By Ashley Lanfer

~Dartmouth College Alumna~

Unlike the other folks speaking today, I did not know Dana as a colleague. She was my teacher. Those of you who have never been one of Dana’s students might be surprised to hear that this articulate, outspoken, passionate writer was enigmatic to us. She was. Many professors I know are more concerned with promoting their own point of view in a classroom than in helping students to develop theirs. Not Dana. In the environmental ethics class I took from her my senior year in college, Dana never gave us any “right answers” to ethical questions. And somewhere along the way my classmates and I stopped worrying about what the famous Professor Meadows thought. We even stopped worrying so much about our own opinions on abortion and population growth and endocrine disrupters.

Dana taught us to look at the whole picture.

In class we focused on a few of the world’s super-charged environmental issues. We were bombarded with conflicting data and opinions. Dana called up loggers and activists, chemists and demographers and put them on speakerphone one by one so our class could talk with them about how they viewed the issue we were studying. We listened to the impassioned, contradictory stories of real people with legitimate concerns and felt increasingly bewildered. Then Dana taught us how to pick apart the problem. What were the indisputable facts that everyone involved would be able to agree on? What assumptions was each group making? What were the values that drove them to think and feel and act the way they did? At first my classmates and I were terrible at this. It was a new skill. Almost a new epistemology.

Dana got us thinking so holistically that we found ourselves venturing beyond the traditional boundaries of academia. One afternoon we sat around a table together and tried to dig down to the bedrock of ethics. “Who decides what is right?” Dana asked her class. “Is there an ethic that transcends culture?” Before I could check myself, I blurted out, “You’re asking us whether God exists!” The moment I said it I knew I had made a terrible mistake. Saying the word “God” in a Dartmouth classroom is simply not done. I turned a deep shade of scarlet and stammered out a disclaimer. Later on that day, Dana saw me in the pocket library near her office. She came in, sat down in the armchair next to me, and said, “Its scary to say the words “God” and “Love” out loud here, Ashley. Don’t let that stop you. In the end, God and Love are what this is all about.”

Obviously, this was a moment when Dana blew her cover. Over the course of the semester, she gave us a few other windows into the way she saw the world. She invited the whole class over to watch the movie Ghandi. She gave us carrots from her organic garden to munch while we watched. She had us read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. She was also the first professor any of us had ever had who asked us to assign ourselves a grade for a class and then tell her why we thought we deserved it. Dana’s approach to teaching gave us hints about who she was and what she believed, but I was thirsty for more. I began collecting little bits of information about her life. I wanted to know everything. What she had been like when she was my age, what she cared about, what made her happy, what her home and family were like.

What I learned was actually quite disconcerting. Until I met Dana, I figured that if I was unhappy about global inequity, if I felt over-consumption was wrong, I was doing about as much as anybody could. The problems were, after all, so enormous. But while I was looking at them and feeling insignificant and powerless, Dana was doing something about them. Here was a woman whose life mirrored her convictions. And she seemed to be changing the world on every level–from the soil in her garden and the health of her neighbors all the way to the United Nations and the fate of the planet. When Dana said she was worried about population growth, she backed it up by helping raise other peoples’ children, but never having her own. I mean, the woman milked her own cows! Dana’s radical commitment to her beliefs and values affected me profoundly. Suddenly, I had no excuses. Here was a person who gave flesh and bone answers to the problems I had been content to contemplate.

Knowing that Dana existed in the world was not easy. Knowing that she is no longer in this world is much, much more difficult.

At the end of the school term, Dana reverently handed each of us a fold-up poster of the 1996 UN World Population Statistics. Dana was passionate about statistics. Inequity. Child mortality. Literacy rates. Birth rates. What for most people was a mind- numbing matrix of numbers in rows and columns was for Dana a to-do list. That fall after our final class, I stared at the numbers and tried to see them the way Dana did. I stared until I could imagine the people that the numbers represented. I felt them living and breathing and laughing and crying out there in the world. I took the fold-up UN poster with me when I moved to rural Kenya to start my first job after college. I must have pulled that thing out dozens of times in Africa. I talked about the numbers with many of my friends and colleagues there. I still have that poster. And the statistics still haunt me and spur me to action. Now, as a graduate student in Environmental Science, I help teach a class in the same problems of population growth and the environment that Dana taught me to analyze.

Dana’s life has been folded into the lives of her students in ways that we can only begin to understand and articulate. On behalf of her students, I’d like to say “Dana, we thank God for your life. And we love you.”