Dear Folks,
I’m writing with a headache, a bad thing to do, because the world always looks impossible when I view it through a headache.
When I was younger I had terrible migraines once or twice a month. After endometrial cancer and a hysterectomy, they went away almost entirely. But I still get them occasionally — mostly when I give up caffeine, which I do about twice a year. I have not given up caffeine at the moment, but I have come down to earth momentarily from a month of more than usually frenetic activity. I’ve noticed that migraines rarely come when I’m in the middle of something, but are likely to appear when the pressure lifts.
So here I am on a dull, drippy Sunday afternoon with a head that feels as if someone has thrust a white-hot sword into it. If the pressure had really lifted, I’d wait for a more cheerful time to write you. But I leave in two days for a Pew Scholars meeting, and immediately after that comes an ecology conference in Minnesota, and this newsletter is overdue. So, if you detect some crankiness behind this letter, please know that it’s the headache speaking. By the time you read this, it will be gone.
Hungary/Chicago/New York/potatoes/apples/squash/wood — that’s what runs together in my mind as I think about the past month.
Hungary means Balaton, of course, our twelfth annual meeting on the shore of Lake Balaton, the second-largest lake in Europe (and the shallowest). Long-time readers of this letter will know that I am always tongue-tied (a rare state for me) about Balaton meetings. I have never been able to describe them adequately to anyone, especially funders — which keeps us on the edge of bankruptcy, but never yet out of business.
Michael Lerner asked me once, “why is it that Steve Viederman’s eyes always take on a special glow when he talks about Balaton?” I couldn’t answer. Steve couldn’t either. We all have trouble describing why the meetings are so special. This year Michael came to his first Balaton meeting, and I got to watch HIS eyes take on that glow.
One of my problems is that I spend Balaton week in a Mode of Being that I normally experience only in small spurts — a mode of total responsibility, total love, total involvement, and almost no verbal processing. I take copious notes, dozens of pages, for the subsequent Balaton Bulletin, but the notes just record what others are saying. I don’t formulate my own thoughts; I don’t analyze anything. Though I bring my computer, hoping to do some writing, I’m always incapable of summoning up words. It’s only afterward, doing the Bulletin, that I’m able to digest what the meeting was about.
I’m there to serve, not to think. After 12 years of practice I’ve learned (the hard way) to let go of control. I may work for weeks to set the meeting up, but after it starts I just watch, listen, participate, and pitch in as best I can. There were over 50 people there this year, a few more than the resthouse can comfortably hold, and so the meeting was even more rich, exciting and exhausting than usual.
OK, enough generalizations, so what actually HAPPENED? Well, I took my regular Swissair commuter flight from Boston to Zurich and spent an afternoon with my friend Joan in the house she’s just bought, with a yard loaded with apple trees, on a hillside in a nice neighborhood not far from the airport. I had fasted for a week in preparation for the meeting, and Joan had a home-grown apple ready for me to break my fast. I took a nap to rest from the overnight flight, we chatted over the kitchen table, as we always do, I helped Joan run a few last-minute errands, and then the two of us took off for Budapest.
To save money we gather at the dormitory of the Budapest University of Economics, a scrudgy place, but where else can you put up dozens of people for a few hundred bucks? Since the inside of the dorm isn’t very nice, we tend to take over the crumbling benches on the porch outside. There Joan and I sat and waited for the group to come back from dinner at a nearby restaurant. Dennis arrived first, bearing roses for us. Then the rest came, warm hugs all around, dear friends and good workers in the causes of organic agriculture, sustainable forestry, alternative economics, village development, energy efficiency — sustainability. Given that we’re scattered all over the world, it’s surprising how much we do see of each other during the year — Joan and I and Herbie Girardet and Carlos Quesada had just been together in Costa Rica, for instance — but still it’s indescribably wonderful to have nearly everyone at the same place at the same time. At the first hug the meeting begins for me, my spirits soar, and I go into “Balaton mode.”
The next morning several of us were interviewed for Hungarian TV, others toured the city, some gathered in corners, pulled out laptops, and started work on joint projects. New people drifted in from planes and trains — more hugs, even higher spirits. After lunch we boarded a bus and set off on the 90-minute drive to the lake.
