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A Gathering of Celebration and Reflection
Sunday, April 22, 2001, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
Linda Galvan, cello
James Wright, President of Dartmouth College
James Hornig, Professor Emeritus, Environmental Studies, Dartmouth College
Vicki Smith, Upper Valley community planner
Priscilla Sears, Professor, English Department, Dartmouth College
Drew Jones, Sustainability Institute
Plainfield Chimers, handbell choir with whom Dana played, Blessed Assurance and Let There Be Peace of Earth, arr. by Cynthia Dobrinski
Dennis Meadows, University of New Hampshire
John Richardson, Professor of International Development . American University
Philip Rice, Cobb Hill Co-Housing
Alan AtKisson, AtKisson Inc.
Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
Hannah Jacobs, Environmental Studies major, Dartmouth College
Linda Galvan, cello
This weekend there are memorial services like this being held in Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Seattle, and at least one in Europe. What a testimonial to the fact that one person can make a difference! And how appropriate that Dana's memory is being honored on Earth Day! She loved the earth.
I first met Dana in 1972, when Dennis was being interviewed for a possible teaching position in the Engineering School at Dartmouth. I was Dean of the Science Faculty, and had been told that Dennis’s wife Donella was also interested in a position at Dartmouth. I met with her, and described my reactions in a letter to several departments as follows:
Fortunately I made the right decision and we created a position for Dana in the brand new program in Environmental Studies. This was arguably the best decision I ever made as dean. And it was the start of a twenty nine year association with Dana which was never dull and which enriched my life immeasurably.
A few years later, when I returned to full time teaching, I decided to cast my lot with the fledgling Environmental Studies Program, and that is when my education in sustainability began in earnest, with Dana as my tutor.
The Environmental Studies Program has done well, and its success owes a great debt to Dana's influence on students, faculty, and the curriculum. Students flocked to her courses, and in the past weeks I have been contacted by many former students who described how Dana changed their lives.
But I would like to make a special point of Dana’s unique influence on the faculty. We could always count on her to challenge us, to prod us, to inspire us, and to educate us. But beyond that, there was another very important and unusual role that Dana filled for me and, I suspect, for many of her faculty colleagues. Dana was willing — even anxious — to be a visible public advocate of important issues relating to sustainability and the environment. Her weekly newspaper column, of course, was the most visible but not the only example of this role. Most of us on the faculty are trained in a discipline and are uncomfortable about speaking out publicly on matters too far from the comfort zone of our disciplinary expertise. But because of Dana we had the luxury of having someone speak out for us. She spoke eloquently, she spoke honestly, and she spoke knowledgeably. Her scientific training, together with a life in the public policy arena, and a profound intuitive understanding of the dynamics of complex systems, gave her positions a balanced credibility rare in the literature of environmental advocacy. We certainly didn’t always agree with every one of her positions, but we never had to apologize for errors of logic or fact. We were always honored to have her byline identify her as a member of the faculty of the Dartmouth Environmental Studies Program.
Greetings.
I work as a community planner, currently for the town of Hanover and live on a beautiful south facing hillside where Spring has arrived.
I was asked to talk about the early days of the Upper Valley Land Trust, a regional land trust, started here in the Upper Valley 15 years ago with Dana leading the charge. I also want to talk about community and love for Dana.
Although I was one of Dana’s environmental studies students here at Dartmouth, I didn’t know Dana well until I had been away to graduate school and had returned to work here at the regional planning commission. Then I got to know Dana at her farm. Ultimately, we talked livestock. My husband and I bought politically correct lambs, including Dark Star, a particularly memorable independent ewe who hated fences and gates. Thanks Dana.
It was during those days in 1986 that I got to know Dana as a ring leader.
The spark for the Land Trust was kindled by Fran Field. Fran describes she and Dana as "real kindred spirits"; they were organic farmers and visited each others’ farms and both wondered about the future of their properties. They worried about the changes taking place in our community as the Upper Valley was transforming-leaving its agricultural identity behind for a more suburban one. Fran heard about land trusts through the national press, shared this information with Dana and they knew immediately that a community land trust was exactly what was needed here in our community.
