Some years ago, I was part of a group that set out to create a community where we could work toward living with less impact on the environment. One of the first steps we took was to write down a list of principles to guide us as we worked to turn our vision into reality. At the top of the list were “community” and “sustainability.” (The others, if you’re curious, were “unity,” “beauty,” and “equity.”)

The village people: Cobb Hill community members.

Photo: Cobb Hill Cohousing.

As I was one of the chief drafters of these principles, I took them very seriously. When newcomers wanted to know what we were up to, I would explain our principles one by one. Community, I used to say, has to do with how we treat each other. Sustainability has to do with how we treat the Earth.

Now, seven years later, we have moved beyond words on a page to a real place that we call Cobb Hill. Here, 22 families share a farm, common meals, childcare, music, a wood-burning heating system, cheese-making, syrup-making, haymaking, and, now and then, quiet cups of tea. Now that I’m living in this messy, wonderful reality rather than that orderly statement of principles, I don’t see the distinctions between sustainability and community quite as clearly as I once did.

Here’s one example. We live about 20 minutes by car from the nearest big town, a drive my family once made weekly for groceries. Knowing plenty about greenhouse emissions and climate change, we weren’t happy with that situation, but we had no other practical options.

Hazel and Willow, part of the family.

Photo: Cobb Hill Cohousing.

Then our community began to cohere. Dana moved in with her chickens, so fresh eggs were always available. Steven and Kerry began milking their cows, so we had fresh milk once a week. We formed a buying co-op, so that once a month we could order boxes of toilet paper, sacks of flour, and jars of spices, all of which were delivered by truck and divvied up among us. Then a group began making cheese and selling it alongside the eggs and milk. We started sharing meals three nights a week. Now, a few times a month, each family cooks for 20 to 30 people; the other nights we do no shopping, no cooking, and no dishes.

The other day, we realized that our family rarely drives to town to buy groceries anymore. A shopping list slowly accumulates on our refrigerator door, and occasionally, when we are out for some other reason, we stop in at the grocery store. We probably spend as much time as we did before on procuring our food. But now we are carrying water to the chickens or cooking a stew for the neighborhood instead of strapping the kids in the car and heading off on a shopping expedition. And we burn less fossil fuel in the bargain.

Maybe this idea of a shared farm appeals to you and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you love cities and are not excited by the idea of reaching under a chicken for your breakfast eggs. My point is not that our little experiment is the only way to live more sustainably or that my shopping-trip dilemma is the most important sustainability problem on the planet.

What I am saying is this: Joining together in community has a way of opening up unexpected opportunities for sustainability. What we cannot manage individually, we can often achieve collectively. My family could never manage cows, chickens, and cheese on our own; likewise, the owners of each of these small-scale enterprises would be struggling without the community members who share in the ownership and upkeep of our farm. Whether it is a city block reclaiming a park or a community of nations signing a treaty, some of our most powerful options for lessening individual environmental impact require collective action. Now more than ever, we need to draw upon the power of community to protect the planet.

Painting the town red, one barn at a time.

Photo: Cobb Hill Cohousing.

Of course, creating community doesn’t happen effortlessly, and it cannot happen without relinquishing some autonomy. A lot of decisions most families make on their own require the agreement of others in my community. What time should the common meal be served? Families with small children prefer 5:30, but the people milking cows are not finished until 6:30. Should we replace the barn roof? Maybe — but that means money not spent on other projects. Can cats roam free? They are miserable inside, but they kill songbirds. You get the picture: Community living requires a lot of dialogue and a lot of compromise.

I won’t claim that it’s always easy or that I’ve never fantasized about moving to my own little farm at the end of a long, empty road. Still, the give-and-take is a minor inconvenience, not a deep sacrifice. And it is a price I am grateful to pay for the chance to share in this beautiful farm and participate in more sustainability experiments than I could in 10 lifetimes of solitary living.

I’ve been making the case that living in community makes sustainability easier, but it is also important to say that working together towards sustainability builds community. Weeding raspberries with a neighbor last fall, I heard amazing stories of childhood dreams and adventures. Watching a newborn lamb stagger to its feet encircled by a group of my neighbors, I watched faces open and soften in a way that rarely happens during our meetings. In the day-to-day living and working we do together, I see new dimensions of the people of this community. And the more I see of their hopes, their dreams, and their vulnerabilities, the easier it becomes to stick it out and work together during those conversations about roofs and cats and dinner schedules.

Community fosters sustainability. Working together towards sustainability builds community. Far from the separate goals I once believed them to be, community and sustainability are two elements of one whole fabric. They rise and fall together. The more we step into choices where both are rising — and the more we can invite others to step in beside us — the healthier our world and its people will be.

