner into winter. Until this week we’ve been scrambling to finish outside tasks. Stephen and Kerry made a deal with a dairy farmer to prune his half-acre of raspberries in exchange for three loads of cow manure for our new 3-acre garden. So they’ve been over pruning, and Stephen has been spreading and disking in cow shit. (And the dogs have been ecstatically rolling in it — phew!) Kerry just dug the last carrots and beets out of the hoop house. Kerry and I washed the downstairs windows. We’ve finally got all the cockerels butchered and in the freezer, and I’ll do the ducks on the day before Thanksgiving (with one to be served the next day). We just walked the geese up from the pond to the barn and the ewes up from the pasture to the orchard, where we can carry hay to them. A handsome Border Leicester ram we call Lester has arrived to make sheep babies. The Fjord horses still spend their days nibbling at frozen grass in Ruth’s field, but they spend nights in the barn.
Since their arrival just a month ago, Stephen and Kerry have been hustling like crazy. I doubt if there’s a farm in the area they haven’t visited, to find out what’s going on there and to ask for a job. Stephen now works weekends at a horse farm in Hartland, and Kerry just started a job in the produce section of our local coop. (Handy, since that’s where we sell our onions and eggs.) They’re also perusing our farmers’ Market Bulletin (put out by the NH ag department every week) to pick up used equipment for the massive gardening effort we’re planning for next year. And they’ve been wonderfully helpful to me, splitting wood, getting the farm buttoned down for the winter, even doing the morning chores on my crazier days, like Thursdays, when I have both a column deadline and a class to prepare.
The ethics class seems to be going gangbusters. It’s a great group of students, mostly seniors, environmental studies majors. Many of them spent last winter together in Kenya, in our foreign study term, where they live for awhile with city families in Nairobi, with Kikuyu farming families in the highlands, with pastoral families in the drylands (where they get to taste the Samburu diet of milk and cattle blood), and in the game parks. It’s an earth-shaking experience for them, and a bonding. They come back great friends and more than ready to confront the great ethical questions.
How can we have created a world where some people are so rich and others are so poor?, asks one young woman, who spent a leave term extracting worms from the bodies of AIDS babies in a Ugandan hospital. And what can I do about it?
Where does this moral instinct in us come from? asks a serious Chinese-American exchange student. And why do some people appear not to have it?
How do we know what we know? What is “good,” anyway? Does the rest of nature merit the same kind of moral consideration as human beings do? Even if we knew the good, does that mean we can or will or should do the good? Why do the adults around us seem to talk and think so little about ethics? These kids are deeply pained by the state of the world, desperate to fix it, horrified that even if they devote their whole lives to the task, their lives might not be enough.
They’re very moving. As you see, I had to write a column about them. It’s a privilege to be with them. That, I always discover, when I get dragged kicking and screaming back into teaching, is the reason I teach.
And I’ll be glad when it’s over and I can get back to my normal over-scheduled routine. Just two more class sessions and one final paper to grade.
I’ve made a decision to downsize my life 1997, to go into hiding and finish the environmental systems textbook I’ve been working on forever (but not steadily. I’ve just resigned from the National Geographic Research and Exploration Committee (which gives out the grants for all the nifty expeditions — it meant 8 trips to Washington a year and reading hundreds of proposals). I’ll get off every board I possibly can. I won’t do any speaking or traveling except for Balaton. And I’ll turn the gardens over to the able crew we have on the farm now — Stephen, Kerry, Chrissie, Scot. I’ll be their stoop laborer, ready to go weed whatever needs weeding during writing breaks. I need that kind of writing break. But I will have the gardens off my mind, and that’s the main thing, my limiting factor, how much I can hold in my mind.
The textbook and the new community are what I WANT to spend my time on. The community is still having wonderful meetings, one just yesterday. We’re rotating around, meeting at the houses of the folks who live around here, which is nice, because we get to know each others’ spaces and families. I am still amazed at the quality of the people who show up and the common sense and good will they bring to our discussions. I know, we haven’t come to any of the hard decisions (having to do with money) yet, but in a gentle way we’re beginning to explore the territory where many communities have the hardest times.
