Dear Folks,
It’s wonderful to come back to the farm from a long time on the road. The quiet, instead of the pounding noise (have you noticed how LOUD the world is getting?). Oakleaf lettuce picked fresh from the garden instead of iceberg lettuce days old. Air that smells of pine trees, not diesel fumes. Good physical work to do instead of sitting all day in meetings and planes. Every time I come home, I swear I’ll never leave again.
And yet — and yet. There are so many great people out there, people I love, people I want to work with. There are so many new ideas, there is so much to learn. It is necessary to be humbled now and again by all the differentness of this diverse planet, to be reminded that the whole world isn’t crisp, forested New England, that there are deserts and rainforests and sprawling, thundering cities. (Have you ever seen Miami from an airplane? It goes on FOREVER!)
With Scot and Chrissie here giving me the freedom to travel again, I’m right back to my old dilemma. Except maybe in the depths of January, I’d be happy to stay on the farm forever. But the world keeps calling me to do interesting, maybe even useful, things. The people I need and want to work with are scattered all over. And I need to be shaken out of my shell, reminded of how many people do think what I think, even though sometimes I feel I am alone, and also of how many people don’t think what I think, even though sometimes I feel everyone surely must.
I got back night before last from a two-week trip, the longest since Don and Sylvia moved away a year ago. I stopped for a day to visit my Mom in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. I went on to the Pew Scholars meeting in Tucson. Then I zoomed down to Costa Rica for the International Society of Ecological Economics.
I try to stop in with Mom whenever I have a trip that leads west. She lives in Go-Ye Village, a retirement community, where she’s the best gardener (even won a Tahlequah “yard of the month” award!), a constant source of support for everyone, and a bit of a rebel. The rebel part is what I’ve always loved most about her. She was a red-headed tomboy as a kid, which didn’t sit too well, because she was the daughter of a Baptist minister. When she moved into Go-Ye, established by missionaries, fairly pious in its day-to-day operations, she declared, “I’ll be darned if I’m going to pray over the popcorn!”
Both Mom and I find retirement communities sociologically interesting but sometimes depressing. Having just celebrated her 79th birthday, she is still so full of energy that she feels confined by the place, but she also knows why she needs it. My dear stepfather Karl is on oxygen almost constantly now, and he needs increasing help to get through the day. He is in a room in a nursing wing of the main building, where there’s always someone to attend to him. Mom spends many hours a day there, but thanks to the nurses, she can tend to her garden, run errands, go to church (where she’s in the bell-choir), and get some sleep at night. I can’t imagine how she or Karl would manage if they weren’t at Go-Ye.
It’s a pretty place, with the yards full of bluebirds and meadowlarks and scissors-tail flycatchers. Tahlequah is the headquarters of the Cherokee Nation, so there are interesting museums and ceremonies — and people. I wish I were closer, so I could help Mom more and get her out for some fun. I’d love to have her live at the farm, but she wouldn’t be happy either with the winters or with the idea of being “dependent” on her daughter. So, given how far our family is spread apart, given how poorly structured our society is for taking care of each other, I’m happy she’s at Go-Ye Village.
On to Tucson, or more accurately to a dude ranch about 45 minutes outside Tucson. It’s a wonder to me why anyone would try to ranch out in the desert. The horses are fed with alfalfa trucked in from god-knows-where. The cattle graze on prickly stuff that no self-respecting Eastern cow would look at twice. The water for the animals and the guests at the ranch comes, I presume, from the infamous Central Arizona Project, which means it flows hundreds of miles across the desert from the Colorado River. Seems to me the whole, beautiful Sonoran desert should be turned back to the Pima Indians, who knew how to live on it without hauling in most of what they need from some other place.
This anti-ecological ranch was a strange setting for the annual meeting of the Pew Scholars in Conservation and the Environment, but we had a great meeting. Ten Pew Scholars are chosen every year. This has been going on for 5 years, so there are 50 of us now. The meetings are getting to be like Balaton meetings, a growing community of people with shared passion who are finding out how to work together. Pew Scholars (we’re beginning to call ourselves “Pewies”) tend to be a bit more academic than Balaton members, but that’s changing more toward activism. They now include not only great field ecologists like Les Kaufman (cichlid fish of the African lakes) and Connie Millar (West-Coast temperate forests) and great scientists in other fields like Mario Molina (chemistry of ozone depletion) and Susan Anderson (DNA toxicology), but also lawyers who are pursuing environmental goals in court (Michael Bean of the Endangered Species Act and Vic Sher of the great spotted owl wars). Some of the scholars work with indigenous people (Marcus Colchester of the Rainforest Action Network and Anil Gupta of India). Some are ecological economists (Bob Costanza of Maryland, Tomasz Zylicz of Poland) Some, like Norman Myers and me, work primarily at communicating to the public.
It’s mind-blowing to be with 50 of these folks at once. Like Balaton, it’s a non-stop, high-energy conversation. On the first day of the meeting the 10 new scholars present their work. (The lectures range from the preservation of the unique fynbos vegetation of South Africa to the reasons for the bleaching of the world’s coral reefs to the 7000 Inuit people of Alaska’s North Slope who live in an area the size of Utah — and who attend college by telephone!) On the second day, we organize into working groups, Gretchen Daily and I started one on transforming the discussion in the public media on the subject of sustainability. Various of us also plotted how to set up, encourage, and link small institutes capable of supplying good information on sustainable resource management in their own regions — á la Balaton. Jane Lubchenco and I worked on a project in training ecologists to be public speakers and advocates. Theo Colborn and I worked on her forthcoming, dynamite book on endocrine stimulators and blockers. (I’ve now read the first 9 chapters and it’s hair-raising. It will be out next spring, and I predict it will be another Silent Spring.)