For historical reasons that have somehow held through all the political changes, we meet at a resthouse of the Hungarian oil and gas company — once government-owned, now a bustling private concern called MOL. The “Hotel Petrol” is a modest place by world standards, but with the coming of hard currency, it gets a little spiffier each year — this year it actually got an elevator (it’s a 4-story building). The staff knows us well but can never quite get over us. All summer people come there to swim and hike and eat and sit in the sun. We come and bend over computers and hold meetings at all hours and talk and talk and talk.
The first evening after dinner we went around the room and introduced ourselves, since at any meeting about 1/3 of the people are there for the first time:
“I’m Faye Duchin, an economist from New York University. I’m trying to understand how an analyst can usefully support the development of new global institutions. I think that theory, model, strategy, data, and institutional design have to interplay. For example, when I did an assessment of the operability of the Brundtland report, I discovered that it is simply not a feasible vision. When I studied Indonesia I could see that their commitment to food self-sufficiency was inconsistent with their land-use and population patterns. Now I want to do the same kind of analysis on world trade agreements like GATT.”
“I’m Jau-Inn Huang. I have just returned to Taiwan to evaluate its long-term energy policy. I’ve also started a new NGO there to do something about the rapidly rising rates of consumption in the newly industrialized countries. We have 20 million people, a GDP per capita of over $10,000, and an economic growth rate of 6% per year — we’re a long way from sustainable.”
“I’m Niels Meyer, a solid-state physicist from Denmark, now working with energy, environment, and sustainable development. I’m convinced from our work that you can’t know what sustainable development is until you put in the numbers. For example, we have shown that for all of Scandinavia it could be possible to have a sustainable non-fossil, non-nuclear energy system, but not if we go on growing.”
And so on, around the room, fifty bright, capable, committed people.
Every morning we met in plenary session, listened to speakers, and discussed the meeting’s topic — this year it was trade, development, and the environment. Since I have to write up that discussion for the Bulletin, and since it has inspired at least 5 columns, 3 of which are contained in this newsletter, I will just summarize here by saying, the more I learn about NAFTA, Maastricht, GATT, and the world financial system, the more leery I get. As various experts described the system, we systems-trained folks began to see it as not only destructive, but self-destructive. Money flows are increasingly out of contact with the real economy. Positive feedback loops are bidding up apparent value where there is no real value at all. Free trade is some sort of chimeric hope — that if the system is turbulent and unjust and stagnant when confined within nations, maybe it will magically become stable and prosperous and helpful to the poor when released into the wide-open, unregulated arena of the whole world. Of course it will do the opposite. I’m not the only person who emerged from those morning discussions with a lot more information and a lot more passion on this subject!
The afternoons and evenings are where Balaton really comes into its own. Nothing is scheduled. Members can put up notices for as many meetings as they want, on whatever topics they like — or they can take off on long walks or go rowing or biking. I try to bounce around and keep up with everything, which is impossible.
One afternoon in the dining room we had a group playing Dennis’s Fishbanks game (which demonstrates the tragedy of the commons most compellingly). In the hallway a bunch of long computer cables connected small groups trying out Bert’s new greenhouse policy exercise. “India” was meeting in one corner, the “U.S.” in another, and so on. All the “nations” shared a computer-generated climate that responded to their policy decisions. They had “global negotiations” in the middle of the hall. (You’ll be glad to know that the U.S. developed a strong energy-efficiency policy and generously funded India to do the same, and the climate was saved!)
Upstairs a group was watching a video of Ladakh. In the conference room another group was critiquing a report on energy policy “After Rio.” Jane King of Scotland held a session to talk and think about new definitions of employment and wages in a sustainable economy. I held a session on consumption patterns in the rich world. There were training sessions on various types of computer modeling and gaming. There was an organizational meeting of our new network (born in Costa Rica) on sustainable cities and settlements. There were meetings on energy policy in Eastern Europe, on sustainable financial institutions for developing countries, on the next steps for regional Balaton meetings in Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America.