Such as kitchens and bathrooms. Yesterday, for the fun of it, we started talking about the physical design of our community. That’s premature, because we don’t have the land yet, but we couldn’t wait, so we decided to list what we wanted and let the discussion inform us about general principles we might want to make into community guidelines. We had an enormous amount of agreement (easy, one person pointed out, because we don’t have the checkbook out on the table). Energy efficiency, passive solar, maybe active photovoltaic, water recycling and solar aquatic sewage treatment, big central greenhouse, common house with community kitchen, library, play space, meditation space, recreation and music and dance hall. Houses very tightly clustered, with quite a few living units in the common house itself, for those who want that. Beauty and simplicity, indoors and out. Attention to the landscape and the views, looking in, looking out.
But what about a separate kitchen for each living unit? What about sharing bathrooms?
Someone pointed out that kitchens and bathrooms are the most expensive part of any building, and that there have been communities that insisted on full kitchens for everyone and then discovered that everyone was eating in the common house and they’d wasted a lot of money. Is it SUSTAINABLE to have so many refrigerators, someone asked? But what if my family NEEDS to have a quiet dinner together, just us and our children? said someone else. I have GOT to have my own kitchen, said someone with teeth slightly clenched. I will NOT share a bathroom, said someone else.
Well, that was interesting! It opened the whole question of privacy versus community and how to draw the proper line between them — a question we found undiscussable in the abstract, but unavoidable when it came to kitchens and bathrooms. We started asking WHY, really why, people felt the need for them. Cooking is my art, my heart, my soul, my identity, one said. The kitchen is where I know who I am, and I can’t accept anyone else’s standards for cleanliness or design or color or where the spoons are kept. Hey, said someone else, when you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go, and I’m not into waiting in line.
What was beautiful was, we just listened and thought about it all, we didn’t leap to conclusions or get on high horses. I began to see design possibilities I had never seen before — to accommodate underlying purposes, instead of just assuming multiple kitchens and bathrooms. Toilets needn’t be in the same rooms as showers, mirrors and sinks, for example, so someone who has to go needn’t wait for a teenager to comb his hair. (That’s standard design in Europe.) Maybe some people could have kitchens for creativity, but not complete family-size food-keeping equipment. A walk-in fridge at the commonhouse could be more efficient and less expensive than 20 refrigerators — and if most of the food is raised right in the community, central processing and storage makes sense. Maybe we could have one or two nice private kitchens and eating spaces for families who want to eat alone or with special guests, but not have to keep 20 full kitchens on standby for that purpose, when most of us would use them only once a week or once a month.
Maybe we could grow beyond thinking that who we are is the space we control. Maybe we could even come to see who we are in communal terms, and see the entire community space as our means of self-expression.
Who would have thought all those lessons would come out of kitchens and bathrooms?
Well, these are only preliminary conversations, but they’re fun, and through them we get to know each other a bit. We find ourselves lingering after they’re over, just going on talking, sharing, learning about each other. In smaller ways the meetings extend on either side too. Babette Wils came up from Boston a day early to stay at our farm and go over the commodity model she and others are working on at MIT — the first formal project of the Sustainability Institute. And Beth Sawin and Phil Rice stayed over with Meg and Robin in Hartland and came to the farm the next morning to talk about sustainability education ideas the Institute might put together. We excited ourselves thoroughly — we have so much material to draw on, and so many talented people who could contribute!
So much for downsizing my life! But you know, all this community stuff, though it enlarges my scope and interests enormously, and though there will be endless complications to get it going, feels different from anything I’ve done before. It feels like passing on ideas and resources and powers and responsibilities and legitimacies to younger people. My goal, ten years from now, when the community and institute are up and running, is to be one of its grandmothers, pottering in the gardens, knitting, baking cookies, helping with the lambings, keeping the sustainability flame burning bright, and loving people.
I had to go on only one journey this month, and that was an easy one, down to Marion Massachusetts for a weekend meeting on The Natural Step.