They came to me for help and I was able to give them my time. …but the inspiration had to come from somewhere- it was from Dana and Fran caring deeply about their community.
The Upper Valley is an ideal place for land trust work. There are incredibly beautiful places, rich in natural wonders. There is intense development pressure. And there are many people who care enough about their community to do something about it- give time, donate money and give away development rights. Dana sensed this community of people existed and created the opportunity for them to come together.
She and Fran had insisted that the land trust start not just as a land trust to conserve open space but as a community land trust- Dana and Fran had both hoped that there would be a perpetually affordable housing component to the land trust. Even though this is not how the UVLT evolved, Dana was one who felt it important to keep "community" in the name because that is what the land trust was about- strengthening community. Lot of us working together to conserve the land, its creatures, its plants and its other natural qualities.
Dana was a bright light. She not only provided guidance and leadership (she was the land trust’s chairperson for two years), she also brought energy and joy to our group. Clearly she added legitimacy, but she also had a way of looking you in the eye and making every one responsible for the trust.
She had an unending supply of enthusiasm and her enthusiasm was infectious. She was an eloquent spokesperson for the fledging land trust- she helped people understand what out land trust was created to do, she recruited members, she cajoled people into serving as board members, she gave and raised money.
In 1991, in an article commemorating the Land Trust’s Fifth Birthday, Dana wrote: The single most necessary ingredient without which nothing would have happened was the supportive community.(That’s you folks. Take a bow).
The work of the Upper Valley Land Trust is a testament to her vision. In 15 years, the Upper Valley Land Trust has worked with more than 200 land owners on over 220 projects to protect more than 20,000 acres of property in the Upper Valley. WOW.
You should know that Dana and Dennis’ Foundation Farm is one of those projects. Dana was a woman of words and action. She was passionate about protecting her farm. She threatened for years to do it and in 1992 I was lucky enough to work with her to develop the conservation easement. It was the highest complement she could pay the land she loved, so- the place where she, many friends, her sheep and her beloved garden thrived.
I was also lucky to speak to Dana the last week in January after not much direct communication with her for some time. I was headed for a week away. I shared with her my excitement about my trip and my excitement about all that she had done and that many of her dreams- Sustainability Institute and Cobb Hill -were coming true. She had been so patient and hard working and I realized here she was again creating community.
I want to share with you some more of Dana’s words. They help me understand how Dana saw the world, why she felt so passionate and connected and why community building was a logical extension of her world view.
This was written by Dana in 1991 and I have excerpted just a few lines.
The earth was formed whole and continuous in the universe without lines.
The human mind arose in the universe needing lines, boundaries, distinctions.
Here and not there. This and not that. Mine and not yours.
That is sea and this is land and here is the line between them. See? It’s very clear on the map…Between me and not me there is surely a line, a clear distinction, or so it seems.
But now that I look, where is that line?
This fresh apple, still cold and crisp, from the morning dew, is not-me only until I eat it. When I eat it, I eat the soil that nourished the apple. When I drink, the waters of the earth become me. With every breath, I take in, I draw in not-me and make it me. With every breath out, I exhale me into not-me.If the air and the waters and the soils are poisoned, I am poisoned.
Only if I believe the fiction of the lines more than the truth of the lineless planet will I poison the earth, which is myself.
This is the earth’s day to celebrate Dana. This is our day to celebrate Dana and the earth. In her life, Dana celebrated the earth and her connection to the earth and she built community. Last year, Dana wrote about Earth Day from the Earth’s perspective: "Earth Day, Shmearth Day" the planet must be thinking, "Are you folks ever going to take me seriously?"
She wrote that Earth Day was beginning to remind her of Mother’s Day, a ceremonial occasion. Then noted " All mothers have their breaking points. Mother Earth does not soften hers with patience, foregiveness or sentimentality."