Scientists call the accumulation of chemical contaminants (such as PCBs, mercury, and pesticides) within a person’s body the “body burden.” Body burden is just a number, a concentration in parts per billion or micrograms per liter. But the term calls forth an image, too, of a body bent over and struggling beneath a heavy load. When scientists start taking about body burden, I think about real bodies — my own and my children’s.

Thanks to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we have a better sense than ever before of the body burden of the typical U.S. citizen. In the Second National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, CDC scientists measured the levels of 116 chemicals in the blood and urine of 2,500 volunteers. The study found detectable levels of 89 chemicals, including pesticides, phthalates, herbicides, pest repellents, and disinfectants.

Chemical by chemical, the report documents the average concentration of contaminants in the bodies of the people studied. But what does all this data mean? At what concentration do these chemicals become dangerous?

For all but a handful of chemicals, nobody knows the answer to this question. The report acknowledges as much, in one understated sentence: “Research studies, separate from the Report, are required to determine which blood or urine levels are safe and which cause disease.”

This is not easy research. The questions involved are complex. What do you measure to determine safety? How relevant are animal studies to questions about human health? Do safe levels differ for children, who eat and respire more per pound of body weight than adults?

These have always been the questions of toxicology, but new questions are emerging, too. The website associated with the book Our Stolen Future, which introduced the idea of endocrine disruptors to the general public in 1996, collects scientific papers and news stories that track discoveries about the health effects of chemical exposures. The papers collected there make it clear that we need to add three new questions to the way we think about safe levels of chemicals.

1. Could a given chemical have health effects a long time after exposure? For chemicals that interfere with cell-signaling systems, such as hormone systems, subtle impacts during early development can cause trouble after a long latency. Traditional tests for the safety of chemicals look for immediate effects, not those that emerge years after exposure.

2. Has a given chemical been tested for low-dose effects? Traditionally, chemicals are tested for safety at lower and lower doses, until a concentration is discovered that has no ill effects. All doses below that threshold are usually assumed to be harmless. But for some chemicals, the dose-response relationship is not that simple. Unexpected effects can appear at lower concentrations than the “safe dose” as a biologically active chemical “hijacks” cellular processes. Because it focuses on testing for outright damage by toxic chemicals, traditional toxicology may miss this low-dose effect.

3. Is a given chemical safe when mixed with other chemicals? Most studies of chemical safety examine the effects of one chemical at a time, but in real life, people are exposed to complex mixtures of contaminants. New studies, such as one on the impact of a commercially available weed-killer mixture on pregnant mice, suggest that mixtures of chemicals can have effects that none of the chemicals have on their own.

No wonder the CDC report can’t say much about the safe levels of the chemicals it measured. Looking for effects from very low doses over very long time periods is difficult enough. Try to do that for all possible real-world combinations of chemical exposure and the task grows exponentially.

Maybe some day our science will reach a level of sophistication that can give us solid assurances about chemical safety. But that’s a distant goal, not a current reality. Until then, we are all walking, breathing experiments in toxicology. Until then, we are all living with risk.

However, there was one definitive and telling finding in the CDC report: The body burdens of lead, DDT, PCBs, and hexachlorobenzene have all decreased since the last CDC study. Guess what? These are all chemicals that have been banned or strictly regulated in the U.S. That’s great news. It means that the pollution of our bodies, like the pollution of our rivers or our air, is reversible.

But a river doesn’t come back to life until the pollution is cut off at the source, and the same will be true for our bodies. So the CDC finding gives us a clear mandate of where to go from here: If a lower body burden seems like a sensible, desirable thing, then we need to limit the chemicals to which we are exposed. That’s no small task. The number of artificial chemicals in our environment is astounding. The CDC tested for the presence of 116, but the U.S. EPA estimates that at least 80,000 chemicals — 690 times the number tested by the CDC — are produced and used today.

If we keep assuming that all chemicals are harmless until we uncover the exact doses, combinations, and lag times that will make us sick, our bodies are going to remain polluted for a long, long time. Wouldn’t it make more sense to put the burden of proof of safety on the chemical manufacturers, rather than the burden of the chemicals on our bodies?

Quiet riot police.

Do you sense it too — the recklessness of this moment?

How can people talk this way — as though deep Earth penetrating nuclear weapons, unmanned drones, and stockpiles of smallpox virus are any more of a solution to global crises than people exploding themselves on crowded street corners?

As though the acid rain falling onto our forests and carbon dioxide warming our planet are only abstractly related to our lives?

As though it is the price of progress that our breast milk contains PCBs?

As though nothing precious is vulnerable. And yet we all bleed and break.

Another day, another secret dance of rock and ocean.

Whatever it is you love, it rises out of the secret dances of rock and ocean and microbes. It depends on the paths that clouds take as they float over the land. It depends on the life expectancy of honeybees, the fish that lay eggs in marsh grass, the quiet creation of soil.

