Dear Folks, It’s an unusually balmy Saturday night after a beautiful day, and, strangely, I can’t tell you much about the farm. I was in my Dartmouth office writing all day. It doesn’t feel like a Saturday at all. Beyond the Limits has got me beyond my limits. When I start missing farm Saturdays, I am well over the edge.
The deadline for a complete first draft is November 1. We won’t make it, but I still have hopes of coming in a week late. Of the eight chapters in the book are in pretty good shape by now, two are lightly sketched in, and two others haven’t even been started.
There’s a lot riding on this deadline. We want to have the book out by spring, well ahead of the Earth Summit (UN Conference on Environment and Development) in June. Ideally we will make the March publication date of the original book twenty years ago — though that’s beginning to look doubtful. Little Chelsea Green Press has staked its whole spring list, and maybe the whole publishing company on this book. Contracts are being signed with publishers in Japan, Germany, Italy, and England, all of whom want to publish at the same time and are pushing to begin translating and typesetting. We have agreements for advances that are very modest in today’s publishing world but bigger by a factor of ten than any I have seen before in my life of writing. And, above all, I care enormously about this book. It’s an update and restatement of a message we thought was urgent twenty years ago, and it’s much more urgent now.
It is simply ridiculous to write a book in six weeks, but that turns out to be what is happening. I thought, until five weeks ago, that we would just edit the text of The Limits to Growth a little and add new computer runs and new data. Easy. After the first week, though, I stopped looking at the old Limits as I wrote. These are different times, we have a new and stronger message, there is much more information, and I am a better writer than I was twenty years ago. So Beyond the Limits is, all but about five paragraphs, a completely new book. I wish I had known that sooner! I would have allowed more time for it!
The book is co-authored by Dennis Meadows (my ex-husband, for those of you new to these newsletters) and J¿rgen Randers — three out of the four original co-authors of Limits. The fourth co-author was Bill Behrens, who is now a house-builder and farmer in Maine. Early on Dennis and I contacted J¿rgen and Bill and asked them what involvement, if any, they wanted to have in the new book. J¿rgen wanted to help; Bill didn’t. J¿rgen came over from Oslo, where he is an entrepreneur in Green businesses, to stay with Dennis for a month in Durham, and one night Bill drove over from Maine and we had a reunion.
That was fun! Actually working all month with Dennis and J¿rgen has been fun. It has been five years since I worked with a co-author on anything (before that I ALWAYS did), and I had forgotten what a pleasure it is to have another mind to strike sparks with, to talk things out when you get stuck, to correct one’s mistakes and moderate one’s judgements and multiply one’s energies. I am much happier as a team player, especially when the team is as good as the one that happened to come together at MIT twenty years ago to produce The Limits to Growth.
So for the last month I have been going down to Durham, two hours from here, or the guys have been coming up here, or we have been meeting in the middle in Concord. Last weekend we took over Dennis’s and Suzanne’s house and worked out all the computer runs, which are the backbone of the book. It was such a contrast from twenty years ago, when we did the runs at MIT on a remote terminal to a massive IBM mainframe computer. This time we had three Macintoshes going, each one probably as powerful as that old mainframe. J¿rgen ran the model on one, I wrote up the run descriptions on another, and Dennis alternated between working out the runs with J¿rgen and taking my word-disk and putting in his suggestions and corrections.
As we dug into the computer model again — not having thought much about it for fifteen years — we were astonished at its dynamic complexity and subtlety. Like all models, it’s incomplete, it isn’t the world, and there are ways to make it better, but it is a really nifty model. We ended up changing only a few numbers to bring it up to date — that was surprising. We ran completely different tests with it, however, putting in policy changes in 1995 instead of 1975, and putting them in more gently, more realistically we think, than we did twenty years ago. And the results are exciting. They show clearly that the options for the world are diminished from twenty years ago, that the limits are very much closer — frighteningly close, actually — and that there are still good futures possible. It is a complex message, not certain doom, not certain triumph, everything resting on the decisions of the next ten or twenty years. I find the runs very convincing. I just pray for the ability to put them into words with all the power they deserve.
It was a glorious warm fall weekend as we worked, at the peak of the color down at that seacoast side of the state. Suzanne made a picnic lunch for us and dragged us outside, which was a good and needed break. Dennis and Suzanne have a house in the woods, overlooking a little swamp where a brook slows into a meandering curve, so when we needed to lift our eyes from computer screens there were beautiful views in all directions. I came home on Sunday energized and excited.
