Stories by Donella H. Meadows
is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College.
Meadows writes: "Snowmobiles continued to vroom unhampered through Yellowstone National Park this winter, though beleaguered park officials had intended to close some of the trails. Environmentalists pounded for trail closure."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Meadows writes: "Nearly everyone who has been to the solar village Gaviotas, east of the Andes in Colombia, calls it a utopia. But it isn't, says Paolo Lugari, its founder. That word means in Greek 'no place.' Gaviotas has existed, however improbably, for more than 30 years now. Lugari says it's a 'topia' -- simply a place."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Meadows writes: "The courts declared what everyone knew -- the funding of local schools through local property tax creates huge inequities, because we practice residential apartheid. Rich folks tend to congregate in rich towns, poor folks in poor towns with little property, not much tax, not great schools. We like to talk about equal opportunity for all, but we're a long way from providing it."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Meadows writes: "In this country not only do we hold people innocent until proven guilty, we do the same for chemicals. Their behavior may be suspect, they may be found regularly at the scenes of crimes, they may fail their lab tests, but still we let them go free -- indeed we multiply, spread and circulate them -- until someone proves beyond all doubt that they are harmful."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Meadows writes: "A new book [Downsizing the U.S.A.] says we are so ticked off because things -- from cities to corporations to governments to schools to the whole economy -- are too big. We pursue quantity instead of quality, go for more and lose sight of enough. Our unthinking devotion to growth drive us to create economic and social monsters that drive us, instead of serving us."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Meadows writes: "A year ago Ms. Zabriskie got fed up with the flood of junk mail coming at her. 'I decided to keep all the catalogs that came from January 1 to December 31, 1997,' she writes. 'The enclosed photo shows what came of it.' The picture shows a smiling Ms. Zabriskie, one arm resting on a stack of catalogs that reaches to her elbow. There are 371 of them, she writes. They weigh 104 pounds."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Meadows writes: "Like many Americans, I snapped last week. Snapped off the TV. And the radio, even venerable NPR ... I stomped around delivering my own gloomy state of the union address to myself. Then I realized that I was not the one who needed to hear it ... So I wrote down my state of the union message, addressed to them all in that august hall -- president, Congress, the press, the cabinet -- all the perpetrators -- and this is my way of delivering it to them."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Meadows writes: "The label 'veggie libel law' makes the whole affair sound silly. But Oprah Winfrey is being sued for insulting beef, not beans. And the case is not trivial. If Oprah loses, we all lose some free speech and food safety protections."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Meadows writes: "I was in Bangkok in 1994, stuck in a bus in one of that city's classic traffic jams with 20 environmentalists from 12 Asian countries. We could see around us at least 50 huge construction cranes hovering over high-rises on their way up. 'Who is going to occupy all those offices and condos?' we asked our Thai colleagues, who shrugged helplessly. Now Bangkok has $20 billion worth of unsold office towers and residential complexes."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Meadows writes: "The Kyoto climate conference is over, the holidays are over, it's the morning after. Our government, with other governments, has promised to cut back greenhouse gas emissions. The promises, ours and theirs, are far too weak to stabilize the atmosphere."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Meadows writes: "Until recently I couldn't have told you the square footage of anything. But for the first time in my life, I'm designing a house, and I've developed a sensitivity to built area ... As I took down my 1997 calendar, I discovered on every page a house with its square-foot measurement."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Meadows writes: "A new computer model of the long-term future of the world does something hardly any model -- computer or mental -- ever does. It explores the fact that we all see the world through biases ... Like most computer models, this one is used not to predict the future but to test possibilities. What if great new solar energy technologies are invented (or not)? What if the climate is way more (or less) sensitive than scientists think it is? What if birth rates go on dropping (or don't)?"
