By Les Kaufman
~Professor, Boston University Marine Program and 1990 Pew Scholar~
The best thing that Dana taught me was about how to reconcile scientific discipline with emotional intensity. All good scientists have a passion for doing science, many for the science itself, and some for the art of conveying science to audiences of layfolk and future scientists. Dana covered each of these bases, in turn, and in spades. But in one respect, Dana was unlike any other scientist, environmentalist, or activist that I have ever met. The passion never had the least edge of having been “put on.” It floated there, like a battleship on a sea of truth, and established for me a new high water mark in what it means to be a scientist with a social conscience.
I saw Dana mostly at annual meetings sponsored by the Pew Scholars Program, but we had lively and sometimes frequent interactions over email and phone. The first time that I really got “it” from her was at a meeting in Oregon. Or someplace. For ecologists we burn an awful lot of fuel getting to where we are going to sit together and discuss how to save it–one of Dana’s favorite saws. A few dozen environmental scholar-activists were incarcerated in this room with a wonderful view of Mount Hood’s receding glaciers and nearby conifer clearcuts. Or perhaps it was some other accident scene–wherever there’s a resort suitable for a meeting, there’s usually some reason to feel guilty about being there.
And there we were, arguing heatedly about the fate of the world, the technical difficulties of charming some fissioned broom back into the infernal closet from which it had been sprung by humanity’s clumsy use of magic. The air in the room was full of that explosive mist of hard science volatilized by the heat of passion, just at flashpoint. So Dana gets up–she may have first put her knitting down–looks about the room, and begins to speak of systems dynamics. This we all feel pretty comfortable with and nod approvingly. After a little while, though, Dana shifts seamlessly into an increasingly animated treatise on love. Love. This is at a meeting of scientists and lawyers, mostly. Dana starts talking about people caring about other people instead of just the numbers. As she goes on, speaking clear and true as one would to a friend, so as not to be misunderstood, she would lock eyes with each person in the room, one by one. Those who felt the touch about midway through Dana’s telepathic role call actually saw tears welling in her eyes. I’m thinking, “hold it together, girl, this is a workshop, not a damned prayer meeting.” But before anybody could be positive what was happening, the tears evaporated like desert rain. And the message was there, pure and simple. And the message was an astonishing one.
Yes, the world is in trouble, that’s old news. So who is to blame? At who do we vent our collective spleen, before who do we prance in placard-studded glory? Who is wrong, and must pay for their sins? Who is right and shall be sainted our leaders?
Nobody.
No body, no person.
It is nobody’s fault. And people are basically good, full of the magical powers born of intellect. When their heads are screwed on straight, people are not deeply flawed.
The global system, however, is a godawful mess. We pretty much know how it got that way, but it doesn’t really matter. All we have to do, is change some basic things about how the system works. Not us, the way we do things.
It is such an interesting message, and so radically different from any of the usual rants. The world is ending, humanity is the despoiler, we are selfish, greedy, shortsighted beings incapable of saving ourselves from ourselves- all nonsense in this view. Dana refused to blame it all on people. Blame lay in the system that we had built together, and that we are now sustaining very much against some of our better judgements. We were not flawed, but we do make mistakes…a lot of them, astonishing ones! Some of the institutions and ideas on which societies are currently based, are among the biggest mistakes we’ve ever made. But those kinds of mistakes can be corrected. If something is wrong about the way we are acting, this we can change.
Dana certainly had a knack for pinpointing what was wrong. By example, she taught us to let the data speak for themselves. And what, then, do the data say? Do they speak of derivatives, and coefficients? Or do they speak of happy faces in the playgrounds of the rich…right there- near the origin of our mathematical, post-industrial Eden? What about the rest of the graph? As the line arcs, crests, and slips–do you see the children’s starved, bedraggled bodies strewn across earth’s arid, ruined fields? Do you see those dots on the figure? Do you, or do you not understand that each dot is a hundred million human beings?
What Dana was saying, over and over again, was that humans are not hopeless. We do not have to change our basic nature, our selves. We are just fine. In our current global jam, this is the sweetest thing we could possibly hear, the very essence of hope. Okay, we’ve been very, very bad. But constitutionally we’re basically good, and there’s time enough to prove this to ourselves.
So: thank goodness we are relieved of the burden of having to fundamentally change our inner nature. But there is a catch. Now that we know this we have to do something about it. We have to because people live lives without purpose. We have to because children, mothers, fathers, loved ones are dying. We have to because our beautiful world is growing ugly. We have to, or else we are monsters, after all. The jury is still out, and we are on trial.
That is how I sometimes felt with Dana–softly, but firmly on trial. Dana held colleagues in her heart like wild creatures, in a loving, respectful, but decidedly firm embrace. Truly now, how many of us think of our hearts as resting places for our colleagues’ souls? I don’t know about you, but this kind of gentle, knowing reminder of who I was, emanating from Dana like a Dolphin’s signature whistle each time we greeted, was most remarkable. It was a constant reminder that when you care for somebody, you want not only the best for them, but for them to be the best that they can. And so I found it impossible not to love Dana. This always invoked a vague sense of disorientation when I did touch base with her, on all too infrequent occasions. How could I feel so strongly about someone I really did not actually see that often?
This combination of reason and love in equal measure, compassion and intellect, made Dana the archtypical Earth Mother for the new century. It would sound good to say that this was a role that she played to the hilt, but it wasn’t at all a role. This was just Dana herself. And this raises another interesting point about Dana as a role model. Remember that before seeking a new way to fulfill her vision of how she should live, Dana reached the top in academia–until very recently, and even still, by and large, a man’s world. The side of being human that men are uncomfortable expressing, and that successful women so often hide in order to play as men, Dana put right out there, 24-7. Dana was a woman, by god. She would sit and knit in meetings. Once I was sure it started out as a sweater, but strangely, it turned into a pair of socks. Hal Hamilton says it was often socks, maybe because even long meetings could not be more than a few socks long…and apparently there are quite a few of these socks still walking about up at the Sustainability Institute. Dana never knit me any socks. She did me one better. The spiritual suit I wear before you today, the secrets of blending passion and truth into an elixir of action–this I learned partly under Dana’s prodding, and this I shall wear proudly until I, too, return my borrowed meat and sugar to the earth. Dana built a strong trellis on which we all have climbed, bloomed profusely, and set seed. Let the fruits of our collective efforts, a beauty and peace of tomorrow’s world, be her living legacy.
Dana, you have made us proud to show off our passion for this world to our more staid and stuffy colleagues. You have made us proud to admit that our science, however dispassionate in its practice, has a powerful backbeat, a deep limbic motivation, ultimately, in love. For with this insight, what we as scientists have to say to the rest of the world can at last be expressed in human terms, in human language. You have made us better scientists, better communicators, better politicians, and shown us just exactly where the truth must eventually come home to roost.
