2022 Life Logs, Day 188: July 7, 1942
Date: Thursday, July 7, 2022
Weather: Sunny, Breezy, Warm; High 76, Low 61 degrees
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
If a day can be described as delicious, then today was just that. The sky was blue and the sun was shining brightly. There was a steady breeze. It was not too hot, not too cold, just right. Jed posted a copy of the today’s weather on Facebook this morning and said, “This is why people come here to Cape Cod for the summer….” And this is one reason why people who live on Cape Cod love it here. But instead of taking advantage of the perfect weather, I spent the day inside thinking about Mark Daniel Handley who was born 80 years ago on July 7, 1942. An early morning text from my son steered my thinking. Justin sent a link to an article about The Limits to Growth that he remembered hearing his dad talk about from time to time.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-infamous-1972-report-that-warned-of-civilizations-collapse/
Justin was correct. Mark did often talk about the 1972 report, The Limits to Growth published by the Club of Rome. It was the result of a study that used a computer model to simulate the consequences of human action on earth’s systems. The question was, “What is the possibility of exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources?” The answers published in The Limits to Growth report captured the world’s attention. It stated that unchanged population growth and resource consumption would dramatically worsen the conditions for humanity within forty to fifty years. And that was fifty years ago. My question this morning was, “Have population growth and resource consumption dramatically worsened the conditions for humanity in the last fifty years?” I’ll let you answer that question for yourself. Unfortunately, at the time, this report was seen as a doomsday scenario by many. In the current article Justin sent, it states that The Limits to Growth model described scenarios in which humanity either reined itself in and got more sustainable and equitable, thus flourishing, or humanity continued letting capitalists plunder the planet and our civilization to its death. It outlined serious consequences to our actions. But by the 1980’s Reagan era, people were no longer talking about limits. Reagan’s personal response was that there are no limits to growth. We could have it all. Really?
I met political activist Mark Handley in 1973. The following is an excerpt from the Prologue to my book-in-the-making, The Voyage of Windbird. “There he was . . . the man of my dreams. I just didn’t know it quite yet. He was standing at the check-in desk at the Cross Keys Inn in Baltimore when he first caught my eye. I was there for an Eastern Public Television conference to give a presentation on how to help teachers better utilize instructional television programs in their classrooms. Surely, he wasn’t there for our meeting; he didn’t look like the rest of us. Even though the year was 1973, there were no hippies in public television management, at least none that I knew. At this conference, all the men wore blue suits with conservative ties and I and the other two women at the conference were dressed in suits. But this guy, he was wearing herringbone bell bottoms, expensive bell bottoms, mind you, but still bell bottoms. His shirt was sprinkled with little blue flowers like those on feed sacks in days past. His wool vest didn’t match his shirt or his pants. It had geometric designs in shades of tan and brown. His hair was a little too long and he had a beard. I walked on thinking he could not be part of our group.” A few hours later, I found out differently.
In the late 1960’s, Mark had returned from a two-year stint as part of a team setting up an instructional television system for the US government in American Samoa. He had returned to a country deeply divided by the Viet Nam War and in 1971 he joined a newly formed group called Movement for a New Society. At that point in my life, I had no idea we needed a new society. I was clueless. But Mark was hardcore. He had become close friends of one of the co-founders of Movement for a New Society, George Lakey, and somehow through that connection, he met Dana and Dennis Meadows, who in 1972 published The Limits to Growth. I never met any of these people because hours after I first saw Mark, we knew we were meant for each other. And only seven months later, we had sold everything we owned, bought five acres of land next to a national forest in northern Idaho, and were building a log cabin where we would live without any modern conveniences, including electricity. We believed there were limits to growth and we were trying to do our part to reduce consumption. Things changed, however, when we found out we were going to have a baby. We only had $250 of the $7,000 we started with and there were absolutely no prospects for employment for us in northern Idaho. We continued for the next ten years to try and live in a sustainable manner, but in 1984, we returned to what others called a ‘normal’ way of life.
So, these are the thoughts that have been swirling around in my head all day and I have a proposition for you. If you knew Mark, I propose you give him an 80th birthday gift. Think of just one thing you can and will do to reduce consumption starting today. Your gift can be something small like making sure you always turn the lights out when you leave a room or taking shorter showers. Or it can be something big like limiting travel in a fuel consuming vehicle or changing your diet to eat more vegetables which are more sustainable than more meat. And if nothing else, I do hope you will read the article linked above. Whatever you do, think of Mark when you do it:-)
Mark’s farwell parties 067
