Dear Folks, It’s the beginning of Glory Season here.  The fields and the edges of the woods are already red with sumac and virginia creeper, mixed with the yellow of late goldenrod.  The white pines are half-green, half-gold.  Their needles last two years — so the second-year needles are about the fall off.  Every time the wind blows, a swirl of golden pine needles flies through the air and settles in beautiful soft mats on the ground.  A few ambitious maples have already turned yellow or orange or red, but most of them are a tired green.  Every day their green chlorophyll fades a little, and we can seemore brilliant color from their carotenes and anthocynanins.  Every day as I drive around the valley there are changes from the day before.

Yesterday, a beautiful sunny day, Dmitry and I went to pick apples at Backofen’s on the other side of town.  I like to go there because they’re high up where you can see range after range of Vermont mountains, and because that farm is always an inspiration.  It’s run by a retired engineering professor and his wife, and it’s immaculate.  They have cut-your-own Christmas trees and pick-your-own blueberries and apples.  They specialize in old-fashioned varieties — we picked Snow Apples and Blue Pearlmains, and Russets and Cox Orange Pippins.  Yum!  One of those right off the tree on a crisp fall day is a sufficient reason for living!

I have long discussions with the apple growers around here about their spray schedules, partly because I want to know what I’m eating, and partly because I want to grow my own good apples.  There are 20 old-fashioned apple trees on Foundation Farm, but when they bear at all, the fruit is scabbed and wormy and wizened.  It ends up food for the sheep, not for us.  I never spray, of course, except with dormant oil in the spring.  Mrs. Backofen’s perfect apples were sprayed 4 times this year (for scab and codling moth), the last time on June 24.  That’s the lowest number of sprays of any orchard in the valley.  Maybe next year I’ll swallow my organic pride and ask the Backofens for a little guidance in early-season spraying.

It has been hard for me in the last two weeks to come down from the high of the Balaton meeting and get back to real life.   For those of you who are new subscribers to this newsletter, the Balaton Group was founded seven years ago by Dennis and me to bring together the people we know all over the world who are working on environmental and resource management, understanding whole systems, and bringing the world into some kind of ecological harmony and sustainability.  There are such people, doing good work, everywhere.  We invite the ones we know best to come together once a year at Lake Balaton in Hungary, to share ideas and projects, information and tools, and, as one person put it, “to relight all our candles”.  There are members from about 20 countries, including the USSR, Hungary, and Poland, Thailand, Costa Rica, India, the USA, and many countries of West Europe.

I’m not sure why Balaton meetings are so special.  I guess it started with the chemistry of the first members, who are still the leaders of the Group.  They are more than good scientists and good political activists, they are also good, honest, loving people, and they have attracted other such people to the Group.  New ones show up each year and fit right in.  The meetings are regularly, predictably, magical, at least for me.  It’s as if they don’t occur in real time or on this real, messed-up planet.

You know, it’s easy enough to describe things that happen in your mind, intellectual things.  I can tell you the good ideas I got in the meeting.  But for me Balaton meetings happen not just in the mind, but in the realm of mind/soul/heart/body integrated experience.  They are a week of living fully in the moment, being fully with the people I’m with, being fully who I am without holding back anything.  Times like that are indescribable.  The best I can do is share some incidents that I remember most clearly.

Victor Gelovani, our good friend from Soviet Georgia, arrived all fired up with a videotape he took of the first exchange between teen-agers from Colorado and from Georgia.  The idea began at last year’s Balaton meeting, when Victor met Amory and Hunter Lovins and set them up to talk in Moscow about energy efficiency.  The people and the ideas just clicked, and exchanges are going on so fast I can’t keep track of them.  A bunch of energy-efficiency designers went to Tblisi, a bunch of Soviet architects came to Aspen, Victor himself came over here, Amory went over there at least twice, and the next thing I knew bunches of teenagers were going back and forth too.

Victor showed us the tape of the American kids with the Georgian kids in the USSR, learning about the environment, dancing, doing sports, helping out on farms, and even jointly tearing apart a real surface-to-air Soviet missile (disarmed, of course).  I’ll never know how Victor arranged that missile business.  First they painted it with peace symbols, then they attacked it with heavy tools and joyously ripped it into bits.  One kid walked off proudly with the nose cone.  As this part of the tape was played, Steve Born from the University of Wisconsin, at his first Balaton meeting, tapped me on the shoulder and asked, in tears, if our meetings were always like this.  They are.