We are all made of lungs and livers, nerve fibers and muscle. So much that matters — music, Sunday dinner, a baby’s grin — depends upon factors that are largely beyond our control: the molecules of our body doing the right thing, in the right place, at the right time. Five fingers extending off an embryonic arm. Heart valves being sculpted just so. A certain number of cell divisions and no more. It all has to work perfectly before music, or sonnets, or even a grin can happen. For all the dazzle of biotechnology, we are nowhere close to understanding, let alone replicating, the mysteries of life. But we do know enough to see that our bodies are not prepared for some of the chemicals we’ve created — the ones that damage DNA, the ones that confuse hormone receptors. We are vulnerable in the face of this new chemistry of our own creation.

With missiles that can send devastating weapons hurtling across oceans and viruses that can be released on the subway, we face another vulnerability, of course — the chance that someone crazy or desperate will launch something flaming or crushing or infectious in our direction.

I don’t expect a world without tragedy and loss. But unlike the natural vulnerability all living things must face and accept, the warfare, the toxins, and the changing climate are not inevitable, not out of our control. They are not like a tornado or grandmother’s inoperable cancer. They are like the house falling in because you didn’t patch the roof, or grandmother growing frail because there is no one to cook her supper. It’s not a matter of destiny; it’s a matter of will.

We need the Earth’s climate to stay more or less constant. Well, there are things human beings can do to increase the chances of this. We know what these things are: switching from coal and oil to solar and wind power. Investing in public transportation.

Our bodies can’t handle heavy metals or dioxin. We know that to be true, and we can reshape our chemistry in nature’s style, using instead the fibers, proteins, sugars, polymers, and dyes that life has already “invented.”

Blooms’ day.

None of us are safe while governments and factions use violence as a tool. We don’t have to be trapped in escalating violence as more and more powerful weapons end up in the hands of more and more volatile leaders. We could shift our priorities, invest in peacekeepers, negotiations, and the enforcement of international law.

We are vulnerable, but we are not without options. Seeing both the vulnerability and the possibility of our times — that’s what causes the anguish, isn’t it? If you understand what is at stake and can see at least a few steps ahead toward safer ground, it’s hard to watch the people around you standing still or even moving in the opposite direction. It’s hard not to wonder if the world has gone mad.

But if you are willing to look at our vulnerability, you also get to see the miracles. You understand the fine line we walk. You hear it in the perfect heart valve pumping away when you press your ear on your daughter’s chest. You see it in the spring when the same gentle warming wakes up the pollinators and opens the apple blossoms. Knowing that climate change could disorient the apples or the bumble bees helps you see the wonder of their partnership in the first place.

If you are willing to believe that we could live in different ways, you have the chance to discover them, little by little. You get to have butternut squash baked in a solar cooker on your doorstep. You get to teach your children how to light a fire in the woodstove with logs they helped you to stack. You get to try, in your own relationships, to resolve conflicts the way you would like to see them resolved across the world.

Butternut squash and apple blossoms don’t sound as though they will change the world. But in my mind they stand for our only hope — people who can look straight at our vulnerability and still see our power.

Stand in a line, with several friends. Each of you hold your right index finger out in front of your body. Now place a long stick across all of your fingers, balanced upon them. Your collective goal is to lower the stick to the ground. There is only one rule. Each finger must remain in contact with the stick at all times. If anyone’s finger loses contact with the stick, you must raise the stick back to the starting level and begin again.

According to Dennis Meadows and Linda Booth Sweeney, who include the game in their book, The Systems Thinking Playbook, groups of people following this rule almost always raise the stick instead of lowering it. As each player works to keep in contact with the stick the group as a whole pushes steadily in the direction opposite to its goal.

This might sound like a silly exercise, but it makes an important point. We can agree to rules that seem to make sense, we can follow those rules, and we can still have outcomes no one wants or even anticipates.

To market, to market, to buy sustainable produce.

In my column last month, I described such a system — commodity agriculture. Individual producers compete to stay in business by attempting to produce more commodity for less cost. As everyone produces more, the price per bushel falls, and to maintain the same income the producer must grow more or cut costs. Production goes up, and costs go down, but because land stewardship or contribution to community does not count as a benefit in this equation, and because damage to the soil or to the watershed does not count as a cost, environmental and social indicators decline while “efficiency” rises.

The solution seems simple. Change the rules, so that all the costs and benefits society cares about factor into the economic decision-making. Charge for the destruction of biodiversity or the degradation of water quality. Reward good stewardship and contributions to local community.

The exact solutions are local matters. They will be different for soybeans and corn, and for codfish and tuna. The knowledge of people living and working in these systems will be central to the design of policies that allow these systems to meet their environmental and social goals.

The rat race.