Some of you who read this newsletter know more about The Natural Step than I do, but here’s what I learned at Marion. An extraordinary children’s cancer doctor in Sweden named Karl Henrik Robert got alarmed at what he was seeing in the cells of children, and he made the leap of connecting it to what is happening to the earth’s environment. He wrote a draft paper, outlining the principles of how the earth works and how the human economy is violating its laws. He circulated the draft to several scientific friends. They sent back criticisms and he revised it and sent it out to a wider circle. More revisions came back. He kept doing this until he had a document that most of the scientific establishment of Sweden had read, contributed to, and approved. It was a powerful document. It said, essentially, that the human economy is unsustainable, that it is breaking down the life support systems of the planet, and that it is making us sick.
Later he boiled down The Natural Step to four “systems conditions,” which the human economy cannot violate. They are (in my wording — and Karl Henrik Robert would probably not like me to use my own wording):
1. We cannot systematically increase our extraction of materials from the earth’s crust.
2. We cannot systematically increase the amount of waste we dump into the environment.
3. We cannot systematically destroy nature and the earth’s life support systems.
4. We cannot survive as a society with huge gaps between the rich and the poor.
Robert took his consensus statement to the TV network and asked for a program in prime time to present it. He took it to producers and actors and asked them to help make the program interesting to the public. He took it to major Swedish companies and asked them to sponsor it. He took it to the king and asked for his endorsement. Given the scientific power behind the statement, they all said yes. Tapes and booklets went out to every household in Sweden. Since then Robert has been working with companies and farmers and government to figure out, so now what can we do to correct our systemic violations of the earth’s operating principles?
At Marion he told interesting stories about the effect of The Natural Step in Sweden. For example, he brought together the proponents of organic farming and of chemical-intensive farming and asked them to work out the implications of the system conditions for agriculture. You can imagine, given the rules above, where they had to come out. He worked with McDonald’s Sweden, who asked his help in adapting their packaging and solid waste stream to the system conditions. After two years of this, with great progress, one of the McDonald’s manager came to Karl Henrik and asked, “are fast-food hamburgers consistent with the system conditions?” “I could never have raised that question to them at the beginning,” said Karl Henrik, “but the system conditions ultimately forced them to ask it for themselves.”
The weekend at the Marion Foundation was a presentation of The Natural Step to about 150 people, some in business, some who want to be part of the Natural Step USA. There was great enthusiasm about the idea, some frustration about how to get the US movement going. It is headed by two powerful and wonderful people, Paul Hawken and Molly Olson (who coordinated the President’s Commission on Sustainable Development). But there are start-up problems, in funding of course, and also in translating from the Swedish — by which I mean more than translating documents. A consensus process like the one Karl Henrik used — and the consensus process was the key to his success — is a different order job among 270 million fractious Americans than among 9 million homogeneous and reasonable Swedes. (That’s how I think of Swedes, anyway.) Paul and Molly are figuring out how to do it right. If it starts to differ too much from the Swedish effort, Karl Henrik will no longer let it be called The Natural Step (understandably). And meanwhile there are a lot of people impatient to get it going.
Stay tuned. It will be an interesting story as it develops. Given my downsizing decision, I will be part of it only as cheerleader and friend to Paul and Molly. But I wish the whole effort well.
Chrissie and Scot report from Vancouver Island that tracking down hundreds of specific plots of trees to do scientific measurements on them is quite a challenge. The island is a rugged place. One day they got three flat tires, the third one an hour and a half along a logging road — and they only had two spares. Another day they came to a washout and had to go on by foot — 1500 feet up and miles in distance — to reach their plot. But they’re learning, and presumably furthering the PhD thesis — and they’ll be back again on Foundation Farm in just a few weeks now.
I’m happy to announce that we have an artist on the farm again, so this newsletter is embellished with a sketch by Stephen of the Fjord horses Mari and Kassima, frolicking in the field. (Just out of view in the picture is our crazy pup Emmett, egging them on — no, actually, they’re young horses and they don’t need any egging on — but you should see how they play with Emmett!)
Dennis and Suzanne and Narayana are coming back for Thanksgiving. There is so much to be thankful for always on a farm, and especially, it seems, on this one. As usual, nearly everything on the table will have been raised right here. The place is full of lovely animals and lovely people. And life just get more and more interesting!
May your Thanksgiving be blessed and full of gratitude, Dana
