August 30, 1994
Logan Airport

Dear Folks,

It’s early to start a letter to you — I just finished sending out the last one. But I know what happens in September. There’s the Balaton meeting. Then there’s the accelerating pace of fall on the farm, and when it comes time to write your monthly letter, I get overwhelmed. So I’ll get ahead this year by starting now, as I sit in Logan Airport in Boston, waiting to get on the plane to Zurich and Budapest. Maybe I’ll find time to add notes as the Balaton meeting goes along.

Always, always when I start on a trip, I have to spend awhile letting go of the farm. I left it on such a beautiful bright day today. The fall cool is fairly reliable now, though we’re still three weeks away from worrying about frost. The front yard smells of blooming phlox. As you near the crabapple tree, it smells of ripening apples. Up by the house big puffy marigolds are just coming into their glory, and the old-fashioned roses are starting their second bloom. The silver-lace Wyandotte chicks that came day-old in the mail last April have grown to beautiful speckled hens that are just starting to lay.

Alicia and I toured the garden today, talking about what needs to be done. Two more sweet corn plantings are ripening; so are the fall raspberries. The winter squash are getting ready to eat. The summer squash are still going strong. Normally by now they’re done in by squash bugs (and we’re glad of it — you should hear the jokes that get made in the kitchen when anyone brings in another yellow crookneck squash). But with all the slugs and bugs and blights this year, I have not seen a single squash bug. So the crooknecks and zucchini are unquenchable.

Saturday night we had a party on the screened back porch. The table was adorned with garden flowers and sweet corn, tomato soup, broccoli quiche, fresh green salad, strawberry-rhubarb pie — it could have been a thanksgiving for the blessings of the farm. Instead it was a good-bye party. I was leaving the next day for Washington (National Geographic) and then Budapest. Stella Voigt, Jorinde’s sister (remember Jorinde, the German girl who stayed with us last year?) has spent the summer working on a nearby horse farm and was about to return to Germany. And — here’s the big one — Brenna was leaving for college.

Brenna? That skinny long-legged kid with the freckled nose who first came to the farm when she was 8? Well, suddenly she’s 18, still long-legged, a champion tennis player, a good student, a popular kid, and a freshman at Union College in Schenectady, New York. (How DOES this happen, right before our very eyes?) This child of New Hampshire, who has grown up with a taste for organic veggies and home-made whole-wheat bread had talked on the phone that day for the first time with her roommate-to-be, a black woman from Brooklyn who loves rap and has scarcely ever been outside the city. (This should be interesting! These college roommate assigners have a sense of humor.) Suddenly Brenna had the feeling that she was about to launch herself over a cliff.

Well, it was a happy but poignant evening. John’s life has been dedicated for 18 years to bringing up Brenna — now, as he says, he needs to find another purpose as compelling as that one.

(What a world this is! As I write here in Logan, they’re boarding a flight to Heathrow. There’s a Middle-Eastern family with three women, veiled head to toe in black, not even eyes showing, hovering around one mustachioed man in Western dress. Just behind them in line is an American kid about 10 years old wearing a T-shirt boasting “NAKED COED BANKING — PENALTY FOR EARLY WITHDRAWAL.” I wish I had a camera.)

There were encouraging hammering sounds from the back house as I packed this morning. Basil was camped out next to my suitcase, with the utterly mournful look that golden retrievers get when suitcases come out. I sent off two columns (whew!), I answered last-minute e-mails and faxes, I somehow wangled all the stuff I had to take into suitcases. I hate to travel with lots of luggage, but Balaton requires not only logistical equipment, such as a VCR that can play both U.S. and European tape formats, but also gifts, software, publications for people from all over the world. Alicia drove me to the Lebanon airport, and …

… the Balaton meeting started immediately. On the same puddle-jumper flight from Leb to Boston was Gwen Hallsmith, of the Institute for Sustainable Communities, based in Montpelier. Its purpose is to work with town governments and NGOs in Central Europe. Gwen works all over Hungary, Poland, former Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania. An obvious participant for a Balaton meeting on sustainable human settlements.

And in the Boston airport just now I ran into Alan AtKisson of Sustainable Seattle, also on his way to Balaton!