When I returned to the Upper Valley from my trip Dana was in a coma. Dana’s community was holding vigils and around the world there was prayer. Her roots and caring extended well beyond the Upper Valley. We who live here are lucky to have the Upper Valley Land Trust as part of her legacy of community building.
Each one of us can act in ways to take the earth seriously. To remember that not-me is really me. This is the best way I know to show respect to Dana and her good work.
In 1996 at the Land Trust’s 10th Birthday, Dana was the featured speaker and this Barbara Holdens Yeoman’s quote was the theme of the celebration: "Men and women die but the land and love live on."
Now that the woman, Dana has died, we see that the land lives on, and clearly the love for Dana lives on. Thank you all for coming her today to show your love for Dana.
I am Priscilla Sears from the English Department. Dana was my colleague, my friend, and often my sustainer. After the publication of Beyond the Limits Dana told me that the editors had insisted that she shorten the comments about love as a sina qua non of sustainability. She comments about love on the cover of the program:
Operate on love. One is not allowed to say that in public any more. Anyone who calls upon the human capacity for brotherly and sisterly love, generosity, compassion, will be met with a hail of cynicism. Once when I tried to do so, a hight government official stood up to say, "Of all scarce resources, love is the scarcest." I just don’t believe that. Love is not a scarce resource, it is an untapped one.
I loved Dana Meadows, and she had loved the poem by Jane Kenyon called"Let Evening Come."
Dana the Teacher — Unearthing our Visions and Driving us Nuts
Andrew Jones
My name is Drew Jones. I was a student of Dana’s here at Dartmouth back in the late 80s and now work at Sustainability Institute, the organization she founded three years ago. I want to tell you a story about Dana and share something she wrote about her students. Overall, I want to talk about Dana as a teacher.
Several years into my first job after college, I found myself feeling a bit lost. Around that time, Dana came to visit to deliver her "Beyond the Limits" talk. A couple hours before the address, she pulled me aside, put her arm around my shoulder, and asked about my career and life.
On hearing of my confusion, she sat me down on a bench in our garden, told me to close my eyes, relax and then asked me to imagine myself in ten years. She continued, saying, "imagine that you are doing work that you would love. Not what you ought to be doing or are likely to be doing, but imagine yourself truly feeling — this is why I’m here in this world."
Eight years later, she asked me again — this time I was part of her staff at the fledgling Sustainability Institute. On the canning porch at Foundation Farm she asked all of us to envision an organization that we would love to create.
Dana was always doing that, wasn’t she? And doing it well. She had an effective way of helping us find our passion, find what we really loved, and encouraging us to develop it fully and share it with the world.
She didn’t just do this with her students. How many of you have had a similar experience with Dana? How many Balaton, Dartmouth, Sustainability Institute, Cobb Hill folks? How many of Dana’s readers felt themselves looking deeper into their hearts and souls to see new possibilities?
Now slow down here. Before we nominate Dana for sainthood let’s remember what could happen if you didn’t answer her questions and chart out a plan for yourself: look out, sister, cause she’d chart one for you. Build that model, construct that chicken house, write that book, buy that farm, fight that policy. Has anyone else ever had the feeling of being aboard the Dana-mobile, and you weren’t steering?
In the classroom, she brought out our best not just through gentle, dreamy questions, but also through tough, probing ones. Listen to her talking about her latest crop of environmental ethics students, in her final newsletter:
I mistreat them badly. I never tell them what I think, and I constantly poke them to explore to the core not only what they think, but why they do. Why do they believe the assumptions they believe? Why do they value what they value? I drive them nuts.…
Usually somewhere about the middle of the term, they realize they haven’t any idea why — nor does anyone else, including the people they most strongly disagree with. That’s the point where we have the opportunity for real transformation.
Such fun!
There’s Dana the teacher — having fun by driving people nuts towards transformation. Lord knows, she drove me nuts!! Anyone else??