But even before we come to implement specific policies, there are challenges to overcome. For those commodities sold into global markets, it is not a simple matter to change the rules to take social and environmental goals into account. If a pollution tax raises the price of corn in the U.S., multinational grain buyers — caught up in their own competitive dynamics — will feel themselves forced to buy from other producers, in places that do not account for environmental degradation. As long as the buyers are intent on buying the cheapest commodity, growers in one region cannot afford to improve the rules of their systems unless growers in other regions take a similar step. This sets up the system for what some have called a “race to the bottom,” with no one able to improve the system rules on their own and everyone experiencing pressure to push costs off onto the environment or onto workers and communities.

A system is primed for this problem when the reach of buyers is broader than the decision-making boundaries of producers. Solutions will require reducing this asymmetry, either by limiting the reach of buyers or extending the solidarity of producers.

You hear more in the news about the first option. That is a part of what the “anti-globalization” movement is about — changing the rules of the largest economic system so that people are able to take steps to make their local economies serve them better. This is critical work; no system can be healthy if the rules at one level create pathology at another level.

Rounding a corn-er?

But there are other possibilities that need our energy, too. Governments from producing regions could commit to policies that incorporate social and economic goals on a multinational scale. If all the corn-producing regions of the world followed this course of action, it would no longer matter that multinational commodity-buying corporations shopped for the cheapest grain. Wherever they turned, they would find local economies that were accounting for the full costs of grain production.

The corporations that buy and process commodities — corporations made up of people who, it must be said, don’t set out to degrade resources or communities — could also come together to find solutions. Because a relatively small number of companies buy any one commodity, such a scenario is a practical possibility. The corporations could agree on minimum environmental and social standards, and take the steps toward these standards together, paying the full costs together, with none of them at a competitive disadvantage.

Can commodity producers, or governments, or competing corporations come together to end the race to the bottom? That is a huge dream, and one that may seem to require more cooperation than our world can muster right now.

On the other hand, it is a dream that is rooted in the reality of our planet. We are one people, living together on one small world. Sooner or later we are going to have to embrace this fact. Anything less means sitting back and waiting for the race to the bottom to reach its final destination. All of us need to demand that the governments we empower and the corporations we buy from end that race and begin a different one to the top, while there is still time.

Map: U.S. EPA.

The Dead Zone may be the headline grabber, but it is only one of many impacts of our contemporary agriculture system. Irrigation leads to aquifer depletion, herbicides accumulate in groundwater, manure from hog farms pollutes rivers, and the full impacts of genetically modified crops on ecosystems are not yet known. Put it all together and you might be tempted to point your finger at farmers. After all, they are the ones out there applying the chemicals and planting the genetically modified seeds. But after spending four years working on a project to understand the root causes of issues like these in corn production, I can tell you that the problem doesn’t lie with farmer greed or indifference; it lies with economics.

Farmers — like all entrepreneurs in free-market systems — compete to stay in business. The terms of that competition are clearly defined. Who can produce the most grain for the least cost of labor, land, machinery, and inputs (such as seed and fertilizer)? The farmers who are the best at maximizing this equation — the most “efficient” farmers — are the most likely to stay in business. As the “least efficient” farmers and farming practices disappear, farming as a whole becomes more and more efficient. This has brought enormous innovation and gains in productivity. Yields of corn, for example, have risen from about 30 bushels per acre in 1940 to around 120 bushels per acre today.

Land o’plenty of problems.

Photo: USDA.

Achieving that kind of efficiency is the promise of our market-based system, and in many ways, it’s a good thing; theoretically, at least, more people could be fed with less land. But what about the Dead Zone, the herbicides in groundwater, the manure in streams? Wouldn’t a really efficient solution to human needs include a healthy fishery downstream of our farms, and plenty of pure water beneath them? Why hasn’t the free-market system — our most vaunted tool for solving humanity’s problems — delivered these goods as well?

After interviewing farmers, farm advocates, environmentalists, and policy makers, my colleagues and I have concluded that part of the answer lies in our society’s definition of efficiency. The kind of efficiency that determines whether a farmer earns a profit and manages to hold on to his land is a very particular efficiency. It is the efficiency of producing just one thing — a single crop — with the frugal use of a few other things — labor, land, equipment, and so forth. There is nothing in this equation about maintaining the health of the Gulf of Mexico. That is why the Gulf of Mexico has a Dead Zone and why that Dead Zone is growing.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There is nothing in our current definition of efficiency that is a natural law. We could reorient our thinking to expand what we reward. We could begin to think of clean water and healthy soil the way we think of wheat and barley — as products of farming. Many European countries have done just that; they hold farmers responsible for water purification and biodiversity as well as crops, and offer payments for these kinds of productivity.

Misting the point: spraying with diswashing detergent and cooking oil.

Photo: USDA.

In addition to expanding what outcomes we reward, we could expand the list of things we want our farmers to be frugal with. There is a clear economic incentive to be frugal with labor and capital; why not also with soil, water, and community quality of life? Getting our markets to work for us requires figuring out how to reward the careful use of these resources.