September 1, 1994
Csopak, Hungary

In Zurich I stopped at Joan Davis’s, and she and I continued to Budapest together. As we were unloading at the dorm of the Budapest University of Economics, where we all assemble, there was Anupam Saraph from India, and Bob Wilkinson from California, and Jørgen Nørgard from Denmark, and Carlos Quesada from Costa Rica. I never can believe from year to year how wonderful it is, to be with a group of people to whom you never have to explain the word “sustainability,” people from many cultures who share the same values — loving nature and caring for human beings, wanting development to be beautiful and not ugly, wanting the world to work for everyone, including other species.

Well, I better stop burbling and tell the news, or I’ll never keep up. That first evening we went on a long metro ride to the Budapest Zoo, of which one of our members has just become the director — so we had a zoo tour, followed by dinner outdoors under the trees, with lions roaring in the background. Miklos Persanyi, the new director, wants to transform the place “from a zoological garden to a garden for life.” He has plans to make every part of the zoo educational, even with a “John Todd” biological sewage treatment plant.

Did you ever wonder what a zoo does when a big animal dies? Well in Budapest a child threw a rubber ball into the mouth of a hippopotamus, which swallowed it and subsequently died. (The autopsy revealed that the ball caused an intestinal blockage.) Miklos will mount an exhibit at the hippopotamus enclosure, featuring the ball and a stern warning. The hippo meat is in the freezer, food for the carnivores. Just thought you might like to know.

Yesterday we loaded into the bus early for a tour of Budapest’s outer and inner plumbing. We climbed to the dome of the cathedral for a sweeping view of the city and its smog. We inspected the sewage plant — one of only two in the city, which between them handle 20% of the sewage. Another 30% leaks out of septic tanks into groundwater. The remaining 50% flows directly tinto the Danube. Along our tour civil engineers and leaders of environmental NGOs joined us. The environmental movement is alive and well, if impoverished, in Hungary.

So, lunch, load back in the bus, and off to Lake Balaton where our official meeting began last night with our traditional round-table of introductions. Fifty great people, particularly enriched this year with urban experts. Enrique Ortiz of Mexico City and Habitat International. Marina Alberti of Italy and the European Community’s office on human settlements. Chris Macaloo, an urban planner from Nairobi. Stephen Boyden of Australia, who wrote a definitive book on the metabolism of HongKong. My head spins after those introductions. We all begin to make lists of the conversations we want to have.

September 2, 1994

Sometime during the first week of September, Hungary shifts from hot summer into cool, breezy fall. It happened last night with a thunderstorm roaring across the Hungarian plain. We were in the middle of one of Dennis’s funny games. He has dozens of them, played with simple props like balls or ropes or, in this case, raw eggs and drinking straws. They instantly socialize a group and also teach lessons about group dynamics. We scattered to close windows and doors against the sudden wind, then went back to eggs and drinking straws. (The object was, as a team, to construct a cage of straws around the egg so that when Dennis dropped it from shoulder height, the egg wouldn’t break. In our case only one of five eggs survived.)

In the morning we heard four talks about cities, one given by me. There is no more attentive audience than the Balaton Group. They suck information out of you as fast as you can deliver it and come back with thoughtful questions. When there’s a coffee break the conversation roars. Arms sketch out feedback loops in the air. Heads bend over tables of data.

Afternoons and evenings are free for working groups on any subject anyone wants to post on a big schedule board. Yesterday I took the first two hours of the afternoon just to walk by the lake with Wouter Biesiot, a professor of energy and environment at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Wouter has been fighting colon cancer, first with surgery, now with chemotherapy, one injection a week for a whole year. We all have been supporting him as best we can with flowers and e-mail messages and vitamins and books and love. We were so touched that he made it to this meeting. He’s in good shape physically (he’s been working out) and mentally and spiritually. He has that directness, that sense of what’s important, that so many people get when they glimpse their own mortality. Wouter is shining here, surrounded by his friends. He has four more months of treatment ahead of him, and then we have to pray that the metastases are all gone.

