Dear Folks,

Nearly always when I sit down to write this monthly letter to you, it’s a Sunday. I have been immersed in farm activities, and I am suffused with happiness — my normal state when I’ve spent a day or two putzing around outside. So I usually start off with farm stuff, descriptions of nature and animals and gardens and the activities of my farm-mates. I start there because that’s where my head is at.

Then I remember the rest of the week, and I tell you about writing, meetings, teaching, or traveling — the indoor parts of my life, which are intellectual and always centered on the global transformation I call “sustainability.” When I tell about those parts of my life, I’m usually excited, hopeful, full of plans and ideas, and deeply appreciative of my “sustainability-mates” all over the world.

I often get stuck in my indoor or outdoor work, and sometimes I gripe in your presence when I have a problem I can’t solve, whether it’s slugs in the garden, drought in the Northeast, politics in the nation, or fundraising for my colleagues in Africa. Mainly I gripe about being too busy, a particularly annoying problem because it’s so clearly caused by no one but me. (It’s awful to have a chronic problem that you can’t blame on anyone else.) But those are normal complaints. No one can live life without getting stuck, and most of us including me have a faith that stuckness passes. Problems get solved. Complaining about them rarely helps, but it passes the time while one is looking around for a solution — which almost always comes.

But every now and then I get more than stuck, I get thoroughly stopped. I may be as busy as ever, turning out columns, going to meetings, working on the farm, but I’m just going on momentum. The direction is unclear, the motor is idling, there’s no fire in the belly, not even any idea where to get a light. Nothing is out of order, but nothing seems to be quite working either, and nothing makes much sense. The only reason I get up in the morning and do things is that everyone, including me, expects me to.

Do you ever get that way? Do you think Gandhi ever did? Or Thomas Jefferson? Or Tolstoy? Or Rachel Carson or Wendell Berry? (To name my most abiding heroes.)

Well, I’m that way at the moment, have been for a week or two, and find myself most reluctant to write a letter to you from this stopped place, when you’re used to hearing purpose and energy from this direction. Those of you who’ve been with me for awhile know that when the time comes to write each month, I do my best to write about where I’m at, even if I’d rather not admit it. Mostly that’s easy. This month it isn’t. But we serve each other best, I tell myself, by sharing all of ourselves, not just the parts we most approve of — so here I am, lost and discouraged. Maybe it helps for you to know I get that way sometimes. It would help me right now to know that Gandhi ever did.

One reason I’m down is that Marcia Meyer, that wonderful rolling stone who rolled in here last May, is rolling out sometime next month. Her further adventures, as far as she can see them, involve going to North Carolina where there’s a community of volunteers called the Human Service Alliance who work full time with people in all sorts of need. She’ll spend three weeks there, then go visit her family in Indiana, then go back to Seattle to see whether the universe calls her back there right now. She might return here — Chrissie and Scot and I emphatically hope she will. But judging from Marcia’s history and her quest, I’d guess she won’t be back to stay unless there’s a bigger community here that needs her and challenges her more than we have challenged her.

I’m not surprised at this development. We understood that Marcia was here temporarily. None of us made any long-term commitment. We have always regarded her time with us as a pure gift, we support her going further, and we’ll treasure her friendship. She brought a wisdom and freedom that taught us a lot, and we’ll go on using the lessons we’ve learned from her. We’ll miss her terribly, but her leaving depresses me mainly because it reminds me how much more work I have to do and how many practical problems I still haven’t solved to build a larger and more stable community here. In my present mood it makes me wonder whether I even want to do that work and solve those problems, or whether, if I want to, I am capable of it.

Believe it or not, I even have doubts about farming just now. I’ve been away too much this fall, I’m too distanced from the land, which means my mind isn’t on top of things as much as it should be, and also that my farm-mates have borne more of a load than they should have — all at one of the most difficult times of the farming year.