It’s not that we lack the policy instruments. Economists already have a toolbox full of suggestions, from stewardship payments to pollution taxes, to encourage ecologically friendly agricultural practices. But we won’t make use of these tools until we stop expecting that competition on a narrow definition of efficiency can somehow deliver broader goals. That is like a university selecting its first-year class based only on SAT scores and then expecting the students to excel at football and chamber music.

These are not things to be left up to chance. If you want football and music — or healthy water and thriving ecosystems — these goals must shape the criteria that determine who is successful enough to participate in your system. Just as the university’s admissions criteria must give some credit to musical or athletic skill, we need to use tools such as taxes and payment incentives to make sure that the most profitable farmers are the ones whose farms produce healthy food, healthy water, healthy topsoil, and healthy habitat. When our policy is informed by such an expanded definition of efficiency, oxygen levels will rise once more in the gulf, and the headlines will proclaim, “The Dead Zone Is Shrinking.”

I thought we were getting an early start, but this is “Back To School Specials Week” and the store is crowded. We stand before the display rack, immobilized at first by the dozens of options lined up on the wall. Black, blue, purple, pink, white, red; plain or covered with butterflies, ponies, baseballs, fire trucks; embroidered or studded with flashing lights; fastened with Velcro or buckles or laces. The laces are plain or beaded. The beads are stars or dinosaurs or flowers or bats.

Jenna begins to pick up the shoes off of their Plexiglas stands. I can see the question forming in the way she lifts them up and sets them down so thoughtfully. Which style does she want? Which will show the world — her new classmates, her new teacher — who she is? I want to stop her, to derail that train of thought. I want her to know herself, her true worth, her unalterable value. She is the child who runs fast downhill with flying braids. She is the girl who crawls into the chicken coop on her belly to grab a squawking hen day after day, until it will eat grain from her hand and sit in her lap. She is the one who smiles with a dimple and can always think of one more question. Flashing lights and sparkling beads add nothing to all of this.

Straight to the source: a Vietnam sweatshop.

Photo: Dara O’Rourke.

But I don’t say anything. She does need shoes. It will soon be too cold for her sandals, which are the only shoes that fit her now. I don’t know what else to do, where else to go, so we sit down on a bench to try on some shoes. While she strides off to a mirror, I ask the salesperson if any of the shoes scattered at our feet are made in the U.S. He shrugs. I can’t tell if he is tired of the question or tired of fitting shoes. “Some of these companies used to manufacture in the states,” he says, “but not anymore. They can’t compete. Unless you want a very expensive handmade kind of shoe, you won’t find anything made in the U.S.”

I want to ask him who made the shoes Jenna is standing in now. I picture a child in Indonesia, a teenager in the Dominican Republic. I want to ask if he knows how much of my $36 the assembler earned. But his tiredness defeats me. I think he owns this store, and in the fluorescent “buy one get one free” sign on the door I can see his struggle to survive in a town that now hosts Wal-Mart, K-Mart, BJs, and Ames.

Eventually we settle on some sneakers that satisfy my daughter. They seem sturdy and fit well. They are white, with pink hearts. They have no beads, but in a long and complex negotiation, we agree to buy two sets of shoelaces (stars and flowers) to be laced on at home.

Always before when I’ve thought of sneakers, I’ve thought of their costs to others, the impact of the solvents and plastics, the fossil fuel to transport them, the injustice to the assemblers. But driving home I feel a sadness that is more personal than any of that.

Tie one on.

I can’t shake the feeling that my daughter’s sense of her own completeness within herself has just shifted. Now that she likes the idea of herself in white-and-pink sneakers with hearts, I worry that she will come to like her real, sneakerless self correspondingly less. I worry that she will come to need things to feel happy.

But children are resilient, and this story has a postscript. Two days later Jenna wears her new shoes to play hide-and-seek in a field of buckwheat. The sneakers, laces and hearts and all, turn brownish green. She is mildly sad, but nowhere near broken-hearted.

I like the shoes better this way, probably because I can see a little hope in them now. My girl who runs fast down hills is still here, pink sneakers or not. Our real selves are pretty tough, and they have a way of shining through. They don’t just vanish with the first glimpse of pale-blue ponies and flashing soccer balls.

But right now, in this culture, the ponies and flashing lights are everywhere, and I am starting to understand that one of my jobs with my children is to help them keep track of their real selves. For now, I think that means spending more time running through the buckwheat and less time asking them to choose among shoes or toys or brands of crackers. And in a few years, I think that it might mean asking, at just the right moment, in front of some tantalizing display of shoes (or jeans, or jewelry), “Can you depend on this to make you happy? Will the way that you play the drums, or write a poem, or take care of your friends change if you choose these shoes over those?”

I can already hear them saying, “Oh Mom!” and see them rolling their eyes, but I think they will have some thoughts on the subject, and I intend to listen with all my heart.