I spent a lot of time just one-on-one with people, asking old friends how their lives are going, talking with new people to find out what their lives are like. People had questions for me, problems for me, special requests for everything from software to letters of recommendation to comments on papers. I did my best to listen to the network’s vibrations at all levels. I missed an enormous amount — fifty people are just too many to tune into. But I did what I could.
Out of the Balaton chaos comes a cross-fertilization that carries most of us for the rest of the year. I emerged determined, for example, to get going as quickly as possible some teaching models and games on the finance and trade system. And to take the primer Liz Krahmer and I wrote on the money system and get it reworked before next year’s 50th anniversary of Bretton Woods. (Just what I needed! ANOTHER book to do!) I came out with clearer ideas of what the North American and European regional groups could do. (There was some enthusiasm for the European group to get together on a serious study of new paradigms, supported by rigorous analysis, for employment and compensation — one of the stickiest points in envisioning the transition to a sustainable society.)
Just two small vignettes of the many that linger in my mind about the unpredictable human power of Balaton. First, my one-time student and long-time co-conspirator Liz Krahmer came to her first Balaton meeting. After graduating from Dartmouth Liz worked in various hunger and development activities and then decided that she needed to understand international finance before she could do anything about world poverty. She went to business school and ended up as an international banker, first with Irving Trust, then with Salomon Brothers, now as an independent consultant. She described these institutions and how they work and think, in one of the hit presentations of the meeting. It was a delight for me to watch her fit in with the group as if she’d always been there, teaching and learning all week. She came home intending to organize a Union of Concerned Bankers to transform the money system so it serves people. not just the multiplication of money.
Diana, my research assistant, told me about another little meeting. Somehow all the young folks at Balaton found themselves drinking wine together one night. All of them had been or were presently working for highly committed “eco-super-stars.” You don’t come close to intense flames like those and come away unscorched. All these terrific young people want their own lives of commitment and accomplishment — but how? What? What was THEIR OWN unique form of contribution? That’s what they had their meeting about.
When Diana told me about it, tears came to my eyes. I just LOVE these folks! All of them. But especially the young ones.
Well, I could tell you more Balaton stories, but that was only the first week of this month! The meeting went on in the bus on the way back to Budapest. Even in the dorm on our last night, I was giving STELLA demonstrations of renewable resource models. I went out that night with two Hungarian friends, Melinda Fulop (longtime readers of this newsletter will remember Melinda, who lived at Foundation Farm for awhile) and Ferenc Rabar, a former finance minister of Hungary, and once my boss at IIASA in Vienna. Both are doing well; Melinda has started her own consulting company in Budapest (ah, the wonders of capitalism!); and it was a fine reunion.
(My headache is gone! I just went out and spent an hour hauling firewood, filling up the woodboxes in the house [yes, it’s that time again] and doing a little hand-splitting. We have a pile of logs in front of our garage that’s roughly as big as the house. With the chainsaw John has reduced about 2/3 of them to stove-stoking size. We hack away at splitting and stacking them whenever we feel like getting rid of our aggressions [or headaches]. One weekend soon we’ll set up the hydraulic splitter, assemble a party, and get most of the splitting done. I don’t know what it was about an hour of good sweat that finally undid the headache, but I’m not only glad, I’m euphoric, which often happens after a headache passes.)
So I was home for a week, which I spent answering the mail and harvesting and freezing the last beans, the last peppers, the last corn. Then I zoomed off for a quick trip to Chicago.
That involved a short but nice meeting with my Dad and Lu and my step-sister Joanie and her family, an overnight stay in the high-rise condominium of my step-sister Julie and her friend and boss the rhinoceros-vet Nan (I love to stay with them and learn about rhinoceroses (rhinoceri?)), and a talk to the MacArthur Foundation. which was the purpose for the trip. Every foundation in the U.S. seems to be rethinking its programs this year and asking me to come in and make wise, or at least thought-provoking, comments. Hoping always that some foundation will want to fund global networks of systems analysts, I go. The day at MacArthur was interesting because of the other four speakers — one on the eroding U.S. family, one on ethnic struggles around the world, one on international trade (coming right from Balaton, I disagreed with him), and one on the eroding criminal justice system. My systems mind kept finding connections among all the problems discussed. I thought of proposing that MacArthur fund a strong problem-related (i.e. not academic) systems institute to make sense of all these problems, but since they think they already do that (the Santa Fe Institute), I kept that thought to myself.