In terms of work that has to be done on a tight schedule, October and November are second only to May and June on the farm hecticness scale. The work in fall is a bit less, but the mood is much darker, as the days are darker. The tasks have to do with infolding rather than outfolding, with harvesting rather than sowing, with death rather than birth. It can be satisfying, tucking away beloved things for the winter’s sleep. The accounts come due and you see how successful your operation has been. The animals come in from the pastures to the barn and the food comes into the freezer and root cellar and you begin to snuggle in and count your blessings.

In accounting terms it has been a great year — our root cellar is stuffed with potatoes, squash, onions, rutabaga, beets, carrots, celeriac, canned tomatoes, pickles, jellies. One freezer is full of fruits and vegetables while the other is loaded with cider and birds. The day before Thanksgiving I butchered 2 roosters, 3 ducks, and 3 geese (the geese bedecked the Thanksgiving tables of three families, including ours). Yesterday I did in 4 more young, handsome Buff Orpington roosters, plus our aging Partridge Rock rooster, who will be supplanted by the remaining Buff Orpie, the feistiest of the bunch. (He nominated himself to become the new king of the flock.) We still have a goose and a duck or two to do, and four lambs go off to the butcher tomorrow. That will take us down to our winter population of breeding animals.

Butchering is a good job, a hard job, a beautiful job when you get used to it (I never cease to be amazed at how wonderfully geese are put together) — but definitely a sober job. Everything about this time of year, but especially the butchering, makes my farm-mates ask, “Why do we have these animals, anyway?” I find myself unable really to answer that question. Because farms have these things. Because they’re beautiful and eat the slugs and grow on grass and give us manure and new babies and ultimately give us, or someone, good meat to eat. We kill because death is the necessary other side of birth. That’s a lesson to absorb deep within us. Like everything else in life, butchering can be a good Zen discipline, if you hold it that way.

But why THIS Zen discipline? When half of us in the household don’t eat meat at all, and the other half almost never do?

I don’t know. Hell, I don’t know why we farm at all. Economically it never made sense, and our culture tells us every day that economic sense is the only kind there is.

That tells you what a mood I’m in!

Too many Saturdays away, three this month. One to the Society of Environmental Journalists meeting in Boston, a meeting I should have spent the whole week at, but with my classes at Dartmouth that was impossible. So I just bopped down for a Saturday, spoke at my panel, and came home. Got to see Amory Lovins, who was also on the panel. Heard a speech by E.O. Wilson (with the amazing news that he and other biologists have spent four whole days with Newt Gingrich, educating him about the Endangered Species Act). Had time for a good talk with Bill Moomaw. Bill’s a long-time sustainability-mate — he headed up Environmental Studies at Williams College, headed up the climate change program at the World Resources Institute, now he’s at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts in Boston. He filled me with hope as he described the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting, where he and other scientists addressed representatives of 180 governments and presented the evidence on global warming and got them to sign off on the latest IPCC report — which states unequivocally that warming is already underway, and that there are easily affordable ways to mitigate it.

Another weekend was spent at Oberlin College, where my friend David Orr, who never seems to lose his sense of direction, is pursuing an education vision like the one I once pursued at Dartmouth — with much more ambition and determination than I ever had. His interdisciplinary Environmental Studies Program is planning a new building (with the help of the students) that will demonstrate the latest ideas in energy efficiency, biological wastewater purification, and non-toxic materials. He was holding an advisory committee meeting (the committee includes good friends Steve Viederman, George Woodwell, and again Bill Moomaw) and I gave a speech on systems to the students and faculty. We met with Oberlin’s president and with students, and tried to support David, who needs about 4 more faculty members to help carry his load or he will burn out. (Is that what’s wrong with me? Simple burnout?) It was good to be back at a nice Midwestern liberal arts college, like the one I went to (Carleton). Somehow on those peaceful campuses the world seems simpler and problems seem solvable.

Then last weekend was the Balaton steering committee meeting in Zurich. I was supposed to go to another meeting before that in Wuppertal, Germany, where the SCOPE committee I’m on was trying to pull together national indicators of sustainable development for the U..N. I had it all worked out with Marcia and Scot to zoom out of my Tuesday class, they would rush me to the Lebanon Airport, and I would just make a flight to Boston which would just make a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. Only trouble was that a good old November Nor’easter swept in from the ocean just then, whipping the east coast with sleet and wind and rain, shutting down the little planes and even some of the big ones.