A Cobb-hilled together community.

It is almost exactly two months since my family moved into our house, clustered with 22 others on this hillside in Vermont. Our new home is part of Cobb Hill Cohousing. Not only do we own this snug, sturdy half of a duplex, we are also part-owners of more than 200 acres of farmland and forest, a few barns, and a soon-to-be-completed “common house” where we will have space for meetings, dances, and big community dinners. I listen to the laughter from the next porch, look around me at the lights in the windows across the way, and give thanks.

Six years ago, a group of strangers and causal acquaintances met on a farmhouse porch in New Hampshire to talk about what we longed for — community, contribution, a working farm, land to care for, a place for children to grow up with a sense of belonging. I was astonished to discover that these people seemed to be yearning for the same things I was. Right away, I sensed that if this thing we were proposing really happened, I would be changed by it. If I had been a parent then, I might have understood that change as akin to what happens when you have a child — when you open your heart to something fragile that lives beyond your control.

Now I am a parent; when we moved here two months ago, I watched my five-year-old daughter carry fairly substantial boxes up onto our rental truck. I was amazed that a child who was not even conceived at the time of those early meetings was now big enough to help with the move. If someone had told me, at that first meeting, that I would be the mother of a kindergartener by the time I lived wherever it was we were going to end up, I would have laughed out loud — or fled the whole project. I would not have believed that it could take so long to bring our dream to fruition.

Building the dream.

It has taken six years to move from discussions of a different relationship with land and food to this hillside, with its patchwork of vegetable gardens, hayfields, pasture, sugar-bush, and forest. Six years for decisions to emerge from dreams: Yes, we will live on these farms, not any of those others. No, we won’t live in dorm rooms and share one common kitchen. Yes, we will build near the village and not at the far, beautiful end of our land. No, we won’t have a constructed wetland, but yes, we will have composting toilets.

Very little here is exactly as I imagined it would be, but it is what it is. And it is beautiful: when the mist rises in the morning, when the children run through the tall grass, when we admit that we don’t know what we are doing but hold fast to our conviction that there is a better way. We carry our fears for the world, and our fears for our children, and our own imperfections, and still insist that we know beauty when we see it. I wouldn’t say we’ve arrived at any of those goals we listed on the farmhouse porch six springs ago. But to be here with a group of people who insist that those goals are possible and worthy is an incredible gift.

At work in the community garden.

I keep waiting to feel as though I have arrived at my destination, or at least that I am beginning on a new path. But moving in hasn’t felt so momentous after all. Things just keep going along. Tomorrow, there is a chicken coop to clean and raspberries to pick. There is a meeting to organize. There are children who would like a grown-up to walk with them in the woods; there is the first ripe tomato to bring home for supper. Slowly, I am realizing that this community is nothing like a final destination. It is simply a place from which we keep on going, doing the best we can and savoring what we have been given.

In this world with its violence and poverty, its hungry children and threatened habitats, I search for something in my own experiences with Cobb Hill to offer about making progress toward dreams. But what I am left with feels not all that wise. I wish I knew some method to move dreams forward more quickly, and along a straighter path. But maybe it’s for the best that I don’t. These slower, winding paths have their bumps and surprises, their sadness and loss; they spell more work than you could ever have expected at the outset, and perhaps more than you thought yourself capable of taking on. But it’s because of the bumps in these roads that things can shift. New ways can grow out of old. Bit by bit, a vision can grow into something solid, a reality. And that new solid thing you have created provides a place to stand and see the next bit of vision as it stretches out in front of you.

Maple leaf sag.

“We had a friend over this morning, an expert in landscaping. I mentioned that we were thinking of planting a sugar maple tree. He told us that maybe we shouldn’t, because climate change could make it impossible for sugar maples to live in Vermont in a matter of decades.”

For a moment all we can do is stand together in the April sunshine and try to comprehend Vermont without sugar maples. None of that dappled welcoming shade on summer afternoons. Fewer splashes of red on the hills each October. Children who must go to the library to learn how maple syrup used to be made in their hometowns.

Reports on the problems plaguing ecosystems around the world keep streaming at us, even as people around the world kill and maim each other in the name of security, justice, or revenge. All the while our government systematically undermines the sort of international agreements — from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change to the anti-ballistic missile treaty — that could make the world a safer place.

Just now it is easy to listen to the voice of despair, the voice that says, “Anyone who thinks there’s a way out doesn’t understand the magnitude of the problem.”

Of course, despair does nothing to guarantee our children a world with sugar maples and safety. If we assume all is lost — if we stop working for change — we create a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it is one thing to recognize this fact and another to keep going day after day in the face of frightening trends and a reckless national leadership.

Donella Meadows.