She is talking about her classroom, but what she said also applies to her life’s work. She got a real charge out of gently, firmly, pushing ALL of US, all 6 billion of us, on the important, unspoken assumptions and mindsets that rest square at the heart of our survivability.
Looking back, Dana’s visioning process helped, as did her pushing on my assumptions. But today, I’m struck by a deeper message that Dana the teacher was sending: she believed in us. She believed that if we dedicated my life to our vision, not necessarily hers, the world would be better for it. Belief — what an incredible gift of a teacher to a student!
In the same way, as I look out on all of you, I know that Dana believed in YOU. She dedicated herself — her time, her attention, her resources — to the support of you, her many colleagues, her friends, her family, her neighbors, because of her deeply held faith that whatever springs from your hearts and your minds will make the world a better place. And you know, she was right.
Today, Dana is gone. She can’t sit us down and ask us to explore our visions. She can’t drive us nuts pressing on our assumptions. But let us remind ourselves that her belief in us, and in all of this crazy world, lives on.
Dana, we’re all saying good-bye much too soon.
Thank you for helping us find our passions — what we love in this world
Thank you for pushing so gently and firmly where we needed to be pushed.
Thank you for believing in us.
Dennis Meadows
I have had over two months to accept the reality of Dana's passing; I have not managed it yet. I have had two months to find appropriate words to share on this day who all those who have gathered in her memory. I have not managed to do that either. There is just too much to take in. So I will offer a few personal reflections.
The thoughts I offer are on behalf of both myself and Suzanne MacDonald, my wife. Suzanne and Dana lived closely together in the same household for seven years, and they were very dear friends.
I met Dana 40 years ago when she introduced herself as my new lab instructor in a sophomore chemistry course. That started a relationship that passed through many phases and changed both our lives profoundly. Even though we ended our marriage 15 years ago, Dana remained for me an enormous source of inspiration and energy.
Life with Dana was a gift to me and to all who knew her. I want to acknowledge here Phebe Hager, Dana's mom. She made that gift possible. Phebe had enormous reservoirs of integrity, ambition, curiosity, and humor. She was enchanted with the natural world, and she was a master gardener. As Dana was growing up in Illinois, she acquired all those traits from her mother.
Dana was fascinated with the phenomenon of leadership, visioning, and inspiration. She did not presume herself to have any of these qualities in great measure. But of course she did, and she applied them to the greatest problems facing humanity today. It is the measure of her genius that she understood and described those problems in ways that will be as valid and as inspirational in 2050 as they are today.
I have often asked myself what made her so special. The best answer I have is the one that Dana provided herself with the brief statement she taped onto her office door, "Even if I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree today." Dana refused to give up on her hopes for the planet.
She and I always disagreed on the last chapter of our books, the chapter where we summarized the results and told what needs to be done next. I was always pessimistic; she was always optimistic. But I knew in my heart that hers was the right way. Of course, Dana always knew she was right, too. So we always used her version. Let me quote here from her last chapter of Beyond the Limits, it captures for me the essential character of Dana,
"It is difficult to speak of or to practice love, friendship, generosity, understanding, or solidarity within a system whose rules, goals, and information streams are geared for lesser human qualities. But we try, and we urge you to try. Be patient with yourself and others as you and they confront the difficulty of a changing world. Understand and empathize with inevitable resistance; there is some resistance, some clinging to the ways of unsustainability, within each of us. Include everyone in the new world. Everyone will be needed. Seek out and trust the best human instincts in yourself and in everyone. Listen to the cynicism around you and pity those who believe it, but don't believe it yourself."
Emily Dickenson said it in another way:
"Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark."
Dana loved to sing, and she was never afraid of the dark.
It is wonderful that we can assemble here to share our grief and to celebrate the enormous accomplishments of Dana's life. But we all know Dana would not want us to spend much time on that. If we really want to honor her and express our love and appreciation, it is time to go out and start planting more trees for Dana.