On the third day, we went on field trips. I elected to go with Gary Nabhan on a “birds and butterflies” tour of the Sonoran desert. We tromped around various habitats, from a green cottonwood forest along a running stream to a high dry bluff where wild chiles and wild cotton grow. This land should not be called a desert, Gary says — it’s really an arid thorn-scrub forest of saguaro, mesquite, paloverde, cactuses, and many other kinds of plants, and all kinds of animals. We saw plenty of birds and butterflies, and deer, and a horned toad, and a huge tarantula, and I nearly tripped over a rattlesnake as thick as my arm and twice as long. (He was much more scared of me than I was of him.) The best part was when I separated from the group for about an hour and just sat on a cliff overlooking a spectacular box canyon, watching the birds at treetop level, absorbing the sun and the wind and the smells and sounds of the land. So different from the place where I live! With a completely different kind of beauty! How could they be on the same planet?
Going to one 50-person Balaton meeting a year gives me more than a year’s worth of ideas and projects to work on. So does going to one 60-person (counting all the staff and advisors) Pew Scholars meeting. So the last thing I needed was to go to a 1400-person conference of the same types of folks. But that was next on the agenda — the biannual meeting of the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE).
When Herman Daly called the first ISEE meeting in Washington in 1990, he expected about 60 people to come. There were not many people in the world then who would have thought of calling themselves ecological economists. But about 400 people showed up. The next meeting in 1992 in Stockholm attracted about 600. This year in San Jose there were 1400. I’ll be writing several columns about the meeting, so here I guess I’ll just tell you about my own personal experience of it.
It was exciting! The meeting was jammed with my friends, old and new. I could hardly get down the hall to the different sessions, because I kept running into everybody. Alicia Korten was there — she left our farm last month to return to Panama and her work with the Kuna and Embera people trying to block the Pan-American highway. At the ISEE meeting she presented the paper on Cost Rica’s structural adjustment, which she had worked on while she was on the farm. Lots of Balaton people were there, including Carlos Quesada of Costa Rica, of course, and Bob Costanza, and John Peet of New Zealand, and Jim Hornig my colleague in environmental studies at Dartmouth. A bunch of Pew Scholars went on with me from Tucson. And I ran into an astonishing number of former students, old buddies from system dynamics, and other co-conspirators.
The other reason the meeting was exciting was that so many people from so many parts of the world would throng to a conference that didn’t even need to make the case that neoclassical economics is seriously flawed and has to be rethought, with ethics and equity and nature in mind. It just assumed all that and went on to ask what kind of economics we need for a sustainable world. This meeting impressed me, as no other event has, that the world desperately wants an answer to this question. The meeting was crammed with Costa Ricans and other Latin Americans, of course. But there were also people from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia. I was stopped in the hall at one point with deep bows from two traditionally-attired (striped woolen capes, woolen stockings) forest managers from Bhutan. I had a great lunch conversation with an eco-feminist from England. I went to a workshop on sustainable development in Africa. Maybe the best conversation of all was a strategy session with Alicia Barceña, the Mexican director of the Earth Council, a woman with whom I feel an enormous commonality of purpose. I expect and even hope that she and I will be working more closely together — oh dear, what does that mean about staying on the farm?
So for 4 days I didn’t move from the big hotel near the San Jose airport where the conference was held. I was busy all day long, sitting in on sessions or talking to people. On the one day when there were field trips, I stayed in the hotel (I had already been to most of the field-trips places) and read National Geographic proposals and typed up the speech I had given. (Typically, I made the speech from a few hurriedly scribbled notes, a practice that always drives conference organizers nuts, since they want to collect and publish all the papers. I even changed my topic completely at the last minute. I’m not a very disciplined academic!)
Well, I can’t possibly sum up the content of all those sessions and conversations. They will show up gradually in columns and projects and (I’m afraid) further trips. Having been home two whole days now, I haven’t even unpacked all the papers and notes I assembled — but I have cleaned the house and pruned the raspberries and done a laundry and dug up dahlia bulbs and cooked up a lamb stew and gone with Scot to pick up our new ram. He’s a big black Columbia/Corriedale cross named Satchmo. Within 15 minutes of arriving at our place, he began making babies. I still have the old ram Wally, who’s down in the pasture with his son, waiting to be sold. The ewes are up in the barnyard and orchard now. Scot is rearranging the whole sheep operation, putting up new fences and gates, remodeling the barn, and gradually fixing us up a sheep palace that will be as magnificent as our chicken palace.
Chrissie is off in Seattle getting ready for her defense of her master’s thesis in forest ecology. John is away for the week, so I haven’t seen him since I got back. The remodeling in back has progressed to the point of sheetrock going up, so there is an end, however distant, in sight.
The weather has gone on being absolutely marvelous. I don’t remember such a benign, gracious fall, ever. Nearly November, and Scot and I were outside in our shirtsleeves all day! Tonight I sat out on the back porch and carved a jack-o-lantern out of one of our big pumpkins. The sheep were mowing the lawn, the sun was setting over Mount Ascutney, and all was right with the world!
Love,
Dana