Then I joined a group talking about their experiences communicating with policymakers in their various countries. The discussion was about language — what words and concepts to use to convince an elected official to choose a long-term gain over a short-term one. Then I joined another group talking about property rights and land use, a crucial issue in Central Europe, where the state-owned land (which means all the land) is now being privatized — out of the frying pan, into the fire. The Latvians were describing their beautiful beaches, untouched because the Soviet Army regarded them as strategic zones, now threatened by an incursion of Hyatt hotels. The Costa Ricans told about their coastal zoning law, some of the strictest in the world, which forbid anyone from building anything directly on beaches. The Latvians asked for copies of the law. That’s how Balaton meetings work — just plain shared experience, people helping people.

September 3, 1994

Last night Alan AtKisson showed us a hysterical slide show that he put together, with an accompanying sound track, from a previous Balaton meeting. We were the stars of the show, and we were pretty funny!

This morning a wonderful presentation by Michael Ableman, who runs a 12-acre organic farm in the middle of Santa Barbara. It grows 100 kinds of fruits and vegetables, pays 12 workers, and feeds 500 families — and acts as an educational center so urban kids can learn where food comes from. Then Rosendo Pujol, talked about the urban growth of San Jose, Costa Rica. Then four case studies on city water, from California, Thailand, Switzerland, and Honduras. LOTS of comments and questions. We’re always an hour late for lunch.

Some interesting ideas to chew on:

– Urban culture began and was shaped by the cities of China, India, the Middle East. One-third of the world’s present cities were important cities a thousand years ago. (David Satterthwaite)

– “By paving our precious topsoil, we are preserving it for future generations.” (Michael Ableman — tongue in cheek)

– It’s a myth that urban density comes only with high-rise buildings. Mexico City is one of the densest cities of the world, and it consists, essentially of 2-story buildings. (Enrique Ortiz)

– It costs 10 German marks to buy one kilogram of atrazine (a popular herbicide), and it costs 400,000 marks to remove it from drinking water. (Joan Davis)

This afternoon I assembled a working group on indicators of sustainability. I’m a member of an international committee that’s supposed to suggest to the U.N. a scientifically credible set of environmental indicators, and I thought I should get a little help from my friends. Indicators are terribly important — they are the way society delivers feedback to itself about how it’s doing. Our primary indicator, the GNP, is so flawed that most of us at Balaton would vote to eliminate it instantly. Better indicators are things like infant mortality rate, or literacy rate, or number of endangered species, or even the Audubon Christmas Bird Count. But there are no internationally agreed environmental (much less sustainability) indicators.

I found at the meeting that at least 15 Balaton members are working on indicators for some local, national or international body. The search for indicators is official, and fast-moving! The bad news is that the emerging indicators are uncoordinated, inconsistent, sometimes deceptive, sometimes unmeasurable, and sometimes dominated by what can be measured rather than what is important. We had a good discussion, which will cause me to think hard before I write my critique of the indicator list my committee came up with. The Latin American Balaton members have already proposed a whole meeting devoted to this topic.

Joan and I are up in our room just now, pecking away at our Powerbooks, she preparing our final “award” ceremony, me writing to you. Outside the Hungarian fall wind still blows. Downstairs they are playing the climate game designed by Dennis and by Bert de Vries — two groups run a simulated rich country and a poor one and try to fulfill their national objectives while negotiating a joint trade, aid, and technology transfer policy that can prevent the emission of greenhouse gases soon enough to avoid global warming. A computer model calculates the consequences of their decisions on their economies and on the global climate, as they step through about 100 years of simulated time in a few hours. It’s a great game — I played it in one of its first trials in July.

September 4, 1994

We had presentations today on the energy and traffic systems of cities. Ashok Gadgil, a Pew Scholar and energy-efficiency expert, described the spread of cholera on India’s east coast, including varieties that are resistant to known vaccinations and drugs. Aromar Revi nodded in sad recognition; he leads a team that works in India’s villages trying to improve living conditions.

Then Ashok described a device he has pioneered, which passes water through a bank of UV lights, tuned to the frequency of DNA. It kills pathogens, including cholera, using one forty-thousandth of the energy it would take to boil the water. Aro lit up. Afterward he and Ashok went off together and worked out a scheme to test the device in the field. Joan lit up too — here is a way to avoid the use of chlorine in water treatment.

So goes Balaton. Energy is connected to water is connected to toxic pollutants is connected to health. And people become connected to each other.