Global modelling has been described as a science, struggling with problems too large for the participants, but too important to ignore. Global modelers, however, were often seen as a fractious bunch of academics, more preoccupied with making each other wrong than addressing the threats faced by a vulerable human species, living on a finite planet. Through collaborating on Groping in the Dark: The First Decade of Global Modeling, Dana, Gerhardt Bruckmann and I came to feel that, fundamentally, global modelers were all speaking the same message - and not a new one.
How we expressed what we felt was Dana's favorate passage in our book:
A final word about the globe
The most basic message of the global models is not new and should not be surprising.
We do not need a computer model to tell us that:
we must not destroy the system upon which our sustenance depends.
poverty is wrong and preventable.
the exploitation of one person or nation by another degrades both the exploited and the exploiter.
it is better for individuals and nations to cooperate than to fight.
the love we have for all humankind and for future generations should be the same as our love for those close to us.
if we do not embrace these principles and live by them, our system cannot survive.
our future is in our hands and will be no better or worse than we make it.
These messages have been around for centuries.
They reemerge periodically in different forms
and now in the outputs of global models.Anything that persists for so long and comes from such diverse sources as gurus and input-output matrices must be coming very close to
truth.
We all know the truth
at some deep level
within ourselves.We have only to look honestly and deeply
to find it.And yet we don't live as if we knew it.
Some of us actively deny messages like the ones from the global models.
Others try very hard not to think about them.
Most of us
feel helpless
shrug our shoulders
wish things were otherwise
assume that we can do nothing and go on living.Meanwhile, on this planet,
twenty-eight people starve to death each minute
one species of life disappears forever every day
and one million dollars are spent each minute on armaments.The current condition of our globe is intolerable
and we make it so.It is changing
because of what we decide.It could be beautiful.
If we would only
decide to get along together
be open to each other and to new ways of thinking
remember what is really important to us
and what is less so
and live our lives for that which is important.As sophisticated, skeptical, scientific Westerners
We always react to statements like that by sayingIt sounds too simple
And is in fact impossible.
How could we ever decide to get along together?You don't just decide things like that.
And how could we get everyone else to decide it?(It couldn't be possible that everyone else is just like us and is saying that same thing)
When everyone is so sophisticated
that they can't believe it could be simple to be honest and to careAnd everyone is so smart
that they know they don't count
so they never tryYou get the kind of world we've got.
Maybe it's worth thinking another way
as if we cared and we made a difference,
Even if it is just groping in the dark
My name is Phil Rice and today I’d like to talk about my experience of Dana as a fellow member of a project to create an eco-village called Cobb Hill Co-housing.
Occasionally before she falls asleep, my 3 1/2 year old daughter asks: "Daddy, what did Dana do?" A good question. For the bedtime ritual her answer is: "She grew pretty flowers and gardens and kept chickens and knitted and baked bread and played with me."
But it’s a good question for all of us: What did Dana do? Or better yet: what can we learn from what Dana accomplished and how she accomplished it?
For a long time, Dana held a vision of a community of people, rooted in the land, learning how to take care of the land and each other, and sharing what they learned. Here’s how she wrote about her vision in 1993. "I must find or create a group of people to live with who are dedicated to a just, peaceful and sustainable world, both in the way they live and in the way they reach out to impact the public discourse…"
Eight years later, from my front window, I watch as the buildings of Cobb Hill sprout from the landscape like so many not-quite-yet naturalized daffodils hugging the hill side. There is already a thriving CSA and market garden, maple sugaring and cheese-making and most important, many new relationships between the families involved in this endeavor. How did one person’s vision create a process that involved so many people and gave rise to all of this?
Dana made things happen in a special way — a way that I am trying to learn to practice myself. She lived at once in a very lofty place, with a vision that was unconstrained by fear, doubt or worries about feasibility and at the same time in an ordinary and pragmatic place filled with honest hard work, step by muddy step.