I don’t think there is a magic cure for despair, but there are things I’ve learned from watching people who are able to carry on bravely working in the face of seemingly intractable problems. Especially I have learned from the woman who founded the institute where I work. Donella Meadows was a scientist and writer who spent 30 years analyzing and communicating about problems ranging from poverty to pollution without allowing despair to slow her stride. From watching her in action, I’ve created a short list I turn to when despair threatens.

In their deepest essence, people are good. We’ve created social and economic rules that make it hard for us to act out of this goodness, but what we have created we can change. We could tax pollution and consumption and reward land stewardship. We could invest in healthcare instead of weaponry. From the abolition of slavery to women getting the vote, our history shows us that dedicated people can change the rules under which they live. And Donella Meadow’s example convinced me that focusing on the rules of the dysfunctional system rather than the people trapped by those rules frees us from the preoccupation with blame and enemies that in the end only fuels despair.

Small changes can snowball. When and where this snowballing effect will happen is unpredictable. But if enough people take small stands and make small changes, a system can shift, suddenly and dramatically. It is because of this possibility that a trend is not a prediction. Each time you speak the truth or act out of love for something beyond yourself, you create the possibility of someone else doing the same. You create the possibility of an upward spiral.

It will be a great adventure. Imagine how you would live in a better world, and then try to live that way in this one. Not everything you do will take off into a snowball of change, but everything you do is an opportunity to live your life out of your deepest convictions. When she wasn’t writing or teaching, Donella Meadows rejoiced in the fertility of a vegetable garden or the satisfaction of insulating a farmhouse wall. She always lived out her global convictions in small, practical ways — in one community, on one piece of land. We live in uncertain times, but we can relish the beauty and resiliency all around us, and we can align our lives with both.

There is so much at stake. The trends are scary and they seem likely to get worse before they get better. There are going to be times, perhaps many of them, when we think, “I don’t make a difference, and it’s too late anyway.” But always, we have the option to reply in a voice that is just a little bit louder than that sly whisper — the voice that is saying, “People are good. Small changes can snowball. It will be a great adventure.”

From Jenna to the world:
Please stop making all this pollution. It’s making all the animals sick and die. The fish can’t live if the coral can’t live and the polar bears can’t live if the fish can’t live.

Approaching the problems of polar bears and coral reefs by writing a letter to the world makes sense if you think like a four-year-old. Surely, people would not knowingly live in ways that threaten polar bears or coral reefs. If people understood the consequences of their behavior, the world would change.

A bear of a problem.

My grown-up mind wishes my daughter’s theory worked. But I’ve tried it enough times myself to know that asking people to act for the good of the future is necessary but not sufficient.

So I’ve been trying to prepare my little girl for the possibility that her letter won’t save the polar bears. We’ve begun to talk about how it is that people can know the polar bears are in danger and nevertheless feel unable to change course. “Sometimes,” I tell her, “people don’t do what would be best for something far away or far in the future because they feel trapped by something else more immediate, more close by.”

This is a simple idea, but four-year-olds aren’t the only ones to suggest that we can solve our environmental and social problems simply by calling on people to be more responsible to future generations. Listen to these words, from a speech delivered by President Bush in early March:

The whole design of free-market capitalism depends upon free people acting responsibly. Business people must answer not just to the demands of the market or self-interest, but to the demands of conscience. The bottom line of the balance sheet defines a business’s goal, but not the sum of responsibilities of its leaders. Management should respect workers. A firm should be loyal to the community, mindful of the environment.

The president is right, of course, as far as he goes. We won’t get anywhere if we don’t expand the boundaries of what we feel responsible for. The trouble with this logic is that it neglects the possibility that short-term goals, dictated by the balance sheet, can conflict with our long-term responsibilities.

Put differently, Bush’s speech invites the question of whether businesses struggling to survive in an age of consolidation can really factor in long-term environmental and social concerns while focusing on short-term profit. Too often, the answer is no. In our current economic system, reducing carbon emissions, restoring a wetland, or phasing out toxic chemicals leads to higher costs and lower profits. And making choices that lead to lower profits can mean risking your business or your job.

S’aint ordinary behavior.

Appeals to conscience will be sufficient to solve our environmental and social problems only if people are willing and able to risk their very livelihoods to do the right thing for the long-term. Some people will rise to this challenge. But there must be more effective ways to create a livable world for our children than to call on everyone to become saints.

We could start by looking for ways to ease the conflict between the short-term goals of the bottom line and our long-term responsibility to the future. In last month’s column, I wrote about the importance of price tags reflecting the true cost of the food we eat, so that consumers understand (and pay for) the relative social and environmental cost of, say, an organic banana versus a conventionally grown banana. That same logic can and should be extended to all other goods.

If all of the costs to society — including the health-care expenses and environmental cleanup costs — were reflected in the price of the products we purchase, then reducing pollution would boost the bottom line. If businesses were paid for stewarding our shared natural resources, then restoring a wetland could reap profits. In an economy that included all costs and values, people wouldn’t have to struggle to resolve the conflict between short-term goals and long-term responsibilities. The most profitable, valuable businesses would be the best community citizens.