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Meadows writes: "The world shrimp catch has tripled since 1970. It's now 50 percent beyond what the UN Food and Agriculture Organization figures is the long-term sustainable limit. In several countries shrimp fisheries are using more and more boats to bring in the same quantity of shrimp. These overextended fisheries continue only because, like failing fisheries everywhere, they are subsidized by governments."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Meadows writes: "The idea Bill Drayton began working on 16 years ago seemed far-out then and seems farther out now. The talents required for entrepreneurship, he realized, need not be applied only to business. Entrepreneurship for public gain is even more admirable than for private gain and even more necessary."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes: "The CO2 in the air has been going down and down and down, with a lot of short-term variation. During the last few hundreds of thousands of years it's been as low as 180 ppm in ice ages and as high as 280 ppm in warm spells ... Then, just a couple hundred years ago, an eyeblink by my reckoning, the big-brainers figured out how to burn oil and coal and gas."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "Windows is taking over the world, not because it's better, just because it's bigger. It started with IBM marketing muscle. Computer users, especially in the business world, adopted it simply because everyone else did. More software was written for DOS, because the market was bigger. Mac users regretfully switched over, needing to be compatible with co-workers. The more they did that, the more others had to do it. The market is full of inferior products that dominate simply because they're first or biggest."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes: "Well-off people may feel justified in having a conniption because they can't find the right new outfit or they may get drunk because they have to postpone their vacation. But they can't understand how a poor father can lash out in frustration because he can't find a job, or how an abused teenage girl can turn to drugs or sex for solace. If people could understand, they would see how to take action."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "There were plenty of bad reasons why Congress turned down President Clinton's 'fast track' trade bill ... But there were good reasons, too, strengthened by the fact that NAFTA, the free trade agreement with Mexico, has failed to fulfill the grandiose promises made for it on either side of the border. Since NAFTA Americans are beginning to hear the pro-trade drumbeat -- globalization is inevitable, we'll be left in the competitive dust, trade grows the economy, trade creates jobs -- as so much bunkum."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes: "The other day a friend sent me a brochure put out by an organization called Responsible Wealth. I could hardly believe the name. Reading on, I could hardly believe what it stands for. 'We are business leaders and wealthy individuals, among the top five percent of income earners and asset holders in the US,' the brochure leads off. 'We are concerned about the rise in power of large corporations and the growing gap between the rich and everyone else.'"
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "David Orr, head of the environmental studies program at Oberlin College, understands that young people learn from everything they do and everything around them. Even buildings. So he started thinking about the structure in which he conducts his classes ... David Orr decided that he wanted to teach in a building that did not undo his curriculum. His students worked with a dozen architects, visited all kinds of buildings, read the literature, considered retrofitting an old building and finally drew up design criteria for a new one."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes: "Listening to climate change talk in the U.S. and in Europe, I have to wonder whether we're all living on the same planet. Several European governments have detailed plans for cutting their economies' 1990 fossil fuel use (hence emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide) by 15 or 20 percent by the year 2005. Meanwhile the U.S. president has generously offered to get U.S. emissions back down to their 1990 level -- twice as high per capita as the European level -- by the year 2008 or 2010 or maybe 2012."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes: "My Dutch friend Wouter Biesiot (pronounced "Vowter Beesio") was diagnosed with colon cancer in December 1993. He was operated upon, he endured a year of chemotherapy, and for two years thereafter we hoped for the best. Then last spring they found a tumor near his liver, and the doctors told him he is beyond medical help. What can one do, when a friend receives a sentence like that? Wouter is only 46 years old."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes: "In one of those strange juxtapositions of life, a sane little book arrived in my mail this week as if it were meant to be contrasted with the insane debate our senators were holding on campaign reform. 'The Technique of Consensus' the book is called, its author is Richard H. Graff, he published it himself."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes: "Endangered plants and animals contribute neither hard nor soft money to political campaigns. People who care about nature are more numerous but less focused than people who want to log, mine, dam, drain, spray, pave or otherwise impose their will upon the few remaining patches of undisturbed nature. So you can imagine what the latest rewrite of the Endangered Species Act looks like."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes: "I have just visited two farms in Europe, both of which claim to demonstrate the future of agriculture -- though they are about as different as two farms could be ... "
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes: "A newspaper near and dear to me recently ran a story about the accidental death of a 17-year-old. At the end was a sentence informing us that the young man once had a run-in with the law, unrelated to the tragic circumstances of his death. His relatives and friends pelted the paper with letters asking why it was necessary to include that last sentence. I wish the folks entrusted with informing the public would ask themselves that family's question every day. Who needs this information? How does it affect its subjects? Is it news or is it gossip?"
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows looks at how the popular concept of the "American Dream Home" has mutated over the years. The purpose of articles like "The New American Dream Home" in the Sunday magazine section of Meadow's daily newspaper is, of course, to practice the great American art of making us dissatisfied with what we've got. This particular piece even tells us, without the slightest hesitation, what we want.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes on the turnaround of a destroyed floodplain. "... With the partnership of the city and the utility, that kind of thinking -- let's turn waste into resources -- has been moving steadily down the Intervale, turning it from a dump to a source of beauty, recreation, food and jobs."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "You would think that if any publication would NOT receive letters enflamed with political opinion, it would be 'Hemmings Motor News.' But there, in last December's issue, is a letter that sounds like a replay from the Rush Limbaugh show. 'From what I've read, the theory of ozone depletion is a hoax,' it starts. 'When the US signed the so-called Montreal Accord, pop science won out over common sense.'"