And she never saw her push toward that vision as the journey of an individual. Although there was much about the core of her vision that she was unwilling to compromise— the sacredness of every square foot of farm land, the necessity of affordable housing units, the adherence to high standards of energy efficiency and resource utilization—much of her vision was unspecific, ambiguous in a way that invited the rest of us to move into and co-create the vision with her. She admitted not knowing exactly how things would be brought into reality. Her admission invited and welcomed collaboration and engendered creativity and community.
Many of you knew Dana as a quintessential gardener. Gardeners create a space and the conditions for plants to flourish and grow. The act of growing a garden is the act of facilitation of what is dormant and possible and the best gardener acts as the servant to the seeds. This role of servant is at once profound and pragmatic. An excellent garden needs both the intellectual vision and the physical work.
Eight years ago she concluded that letter about her vision of a community this way, "Well, who knows what will happen? I have a new vision now to work toward. Meanwhile, if there's one more nice day outdoors I have raspberries to prune. If there isn't, I have a basement to clean."
Dana was drawn to powerful and sometimes distant visions of a better way, while remaining rooted in the real work that it takes to allow visions to grow. I think this is close to the heart of what we can learn — to keep our vision unconstrained and our feet on the ground. To hold the heart&soul of the vision tenaciously and its particular manifestation lightly— at the same time. This what it takes to allow a vision to evolve into a relevant and powerful reality formed by the many participants in a community.
In creating Cobb Hill all of us including, Dana, have had our moments of frustration and exhaustion. But in Dana I also almost always detected a certain air of celebration. It was often Dana would remind us all of how much we were learning, of the amazing gifts brought to our community by each new member, of how exquisite the wildflowers in the hidden corner of the pasture were. I believe that the source of this sense of celebration was Dana’s conviction that we could simply decide to create the kind of world we wanted to live in. I would like to close by reading a poem written about Dana by my wife, Beth Sawin which captures something of this conviction.
The poem reminds me of the belief of some of the worlds peoples that physical reality is sung into existence out of mystery just as together we sing our future into existence.
The poem is called What She Sang:
Fill the gardens with color
and then add some more.
Hatch chicks in the bathtub.
When the moon glows on new snow-dance.
Roll the smooth roundness of beans
between your thumb
and forefinger.
Sip tea.
Knit socks.
Fill baskets with apples.
Tickle babies on their feet,
until they laugh.It can all go on forever,
the babies,
the apples,
the dancing,
once we choose to begin.Take a step now.
Walk with me and sing.
— Beth Sawin
Sustainability
Words and Music © 1998 by Alan AtKisson
Like a boat that sails us home
Like a star that leads us on
The compass we're steering by
A place that we someday hope to seeSustainability
We can save the things we love before they're gone
Sustainability
Let the beauty of the Earth live on and on
For generationsIt's a science and an art
It's a dream in every heart
A vision we can't let go
A hope that will someday set us free ...Sustainability
We can save the things we love before they're gone
Sustainability
Let the beauty of the Earth live on and on
For generations
Generations ...
A biologist, perhaps E.O. Wilson, noted that bees, ants, and termites, though not very smart individually, display high intelligence collectively–and then he added, "People seem just the opposite." Dana was an exception. She was one of those promising specimens that’s turning up more and more often in the search for intelligent life on earth–one of those much higher primates whose love, logic, radical stubbornness, courage, and passion awaken the rest of us to our ability and our responsibility to save the world. She knew, taught, and lived the lesson that love is not only an untapped but an expanding resource: the more you use it, the more you give it away, the more of it you have left.
When I first met Dana in 1963, I was a normal, healthy technotwit–a nerdy 15- or 16-year-old high-school student in Amherst–and she was a roughly 22-year-old biophysics grad student earning her PhD with Professor Oleg Jardetzky at Harvard Med School. We were both doing nuclear magnetic resonance experiments, so I went to see their apparatus and get technical advice. I was immediately struck not just by her powerful and subtle intellect but also by her fresh, free, friendly, and inquiring spirit. It was therefore no surprise when she turned up among Jay Forrester’s students who were advancing the frontiers of understanding how complex systems unfold, and then when The Limits to Growth burst upon an unsuspecting world.