So I didn’t go anywhere that night and missed the SCOPE meeting. The next night I flew directly to Zurich and the home of my dear friend Joan Davis. Her house is the central locus of the Balaton Hotel chain, because it’s 12 minutes by bus from the Zurich airport, and because she’s such a gracious hostess we feel we can stop in any time. For the steering committee we meet there, sleep there, cook our meals together there — a cheap and pleasant way to convene in otherwise expensive Switzerland.

Joan DuToit came in on the overnight flight from Cape Town, South Africa. Dennis arrived from working with our Balaton members in Prague. Alan AtKisson arrived hungry and exhausted from four days of sustainability workshops in Skopje, Macedonia. Zoltan Lontay came from educating people and communities in Budapest about energy efficiency. Aromar Revi and Chirapol Sintunawa, from India and Thailand respectively, blew in from the Wuppertal meeting I had missed and told me all about it. They were disappointed in it. The “experts” meeting there, they said, didn’t even really understand sustainability, much less the system dynamics that would allow one to design good indicators.

Well, for two days we talked and thought together, worried over finances and policies, and designed three meetings for the coming year. (Now I have a lot of proposals to write and organizing to do.) Next year’s big annual meeting will be on water — in ecosystems, in the economy, and in the human metabolism. The good news about that topic is that I’m no expert in it and many other Balaton members are, so I’ll be responsible for the funding but not the program — Joan Davis will head up a committee to do that.

The second meeting, if we can pull it off, will be our first regional meeting in Africa, a place that so badly needs the kind of networking and leadership support that Balaton gives, but the place where we’ve done the worst job, partly because of our own unfamiliarity with it, partly because I find raising funds for Africa almost impossible these days. From the point of view of most foundations, it seems to have dropped off the map. Our African members want to hold a meeting in June, they’ve picked the topic of community participation in resource management, and they’re very fired up — so I’ll get that meeting to happen somehow or other!

The third meeting, invented last weekend in Zurich, will be in Holland, probably in April, on indicators of sustainability. We’ll pull together about 20 Balaton members, the ones most versed in system dynamics, many of whom are already involved in indicator efforts anyway, for their own nations, or for regional groups like the European Community. It will be an intense 5-day workshop, and we’ll come out of it with very clear and concise guidelines for sustainability indicators (real advance warning lights, not just a compilation of environmental measurements), plus 10-20 indicators that we can strongly recommend that the U.N. adopt as a beginning, feasible, useful set. We’ll be trying to do the work of that SCOPE committee, but we’ll select the participants on the basis of their expertise on the subject, not on political correctness.

Again, I don’t know where the money will come from. I can and will jump-start all these efforts from my MacArthur grant, but it isn’t enough to fund all the great ideas the Balaton Group comes up with!

So there’s plenty of good, good, good work to do. I’ll have no trouble staying busy. I have one more class and a lot of grading and then my environmental ethics class is over. I am truly enthused about the Balaton work, and I love the energy, intelligence, and good will my colleagues bring to our process. I want to build a humming community, right here, right around me, of people like that — and Chrissie, Scot, and Marcia are all people like that. But I am stuck on problems like zoning restrictions and finding more people and organizing everything and finding the immense amount of TIME and INTENTION and VISION that it takes to build and hold together community. At the moment, for today anyway, for much of this dark, stormy November, my time and intention and vision seem overallocated, exhausted. I’m not only stuck but stopped.

The main truth about any mood that any human being ever has is that it never lasts. By the time you get this letter every month, whatever mood I was in when I wrote it, whether exaltation or despair, it is almost certainly over. You’ve tolerated my exaltation in the past. Thanks for tolerating my despair.

Love,
Dana

P.S. Chrissie says we should mail without envelopes and save trees, so we’re trying it. Please let us know if this doesn’t work for you.