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "So the cigarette companies have negotiated a deal that would limit public control of their product and limit their liability for the millions of people who have died using that product. As the nation debates their offer, I hear people branding tobacco executives as somehow uniquely evil. I've just read a book that leads me to believe they are neither unique nor evil. Just trapped in a system that forces them and many others to do evil things. The book is 'Toxic Deception' by Dan Fagin and Marianne Lavelle. Its subtitle is: 'How the Chemical Industry Manipulates Science, Bends the Law, and Endangers Your Health.'"
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "Five years ago the leaders of 120 nations assembled at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and signed a list of environmental pledges called Agenda 21. June 23-27 the U.N. General Assembly will hold a special "Rio Plus Five" session to check their progress. There has been no progress."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "If you have a negative bias toward Cuba, you could say that it still has a precarious food supply. If you have a positive bias, you could say that Cuba, suddenly deprived of half its food and most of its agricultural inputs, has not only maintained but increased its food supply in a way that creates jobs and improves the environment."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes: "A recent New York Times/CBS poll says that 89 percent of us think our political campaign system should be fundamentally changed. Just 8 percent of us think it needs only minor tinkering ... We're not dummies. According to the poll, 68 percent of us do not believe Congress has any intention of changing the campaign finance laws -- and 53 percent of us don't think President Clinton does either."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes: "Well, folks, now we know. Nature is worth $33 trillion dollars a year. That's a medium estimate. The real value could be as low as $16 trillion or as high as $54 trillion. To put those numbers in perspective, the value of the entire output of the world economy each year is $18 trillion. That comes to $3,000 a year, on average, for each human on the planet. Nature provides goods and services worth somewhere between $2,600 and $9,000 per person per year. The calculation was made by a team of ecologists, economists, and geographers from twelve prestigious universities and laboratories in three countries. It was published this week in the journal Nature."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "During the long, terrible decades of Russia's communist rule, we systematically exaggerated its strength and resolve. It was, for sure, an awful place. Every time I went there, I would find myself in tears or fury at the way people were treated, the secrecy and fear and ugliness. But all it took was one look around with open eyes, seeing what was there instead of what we had been taught, to understand that the USSR was poor, shabby, physically and politically crumbling."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes: "On the Sunday after Michael Dorris committed suicide, the news was announced, gently and sadly, in a church here in the valley where he lived. A bit of the story came out that Sunday morning. Our neighbor, teacher, favorite writer was separated from the woman we knew as the love of his life, the even more celebrated author Louise Erdrich. He was facing a charge that could have cost him all contact with their children. He had attempted suicide a few weeks before. Friends had been talking with him ever since, many times a day, trying to help him find his way back into the light. His desperation had finally outwitted their care and concern."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Television is so much a part of our lives that we rarely step back and reflect on what it does to us. A new organization called TV-Free America offers us an annual opportunity to do that. Inspired by the Smoke-Out Days that give cigarette addicts a boost toward kicking their habit, TV-Free America holds a National TV-Turnoff week every April. This year it runs from April 24 through April 30.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes: "I don't suppose any place can boast of a happy solution to school funding or land taxes. Most of us live with a set of compromises that endure only out of habit. No one questions the status quo very hard, because once you start tinkering, exposing little illogical holes, a lot of suppressed steam is likely to burst out."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "If the EPA carries out its plan to strengthen the Clean Air Act, that will be the end of Fourth of July fireworks. Backyard barbecues will be banned. You will probably lose your job. The economy will crash. All for a few asthmatic kids, who should just stay inside on smoggy days. So industry ads and spokespersons are saying. It's astonishing. They still hire public relations firms at high prices to try to make us believe stuff like this."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes: "On April 6 it will be 1000 DAYS TILL THE YEAR 2000!!! There will be press conferences and a global sing-along. Countdown clocks will be set ticking, aimed for the turning of the millennium ... It's already impossible, I hear, to get a reservation for December 31, 1999 at the world's hot party spots. I have to say, I'm dreading the hype."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
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