Being the most competitive, the most innovative, providing the most value to shareholders — these are powerful motivators in our economic system. If we were to adjust the rules of doing business so that working for nature and for people was required for economic success, all of the energy and creativity currently channeled into the business world would also go into the service of future generations.

Going bananas.

On a trip to Belize, Hannah and other home-schooled teenagers saw monkeys, the rainforest, and Mayan villages. But the memory that seems to stand out most vividly is of a banana plantation. The workers at the plantation Hannah visited do not wear protective clothing. When planes fly overhead to spray pesticide, the workers take shelter under the nearest banana leaf.

“They say the chemicals make their chests hurt,” Hannah told me.

Hannah reported that mothers bathe their babies in the tubs in which the bananas are washed, sponging off the babies with the residue of whatever chemicals make their fathers’ chests hurt.

At the store where I shop, organic bananas cost 79 cents per pound. Non-organic bananas cost 40 cents per pound. Otherwise, the fruits look identical: bright yellow, cheerful, innocent.

But somewhere between Central America and the U.S. almost the whole story of these bananas has been stripped away. Did the person who picked them earn a fair wage? What chemicals were used? How were they used? All that complexity is reduced to a sticker that says “organic” or “conventional” — and a price tag.

If Hannah stood in the produce section and told her story, how many people in my town would bring home their first bunch of organic bananas?

None of us can act on information we do not have. The organic label doesn’t guarantee that the pickers were paid enough to feed their children. The conventional label doesn’t mean that pesticides were used irresponsibly. And 39 cents extra per pound doesn’t mean anything except 39 cents extra per pound

Once I imagine Hannah standing witness in the banana aisle, my imagination takes off. I begin to populate the whole store with providers of missing information.

Who Moved My Cheese?

Beside the cheese case, I place my friends Marsha and Gail, partners in a small cheese-making business. They could explain what you couldn’t taste in their cheese: how local farmers are now benefiting from the fair price the cheese-makers pay for milk; how the high pasture where the cows graze turns a brilliant shade of green in early spring; how the milk for this cheese never traveled in a gas-guzzling tractor-trailer truck because the cheese room is next door to the milking parlor.

The cheese stands alone.

Their cheese is more expensive than others, but if you could see the farmers, the pasture, and the cleaner air as a part of their product, you’d begin to understand that they are offering a bargain.

This missing information is vital, because a system that makes decisions based on a single variable can only fulfill a single goal. You wouldn’t expect a healthy garden if you only optimized the phosphorous content of your soil. You wouldn’t expect a healthy family if you made all choices based on the needs of only one of your two children.

And yet the reigning assumption in our world is that an economy that takes only price into account can still somehow deliver other goals. Under this assumption, if children are in poverty we must have a “child-poverty crisis.” If ecosystems are struggling we must have an “environmental crisis.” But these are not distinct problems. They are symptoms of a single deep crisis — the crisis of an economy operating with insufficient information and a fundamental inability to pursue any goal beyond that of price.

Whether we are trying to help an estuary or an impoverished nation, we find ourselves struggling against the full force of an economic system that is designed to optimize the bottom line no matter what the consequences for people and nature. This isn’t evil or malevolence. It is just a powerful, informationally bereft system in single-minded pursuit of its only goal.

Instead of exhausting ourselves pushing against such a system, perhaps it is time to redesign it.

Every veggie has a story.

Already we have ideas and technologies that we could borrow creatively. If Fed-Ex can track the exact location of any package anywhere in the world, why can’t we know the history of a bunch of bananas? We can handle countless reviews of books and movies without clogging up the entertainment industry, so why can’t we have reviews of the social and environmental impacts of wedges of cheese, bottles of wine, and bouquets of flowers? Why can’t we estimate the true costs of products and make sure that cost shows up in the final price? Why can’t we find ways to reward the efforts of careful stewards and responsible manufacturers?

People will call me naive for suggesting such ideas. People will say that it is impossible to consciously design a more intelligent economy.

In response I simply say that we won’t know it is impossible until we try. And I ask you to count up all the people who have ever wanted to do the right thing and found it impossible. Impossible because the right thing for land or people doesn’t have a sufficient return on investment to satisfy shareholders, because a responsibly produced product cannot be sold for a low enough price to be competitive, or because a consumer can’t tell which product was made with the future in mind.

Like water held back by a dam, the frustration felt by these people trying to do the right thing represents power; once we see how the battles we are fighting are the product of the obsolete assumptions of our economic system, we will be able to access that power. That is when we will see the veterans of battles to save the whales working alongside the defenders of children, the developers of solar cells, the organizers of migrant laborers, and the business leader of the highest ideals

The world has never known a coalition like that, but it is high time to find out what it could accomplish.