As that debate raged through the 1970s, largely between those who apparently hadn’t read the book but were sure it was wrong and those who knew better, and then in 1982 when Hunter and I were Luce Visiting Professors at Dartmouth, we came to know Dana and Dennis, to stay with them in Plainfield and play with them in Csopak, and to gain a deep admiration and affection for them personally as well as professionally. While they were contributing profoundly to our common understanding what needs to be done, they were also quietly showing a better way to live in balance–rebuilding stone walls, processing honey, putting up preserves, spinning wool, gardening plants and people. Dana stayed grounded all her life in these real things, showing us how to find in daily life the gift to be simple, to be free, to come down where we ought to be. She gained her faith, hope, and clarity from the renewal of the seasons and the miracle of topsoil. Like Wendell Berry, what she stood for was what he stood on. The insight she lived and taught was rooted in the design genius of 3.8 billion years of life–a process of wild experimentation, rigorous testing, and continuous improvement in which whatever didn’t work already got recalled by the Manufacturer.
My old mentor Edwin Land said that invention is a sudden cessation of stupidity; that a mistake is a circumstance not yet fully turned to your advantage; and that people who seem to have had a new idea have often simply stopped having an old idea. Dana had these experiences all the time, and shared them ever more widely as she became arguably the world’s best environmental writer. She combined an unrivaled insight into system dynamics, a commitment to taking responsibility for the whole system even while working to change only part of it, a compassion for all beings, and an uncompromisingly rigorous quest for honest answers and honest questions so lucidly stated that everyone could understand them and would be moved by them.
James Branch Cabell wrote, "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is true." Dana fitted neither category. She wrote three years ago, "By nature I'm an optimist; to me all glasses are half-full," yet she didn’t shrink from reporting bad news, always blended with encouragement about how to do better. She treated the future as choice, not fate, and she defined with luminous clarity how to do (as one sometimes must) what is necessary. She shared René Dubos’s view that despair is a sin, so when asked if we have enough time to prevent catastrophe, she’d always say that we have exactly enough time, starting now.
Two years ago, when E-mailing an unusually somber column about events that made her weep, she appended the following note as counterpoint: "A CEO was having to babysit for his young daughter. He was trying to read the paper but was totally frustrated by the constant interruptions. When he came across a full page of the NASA photo of the Earth from space, he got a brilliant idea. He ripped it up into small pieces and told his child to try to put it back together. He then settled in for what he expected to be a good half-hour of peace and quiet. But only a few minutes had gone by before the child appeared at his side with a big grin on her face. ‘You've finished already?’ he asked. ‘Yep,’ she replied. ‘So how did you do it?’ ‘Well, I saw there was a picture of a person on the other side, so when I put the person together, the Earth got put together too.’"
The truth Dana spoke fearlessly to power was not just about how much is enough; it was also about meeting nonmaterial needs by nonmaterial means. Ecclesiastes reminds us that "He who hath silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that hath abundance with increase: this is also vanity." Dana gently but irresistibly deflated that vanity; she gave us comfort in abandoning vanity without fear. Gandhi-ji, asked what he thought of Western civilization, replied, "I think it would be a very good idea." Like him, Dana did not compartmentalize her spiritual values from her analytic conclusions, but integrated them into wisdom and hope, as only a whole person and a great soul can do. As she wrote four years ago, "[I]n every society, and always, there have been a few people utterly compulsive about the exercise of power, and most people quietly content to live through the exercise not of power, but of duty, community, and love." That contentment with what really counts defined her in service to her community.