Now J¿rgen has gone back to Oslo and I have spent a week slogging alone up here and it’s not so much fun any more. I’ve been trying to complete and polish up the first six chapters so they’re ready to go out for comments — and it’s slow going. Later this week I may go down to Durham and just stay there, away from the farm, the telephone, all interruptions, until this darn book is finished.
I have a hard time, though, staying away from the farm. Since I missed Farm Saturday last weekend, I took a Farm Wednesday this week, to harvest all the remaining winter crops (beets, rutabagas, celeriac, cabbage, carrots) and put them in the root cellar.
The killing frost came on September 29 — a week late, given the 1970s average frost dates, and three weeks earlier than last year. We were ready for it, though. I was actually glad to be able to stop canning tomatoes.
I also found time earlier this month to drive the farm truck up to Lyme and haul back our new ram Wally, whom I bought from Jean McIntyre. Wally is the classiest ram we have ever had. He’s a three-year-old purebred Romney — no previous ram on this farm has ever been purebred, because they’ve all been black. I’ve wanted a mostly black flock, because the dark wool is more valuable, and more beautiful for hand spinning. But now I’m trying to balance the flock to about half-white, so I bought my first white ram.
Wally is alone in the barnyard these days, waiting for the ewes to come up for breeding, which will be in about another week (timed so the lambs will come at the beginning of April). Sylvia and I made the mistake a week ago of letting him out to mow the lawn. When we do that with the ewes they just wander around for awhile and then put themselves right back in the barnyard. At worst they go across the road and munch on Ruth Whybrow’s hayfield, but they always find their way back from there too. Wally didn’t. He split. We stopped watching him for a few minutes, and he was gone.
I went immediately to look down in the pasture, reasoning that a ram’s olfactory system could lead him to ewes over a distance of miles. The ewes were in the pasture, but no Wally. I looked in the orchard where there were delicious apple drops to eat. No Wally. Sylvia was looking all over too, and it was getting dark. No Wally. How could a sheep disappear so fast?
Finally we gave up and went in to fix supper, and an hour or two later the phone rang. It was the town cop, calling to say that someone had seen a big white sheep way over on Stage Road and had eased him along with his car to our road. He was last seen going up our driveway. So Sylvia and Don went out with flashlights and a bucket of grain and managed to coax Wally back into the barnyard. We haven’t let him out again. We won’t, until the girls are back up here to show him how to get back home again.
I’ve included Sylvia’s picture here of Wally confronting the headlines on Stage Road. I’ve also included a sample of the little illustrated notes Sylvia leaves me from time to time — this one telling me that my cat Poppy wouldn’t take her pill. And the duck picture is one that Sylvia just did for a book she’s hoping to illustrate. It’s a new garden book that Eliot Cole has written for Chelsea Green Press. We’re all rooting for Sylvia to win the bid as illustrator.
When I drive home these days in the last light, I look forward to passing our pond. At this time of year it attracts strangers, usually one or two Canada geese, who have dropped down out of their migrating Vs to rest awhile. I guess they can rejoin any flock they want to; anyway, the next day they’re always gone. And sometimes a great blue heron is standing there. He seems to get along well with our geese. The combination looks very silly — four squat fat white geese and a tall skinny blue heron.
The fall glory has come and gone — it flames up for only a few days at its peak, though the dying embers of the oak and popple trees hang on for weeks afterward. My friend Priscilla and I were trying to describe to each other not how it looks during those peak days, but how we feel. It’s a difficult mixture of emotions to describe. Partly pure exhilaration — the sun hits a brilliant maple tree, and the only appropriate response is to shout and dance and turn cartwheels (all of which I do, when no one is around). Partly laughter — I think what a joker God is, to mark the annual death of the forest with this raucous celebration. Partly awe and gratitude, for a universe that can turn trillions of leaves carnival colors overnight without a sound, without a fanfare. Partly sadness, knowing from twenty years’ experience that the show will be so brief, and that the memories of it are never anywhere near as spectacular as the reality. And partly a deep, quiet faith that the show has come back, over and over, for thousands of years, and that it will come again. And then, finally, there is a new emotion, a doubt, a terrible fear that acid rain and greenhouse warming could actually put an end to the show once and for all.
That’s a lot to feel all at once — which may be why, above all, fall in New England makes one feel completely alive.
Well, I’d better get back to the book.
Love to you all,
Dana Meadows