Victor has gotten the Georgian government to grant him a several-thousand-hectare abandoned rural village, which he is going to make into a “21st century sustainable village”, to host future young-people’s exchanges.  He wants it to have solar power, organic farming, materials recycling, biological waste-water treatment, energy-efficient appliances, all the favorite ideas of the Balaton Group.  He convened a working group at the meeting to begin thinking through the design of the village — he’ll go on having design meetings all this year, mostly at the site itself.

That’s how the Balaton Group works.  Two people spark off ideas together, the ideas begin to take shape in the concrete world, and the whole group is incorporated in the design and execution of a living demonstration of what a sustainable world could be like.

Otto Soemarwoto from Indonesia declared he wants to do an Indonesia 2020 study, got a bunch of group members to sit down and plan it with him, got some others to teach him the computer methods he needs, and headed home with computer software and a seed grant to get his study started.  He also made friends with his geographically closest Balaton Group colleagues, Chirapol Sintunawa from Thailand and Anupam Saraph from India — I predict that will be a powerful combination.  Watch out, Southeast Asia!

The Europeans reported on their project, now well started, to plan how Europe can have the electricity it needs without nuclear power and without fossil fuels.  It’s beginning to look possible.  The keys are very efficient energy use, co-generation, and a gradual switch to renewable energy sources, with gas as an intermediate.

Thanks to our new television connections we brought along some excellent videotapes on the environment.  Dennis has finally found a tape player that can convert tapes in any format to play on any television in the world (we’ve been technically defeated on that issue at previous meetings).  We set out tapes for people to play whenever they liked, and there were some great late-night TV-watching sessions, with plenty of commentary from the audience.  The favorite was the BBC-WGBH tape on Gaia, the theory of the earth as an integrated, self-regulating being, with all life forms actively creating the conditions within which life can thrive.  There’s just enough science in that hypothesis, and just enough religion, to fascinate us all.

Jonas Grigaliunis, a forestry expert from Lithuania, showed us, a little tentatively, slides he took of this summer’s environmental demonstrations in Lithuania — demonstrations against a conglomeration of nuclear power plants, cement plants, oil refineries, etc., which are actively killing off the forests downwind.  People showed up in boats, on bicycles, they put up tents in the devastated forest.  I think Jonas was still shocked that such protest could happen in the Soviet Union, and even more shocked that he had the nerve to show slides of it at an international meeting. He pointed out, with pride, that among the flags people were waving was the old Lithuanian flag — not the flag of the Lithuanian Republic of the USSR, but the flag of the independent nation of Lithuania.  I watched the faces of our Russian colleagues carefully — they were smiling.  At Balaton meetings people transcend politics and are simply in favor of the liberation of people.

The Hungarians talked about the demonstrations against the new dam on the Danube.  The Russians talked about collective farms being uncollectivized and turned back into private farms.  A young woman from Hungary told us about 1000 hectares of Hungarian collective farms that are now being farmed organically, the produce to be sold at a premium price in Holland.

You know, sometimes I think the world is actually coming to its senses!

We had volleyball games and soccer games and a hike around Tihany peninsula.  One night the hotel chef (we stay in a resort hotel for oil-and-gas workers) cooked a big pot of goulash outside over a wood fire, and we sat out at picnic tables in candlelight and sang folksongs in all our different languages.  There were formal presentations, and working groups, and times when people were clustered around a computer screen charting the spread of acid rain in Europe.  People sat in the sun with the little laptop computers Dennis always brings along, typing up reports or proposals from their working groups.  Best of all, for me, were the long talks, sometimes late at night, sometimes walking along the lake — talks about our personal lives, about how it really is in Russia these days, about what to do when you’re frustrated with your government, about dreams for the future.

I was dreading the meeting this year, because the administrative structure behind it was falling apart.  The Hungarian government changed radically last spring, and we lost our sponsor who has always paid the Hungarian expenses of the meeting.  We also lost our Hungarian support staff, and our American support staff as Dennis’s office at Dartmouth closed down and our assistant Betty Miller went off to have a baby.  The grants that pay for Balaton are running out and have to been renewed.  Neither Dennis nor I have been able to put enough time into the organization to make it run really well.  Some people didn’t even make it to the meeting, because of administrative goofs.  Others that we count on to be leaders couldn’t make it because they were sick or busy, and we, feeling things collapsing around us, interpreted that as a lack of interest on their part.