Last night we sang until late, starting with some of Alan AtKisson’s “sustainability songs” (“There’s a Whole Lotta Shoppin’ Goin’ On,” and “Dead Planet Blues.” and “The Water of Life”). We went on to folk songs from Latvia and the Czech Republic and Holland, the guitar passing from hand to hand. The songs everybody seems to know, the ones we can sing together, come from the 60s in the USA — “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?” and “If I Had a Hammer.” Drew Jones taught us a song called “Blow up the TV.” (Throw away your papers, move to the country, build your own home. Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches, find sustainability on your own.)

This afternoon we rented a boat to take us along the lake to the Tihany peninsula, one of the most special places in Hungary, a wooded hill that nearly cuts the great lake in two, with a church on top that is built over an earlier 12th century church, that is built over a Roman ruin. The conversations continued, on the boat, walking up the hill, walking around the little tourist town, looking down on the placid lake, the sailboats, the swans — and all the way home. Our host Tamas had “goulash in the garden” waiting for us, an enormous iron pot hanging over a wood fire, filled with classic Hungarian goulash. We sat outside by candle-light. At my table we talked about time as the central resource, and probably the one we manage least well. We may have a meeting on that sometime.

Later the same night. In the conference room a bunch of people have asked Michael Ableman to go back over his slides of agriculture around the world more slowly, so they can ask all the questions they like. Out in the hall a rowdy bunch is playing a World Bank game invented by Gwen Hallsmith. I don’t know what about the World Bank is so funny, but they’re having a great time. In other corners people are having quiet two- or three-way conversations, or they’re bending over laptop computers, or they’re reading books from the piles on the tables. Some are organizing a midnight swim. As for me, I’m going to bed.

September 7, 1994
on Swissair 127

How quickly Balaton days fly! I’m on my way home, and I’d better summarize fast here, because I have a whole Balaton Bulletin to type. Maybe I just should end by transcribing a few notes from the last 15 minutes of the meeting, when we said good-bye to each other.

Gerardo Budowski (Costa Rica) — I’ve been away from Balaton for a few years, and it’s a tremendous feeling to get into the spirit again. I’m happy to see that some of our practices have now become treasured traditions, and that there have been innovations, too.

Drew Jones (USA) — I’ve just left a happy job at a confortable institute (RMI), and I was feeling like a bright orange autumn maple leaf, falling slowly, blown around, not knowing where I would land. Here among you I felt as if a swift, cool breeze had picked me up and blown me in new directions. One thing is clear: I’m not just going to fall right under the same tree.

Nasir Dogar (Pakistan) — This is my first meeting, and I came not knowing what to expect, not knowing if I would get any value from the meeting whatsoever. Now I’m full of ideas, concepts, experiences — and I have many new friends.

Stephen Boyden (Australia) — This has been such an amazing experience, intellectually and emotionally, that I can’t begin to express it in words. I can only say that I feel I’m going home a different person than the one that came.

Michael Ableman (USA) — What we’re really doing here is practicing community. How do we carry what we’re learning about that to the broader community? How do we bring not only the ideas here, but the mutual support down to the real physical world, the gardens and cities and systems where we work?

Alan AtKisson (USA) — I have been moved to tears and to laughter, and I’ve felt the sharp edge of my own learning curve. I’ve felt stupid on occasion, and overjoyed and enriched most of the time. I’m grateful to all of you who have brought not only your minds and your cultures, but your absolute personal commitment, of the sort that’s needed to bring about any change — in the perpetual tug of war with the huge powers of entrenched systems.

Herbie Girardet (UK) — I’ve felt not a tug of war here, but a tug of peace. In these meetings, people never play “I’m cleverer than you are.” Somehow we find ourselves building together, serving each other. What I want is Balaton all year round. I want to carry this non-competitive spirit into the world.

I was asked to summarize, unfortunately, because I was too full of emotion and unprocessed new ideas to make much sense. I could only think of my conversations with Wouter, the kinds of conversations cancer patients have, in which we glowingly, joyfully, express our gratitude for the miraculous and undeserved privilege of life. Coming close to death makes one very much alive. So does stepping into a community of love, as at Balaton.