Dana left big footprints for us to try on for size. While she left us far too soon, she also equipped us to discern and pursue what needs to be done, and how to intervene where it’s most effective–best of all by changing the mindset of those who make the rules. She helped us prepare for our species’ graduation test, already underway, when we’ll all get to find out whether this bold evolutionary experiment of combining a large forebrain with opposable thumbs was really a good idea. She was–and her legacy is–living proof that it was.
When another giant, David Brower, died late last year–another of my mentors–Walter Link asked, "Wouldn’t it be an implausible failing of evolution that a species like ours could come to be, that it would evolve to have a consciousness that can grow, that can spend a lifetime learning how to be effective, and then have the individuals of that species die in such a way that all that is lost to the universe?" Happily, Dana, like Dave, left much of her wisdom with us through her teaching, writing, and personal example, knowing that we would carry on the work. She knew too, as Robinson Jeffers put it, "that the enormous invulnerable beauty of things / Is the face of God, to live gladly in its presence, / And die without grief or fear knowing it survives us." As Jeffers wrote in his "Incription for a Gravestone":
I admired the beauty
While I was human, now I am part of the beauty.
I wander in the air,
Being mostly gas and water, and flow in the ocean,
Touch you and Asia
At the same moment, have a hand in the sunrises
And the glow of this grass.
I left the light precipitate of ashes to earth
For a love-token.
I grew up with the words of Dana Meadows. Published faithfully each week in the Keene Sentinel, the newspaper of the town where I went to school, her writing was a source of hope and inspiration to the community. My high school graduation gift was two books by Dana, and now that I am in college, rather than writing letters my grandmother sends me clippings of her columns. Her presence at Dartmouth was also one of the main factors in my decision to come here, and I, along with the other students in her class this past winter, felt blessed to be able to have her as a professor in the month before she passed away.
I am going to read excerpts from a column of Dana’s entitled "A Time of Death and Life."
The Shepherd’s year ends and begins in November. That’s when we bring the sheep up from the pasture, butcher last spring’s lambs, and turn the ram in with the ewes to make lambs again. The record book closes on one cycle, and the next cycle begins.
I think of it as The Time When We Haul Sheep Around.
The final haul was the five ram lambs we took to Sharon Beef, the slaughterhouse. This is an annual trip, which we do with crisp routine and a certain serenity. We unloaded the rams into clean stalls at Sharon Beef on a Sunday night. The next Friday we picked up wrapped, frozen, labeled lamb meat to deliver to the freezers of our customers. We also picked up the pelts to scrape, salt, and cure to become sheep-skin rugs.
The slaughterhouse is meticulously clean and efficient, and all the business is done with neighbors. Neighbors do the butchering and neighbors buy the meat and rugs. The income arrives just before the December tax bill, when we most need it.
When I talk happily about this time of year, some folks, nearly always meat eaters, ask how I can be so cruel as to take my lambs- in whose births I assisted, whose growth I’ve overseen, whose mothers I call by name- to slaughter. It’s a question that can only come from an urbanized culture like ours, where most people live a long way from the sources of their food.
You don’t have to live on a farm very long before you can come to terms with life and death, with the Novembers when you kill the lambs and start the lambs. You don’t become hard or unfeeling; rather you become accepting. You know that birth and death are not separable and that deaths are necessary so that the ratios of rams and ewes and sheep and pastures will be right, and so there will be meat to feed people. On a farm every stage of the cycle- breeding, birth, growth, maturity, death- has beauty and dignity.
November isn’t the exciting high of spring when the lambs are born and the daffodils bloom. It’s the time for preparation for spring. The dead-looking daffodil bulbs go into the ground, and the ram goes in with the ewes. The fall is the time to remember that nature turns death into new life. The garden takes last year’s cornstalks and fallen leaves and sheep manure and turns them into next year’s tomatoes and broccoli. The sheep turn last year’s hay into next year’s wool and lambs. And who knows what tasks and achievements, joys, and sorrows our customers will produce out of the energy from that lamb meat.
It was Gandhi who pointed out that in spite of all the death in the world, what persists is life.
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