Home to the garden again and high harvest season. We are overwhelmed with squash and apples, and we have a heck of a lot of potatoes and pears and raspberries and carrots and celery and cabbage and beans. My friend Jan Wright from New Zealand came for a few days to celebrate the successful passing of her PhD comprehensive exam at Harvard. She’s the kind of delightful person who likes to rest from academic work by farming. So she shucked most of the dry beans (in many colors — kidney, Jacob’s cattle, Vermont cranberry, and Maine yellow-eye — so pretty that Jorinde and Heather strung them into necklaces). Jan helped me dig potatoes. She picked several bushels from my apple trees, and then we drove around town picking wild apples (the whole town is hung with apples). We took them to a neighboring farm’s cider press and came back with 15 gallons of the most wonderful cider you can imagine. Yorinde from Germany went along with us — she’d never seen apples turn to cider before. We drank 3 gallons almost immediately and froze the rest.
Released from my fast, I find the fall crops amazingly delicious and the cooling weather perfect for cooking. We’re having bean soups and potato pancakes and pumpkin pie and corn muffins (from our own hand-ground Indian corn). And lots and lots of applesauce. Yorinde is good about helping me peel apples by the bushel. Home-made sauce freezes well, it tastes much better than the stuff in the stores, and I know what the apples have and haven’t been sprayed with.
We had a killing frost on the 19th, earlier than usual, but I was ready for it. I had most of the squash picked, and I had given up on the tomatoes, which were just mediocre this year.
Right now, on the 26th, we are at that exquisite moment when the trees are on the verge of glory. The landscape is still overwhelmingly green. But every day the green fades a bit, and we know what is lurking behind it, ready to jump out at us. It’s a breath-holding time. Within a week the entire landscape will be transformed, without a fanfare, without a bang or a boom, into a total celebration. For me it’s the highest-energy time of year.
I had to spend three days of this last week in New York, not one of my favorite places, but I went from friend to friend and had a good time. I spent two days in an Episcopalian retreat house working with people from Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelical communities, planning a project on religion and the environment, which is to go out to 53,000 congregations next April. It was amazing to work with good people from those 4 faiths all at once, and to discover how much common ground there is in their environmental thinking. (The earth is sacred. One way to approach the Creator is through the Creation. Justice should be expressed not only to other people, but to other species, and to future generations.) I always like working with people to whom you don’t have to apologize when you talk about morality.
The third day in New York I spent with Bob Wilkinson, who I hope will become a full-time organizer for Balaton. Bob and I talked to the two people who have given us the most financial support so far — Steve Viederman of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation and Bill Moody of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund — about how to “scale up,” how to take on a staff to follow up on all the amazing opportunities Balaton presents. For 12 years we have been operating out of Dennis’s and my spare time; now we have grown to the point of needing more. Bob and I didn’t expect the two foundations we were talking to to chip in more, but they did give us a lot of good ideas.
I was glad to get back to the garden this weekend, though the time will be short before the next two trips. This fall is an unusually bad one for trips — but not as bad as last fall, when I went away for two and a half months! I hope to actually get the windows washed this year.
We’ve moved the ewes up to the barnyard to separate them from the rams.
Heather has turned 6 and is in the first grade. Don got a deer on the third day of bow season. Jorinde is now attending high school in the U.S. and is liking it enough to think of staying a few weeks longer. She and I have a lot less time to play music than we did in the summer. Brenna has started a hot soccer season and is looking around at colleges, now that she’s a senior. Sylvia has given notice to the horse farm where she works, so she can have more time to work on her books. The Spains are moving out about a month from now, and I haven’t had a minute to think about what to do about that.
God will provide. God helps those who help themselves. I wish God would give me a little more guidance about how to help myself and other people at the same time!
Love,
Dana
