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By Jon Kohl '92
I'll never make the pilgrimage to Dartmouth I had planned last year. I'll
never have another chance for a mentoring dose of career advise from Donella
Meadows. As she lied in a coma, all I could do from my Guatemalan apartment was
blitz one last email to her idle account, one last email she will never
read.
If you are reading this, things have improved remarkably and I hope they
only continue to do so. Aside from the many ways you helped me, the world needs
you at full strength!
Five days later on 22 February 2001, Donella Meadows died. Silenced by a
missed opportunity, I was heartened, after all, by the coincidental opportunity
to pen my last words for Dana, but instead directed at Sense of Place.
My words would have focused on how much she affected my life, but instead,
in her death, I now focus on the reincarnation of Sense of Place (SOP). Last
year some Dartmouth students attempted to mount a resurrection of Dartmouth's
and perhaps the nation's first formatted publication distributed across an
electronic network. Between 1989 and 1993, SOP earned national exposure as a
student-run environmental electronic magazine.
Unfortunately the attempted resurrection has apparently failed, and this
article left without a home. But I know the interest is still out there and
therefore share with Dartmouth students by way of The Environmental Studies
Department how Dana Meadows's legacy offers an important lesson for SOP,
starting the day she joined its advisory board. She believed SOP could do more
than just educate students, but change sustainable thinking at Dartmouth for
the better. That reason applies as much today as back when SOP and its
predecessor, ESD News, were all the rage in the postnatal period of the modern
Internet. (See the New York Times article about
SOP.)
Dana was the perfect board member for SOP, as a scientist envisioning new
ways information could change the world sustainably, as a writer and professor
showing the world how to think sustainably, and a practitioner exemplifying how
to live sustainably. All systems are governed by certain behaviors whether they
be rainfall, blood circulation, urban expansion, planetary motion, or
information flow.
As a systems thinker Dana identified myriad ways that human beliefs pervert
these information flows, ultimately degrading our environment and quality of
life. In her column, "Global Citizen," she showed us how people often
do not understand exponential growth, uncertainty, lag times, or how feedback
and redundancy are important for system health -- how scale, values, unseen
physical processes and sleazy politics can change the human score.
For her the connection between human rights, democracy, and environmental
degradation was eminently clear. She breathed a constant campaign against
power's corrupting a system's original design and functions, how the media can
be a weapon, how dark paradigmatic lenses cause us to walk into walls she
called limits of growth.
But of all the concepts that she introduced in her writings over the years,
I want to dial up one that is especially relevant to Sense of Place. It is the
"informationsphere." I first found her discussion about this in the
summer 1990 issue of the Gannett Center Journal, "Changing the World
Through the Informationsphere." The piece was written for Columbia
University journalism students and inspired me to write a paper on how
lobbyists use information for Professor Lynn Mather's Government 6 class. Dana
describes the informationsphere:
Information is the vehicle for feedback in systems, and feedback is the
means of control. A feedback loop is a circular chain of causation from the
physical world to points of decision and back through action to the physical
world (system states and flows). Half of every feedback loop is information. In
that half the system state is compared to some goal. If there is a discrepancy
between what is and what someone thinks ought to be, that brings about a
decision... For a feedback loop to bring the system state to the goal, its
information must be timely, accurate, and noticed.
Between the lines of SOP's mission pulsed the informationsphere. The system
state that we wanted to change back then was Dartmouth, from a very good
environmentally oriented college to the best. The feedback loop acted through
SOP, the actors were the Dartmouth community, and the information as timely,
accurate, and noticed as we could make it.
Dana realized this potential and that is why she elected to be on SOP?s
advisory board. But even before that decision, she had written as much when she
covered ESD News in her 7 July 1990 Global Citizen, called "
The World's First Electronic Magazine." She wrote:
The medium of the ESD News is unique, the format is lively, and the content
is best. A recent issue described the unsustainable old-growth logging
activities of the Plum Creek Timber Company, pointing out that the company?s
chairman is a former Dartmouth trustee. There has been a sizzling exchange of
letters on Dartmouth?s own environmental record, examining everything from
where the dining service buys its beef to how often the college sprays its
trees to what goes out of the smokestack at the power plant. The ESD News has
[even] challenged Dartmouth to establish a dean of the environment.
While SOP is no longer a technological wonder, its function to challenge
Dartmouth is as important now as when Dana first wrote about ESD News. While
the work of Dartmouth environmental veterans such as Jim Hornig and Bill
Hochstin is one in many millions, Dartmouth can still be pushed ahead to lead
in environmental stewardship among American universities. That was always my
vision when I was an undergraduate developing Sense of Place.
And no matter how hard I tried, Dana was there to push me a little further.
When I was in her Environmental Journalism class, she frankly told me that I
made a better editor than a writer. Perhaps I should have taken that as a
compliment, instead I have spent a decade trying to prove to her otherwise.
And that should be the role of a resurrected SOP, to push Dartmouth ever
further, even when it thinks it is doing the best it can. Push for an
environmental dean or push for an environmental code as part of Dartmouth?s
code of ethics or push for a college naturalist, and don?t miss an opportunity
to promote Dartmouth?s many environmental resources. Whatever SOP were to
promote, just remember that lesson in any back issue of "Global
Citizen." Dana pushed every one of her readers and decision-makers around
the world in every column, right up until the very last
one. Allow me to quote her final three paragraphs.
"Does our only possible future consist of watching the disappearance of
the polar bear, the whale, the tiger, the elephant, the redwood tree, the coral
reef, while fearing for the three-year-old?
"Heck, I don't know. There's only one thing I do know. If we believe
that it's effectively over, that we are fatally flawed, that the most greedy
and short-sighted among us will always be permitted to rule, that we can never
constrain our consumption and destruction, that each of us is too small and
helpless to do anything, that we should just give up and enjoy our SUVs while
they last -- well, then yes, it's over. That's the one way of believing and
behaving that gives us a guaranteed outcome.
"Personally, I don't believe that stuff at all. I don't see myself or
the people around me as fatally flawed. Everyone I know wants polar bears and
three-year-olds in our world. We are not helpless and there is nothing wrong
with us except the strange belief that we are helpless and there's something
wrong with us. All we need to do, for the bear and ourselves, is to stop
letting that belief paralyze our minds, hearts, and souls."
While SOP's format would no longer be novel among university publications,
its mission could still be novel in the informationsphere. There is nothing
more motivating for a new publication than a palpable vision. Thus I call on
students to bring back Sense of Place, not for me, not for Dana: Dartmouth has
always been strong in the environment, and with the help of a reincarnated
Sense of Place, it could become the best. Donella Meadows would want nothing
less.
Further reading
For further reading on Donella Meadows, you may read a tribute I wrote for
her on the occasion of her 20th anniversary at Dartmouth. Staff and students of
environmental studies joined to write letters of appreciation. This is the
first time anyone has seen this letter outside of Dana and I, now after nine
years I want to share with you. You may also read about her at www.sustainabilityinstitute.org.
Jon is currently a fiction and non-fiction writer and a consultant in park
planning and ecotourism in Costa Rica. He lives with his Costa Rican wife and
son and facilitates a group that is establishing an ecologically sustainable
intentional community there. To read more of his writing or learn about his
current events, please visit www.jonkohl.com.
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