But the meeting worked anyway.  It doesn’t depend on Dennis and me to hold it together; it doesn’t depend on perfect administration or support from the Hungarian government.  All those things are nice, and they help, and we have to work to restore them, but they are not what makes the Balaton Group tick.  The members do that, and the best thing we can do is just to get them together and get out of their way.  I think the Group needs full-time administrative support and about twice as much money as it has now, and I’m going to work over the next year to make that happen.  When the TV project is done, I may become its administrator myself (half-time, anyway).  It’s time to rethink the whole idea of the Balaton Group and make it larger and better — at this meeting the members already started doing that.  And it’s also all right, in fact wonderful, just as it is.

So I came back fired up, with a bunch of commitments and resolutions and things to do, which was exactly what I didn’t need.  The first of many impossible deadlines for the TV project is October 1, and I’m sweating it.  Why are there so many good, exciting things to do in the world?  Why can’t I restrain my enthusiasm for doing them?

Just to add to the confusion, I’m moving back next door to Foundation Farm, to home, next week!  My emotions at this pre-move point are wild and mixed.  I’m not looking forward to the hassle of three people moving out all at once (Dmitry back to Moscow, Suzanne to Cambridge, Dennis to Durham), and four moving in (Sylvia, Don, and Heather Spain and me), or to the psychological adjustments those changes will entail.

I’m sad to be leaving the peace and beauty of Ruth’s farm and the daily interaction with Ruth.  At least I’m not going far away.  This year has solidified Ruth’s and my friendship, and we will be seeking out each other’s company and managing the two farms together.  It was the right decision to come here last year, the right place to come to, and wonderful of Ruth and her girls to let it happen.  My purpose in moving was to learn to organize my life around writing.  It wasn’t easy for me to do that.  I had to face loneliness and overeating and lack of discipline and lack of self-confidence, and I can’t say I’ve handled all that, but I’ve found effective ways of working on it.  I think I’ve made the transition from professor to writer, and the world has even recognized that I have.  I’ve grown a lot this year, which is exactly what I wanted to do. Ruth has been enormously supportive all the way.

I’m harboring some anxiety about my ability to manage the farm, both logistically and financially.  I’ll have help and I think it will all work, and I’m committed to making it work, but I’m the anxious type, so I’m worrying.

I’m also discovering some anger in this emotional mix, as I go over there and start doing the fall chores and find a lot of neglect.  The tools I need are not where they belong, and they’re in bad shape.  Before we started putting up wood we had to get the saw chains tightened and sharpened.  Before we stacked wood in the shed we had to clean up a mess from the roofing job.  The axes are dull, the tractor battery is dead, good boards are out where they can get rained on.  Everywhere I look, I see work to do.  I’m going to have a job to do on myself to be patient and not try to fix up everything at once, and not to go crazy when things aren’t just the way I want them.  It will be Twelve-Step practice.  Easy does it.  One day at a time.  Don’t be too hard on yourself or anyone else.

Primarily, when I think about moving, though, I’m excited.  I was over there yesterday happily canning tomatoes in my old beat-up kitchen and remembering how it feels to be in the same place as my piano and dog and garden and sheep and all the stuff, the rugs and pictures and vases and tools that Dennis and I accumulated during 21 years of marriage.  I got along this year without those things, and eventually I stopped missing them and identified with a new life, new animals, new stuff.  But some part of me is in fact embedded in all that stuff, and I will feel more whole somehow, more continuous with my own past, to be united with it again (especially the piano!).  That’s what home does for you; it lets you construct a protective shell, a material expression of yourself, a tangible reminder of who you are and have been.

Dennis is the one who will have to let go of that material support now.  I’m sure he’ll take a significant amount with him (we haven’t even begun to discuss what, but neither of us is much concerned about it; there’s a pretty clear dividing line between what’s most important to him and to me), but still, he’s launching off into a new world, traveling light.  I, above all, am in a position to appreciate what he’s about to go through.  My heart goes out to him, and I wish him well.

I’ll introduce you to the new farm family next time and tell you how the move goes.

Love, Dana