I posed a question from Deepak Chopra. We seem to assume that we need to have our lives threatened to become alive. But is that dreadful stimulus really necessary? A similar question has been asked and answered by Alcoholics Anonymous, which used to assume that a drunk had to “hit bottom” — totally mess up his or her life — before becoming ready for recovery. That assumption proved false. The “bottoms” in AA become more and more shallow, as the group realizes that the commitment to recovery can come any time.

In Balaton assume that in the presence of each other, with people of shared values, in one little resthouse in Hungary, we can soften our hard masks, tell the truth about our dreams and fears, let ourselves be the loving, humble, vulnerable, non-competitive, beautiful souls we really are. But what if that assumption isn’t true? What if we can be that way all the time? What if we could take the spirit of Balaton into the world?

Sitting here in an airplane looking down on the coast of Northern Ireland, away from the protective bubble of Balaton, I’m aware of how idealistic our Balaton weeks can seem. My beautiful Self shrivels when I walk into the ungenerous, conflictual, egoistic, power-hungry corners of the world. Only a few hundred miles from Lake Balaton, the guns were firing this week on Sarajevo. Aro showed us heart-rending pictures of children in the abominable sections of Bombay — the streets three feet deep in garbage, the abandoned apartment blocks turned, for lack of any alternative, into multi-story public toilets, children working at long hours for pitiful pay at the age of 8. The Herald Tribune in front of me says (next to a picture of North Belfast children grieving for their murdered father), “Irish Leader Says: Don’t be Afraid of Peace.”

Don’t be afraid of peace. In South Africa, in the Middle East, the former Soviet Empire, hard masks have melted. Institutionalized evil has softened like the thawing earth in spring rain (and has turned, our Balaton members from those areas would insist, into a muddy mess). If fifty people from all over the world can come together once a year in Hungary and discover the beauty of who they really are, then I have to believe that any people can do that, any time, anywhere.

Well, so I feel, anyway, on the way home from this special week. You can see why Balaton meetings are so important to me. They provide my agenda, and my energy, and my inspiration for the whole year.

September 21, 1994

Home again! The beautiful, golden, fruitful month of September! Squash and pumpkins galore, and the best potato crop ever, and a back porch full of tomatoes waiting to be canned! The colors are changing early, the wine-colored Virginia creeper is bedecking the roadsides, but so far the frost is holding off.

And, finally, we have NEW FOLKS on the farm! They arrived the day after I got home from Balaton, and they are already filling my heart with joy.

Meet Scot Zens and Chrissie Robinson. both 27 years old, both with newly minted master’s degrees in forestry from the University of Washington. Scot is Canadian, grew up on a farm on Vancouver Island, is now beginning a doctorate in ecology at Dartmouth (working with one of my favorite colleagues there, David Peart). Chrissie grew up all over the U.S. (and Spain) as an Army brat. She’s looking forward to gardening and caring for animals and figuring out what direction her life will take next. Within a week of moving in, Chrissie was making pickles and going out with Alicia to pick wild grapes for jelly, and Scot was hammering together four big cold frames to shelter the fall greens.

They are innately helpful people, with experience and enthusiasm for farm things. They just knew right what to do from the day they moved in. I can hardly believe it. I’m so used to having to tell people the difference between the weeds and the veggies and having to remind folks to refill the chicken water — but not Scot and Chrissie. They are fully responsible from the get-go. John’s and my workload has just been cut in half. I’m still dazed by that luxury, and by the pleasure of their company. And Scot and I can car-pool into Dartmouth. And we share all kinds of mutual interests in environmental matters. I feel as if the farm has just waked up after a long, lonely sleep. We have become a community again!

We are a community in transition, of course — I guess we always will be. Alicia departs this weekend to go back to Panama and save the rainforest and the homelands of the native peoples. The renovation out back is still a long way from finished, so Scot and Chrissie are crammed into Brenna’s room and won’t be finally settled for awhile. When we do get all our space back, the question will open of bringing others into the community, and even of building more space.

But all that will happen as it happens. One day at a time. The fall chore list has been drawn up — make potting soil, wash windows, plant bulbs, clean chicken house, put away dry wood for the kitchen stove, harvest and store away crops, bring in more hay. They’re comforting chores, tucking everything away for the winter. They’ll keep us busy and happy until the snow flies. Which, hopefully, will be still two months away.

Love,
Dana