Stories by Donella H. Meadows
is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College.
Though we humans grandly call ourselves Homo sapiens, "man the wise," we also carry on a constant debate about how smart we really are. The argument goes on, because the answer isn't obvious. There's plenty of evidence of our brilliance and of our enduring foolishness. The ultimate intelligence test is coming from the environment. Are we smart enough to stop destroying our own support systems?
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes: "Maybe it's just that I was a kid, but I remember my public school in a middle-class Midwest town as the center of community life ... I learned to multiply and divide in that school, to play the saxophone, to love books and learning. Surely the way to express my gratitude is to support great schools for the next generation. But for some reason we're not doing that any more."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows on Alar: "If the name Alar means anything to you, it probably means something related to apples and Meryl Streep and hysterical environmentalists. Those mental associations have been nurtured by industry-funded public relations groups, who repeat over and over the claim that the 'Alar scare' was deliberate hype, which alarmed the public unnecessarily and caused irreparable harm to apple growers. They have made Alar the poster child of maligned chemicals."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
"Biosolids" is what they call it now. It used to be called "sludge." By any name, it comes out of a sewage treatment plant, and it can cause raging battles. Wastewater treatment managers, who have tons and tons of the stuff to get rid of, like to spread it on forests or fields. But many raise safety concerns about the practice. So who's right, the sludge spreaders or the sludge opponents? Well, actually, both.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes: "Bipartisanship is the in-word in Washington. What it appears to mean is compromise. Everyone stays stuck in ideology, sniping at the other side a bit more quietly, while deals are made. Cut Medicare more than the Democrats want but less than the Republicans want... Weaken environmental laws, but don't trash them entirely. Holding to the middle, where no one is fully satisfied or terminally outraged, is the unique style of Bill Clinton. He stands for no discernible policy or principles, only for process, conciliation, keeping everyone sort of happy most of the time. The trouble is, compromise is not leadership."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
How many dumb things do you think this country could stop doing? Donella Meadows can think of plenty: "Take Take the CIA, for instance... . CIA higher-ups seem to be constantly leaking secrets to the Russians. It's not clear why we even have secrets any more, nor why the Russians would care... So why have it? Secrets don't mix well with democracy, anyway. I nominate the CIA as a dumb thing we could stop doing."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Feelings, like knowledge, don't directly change anything. But if we don't rush past the feelings or stuff them down, if we take time to admit even the most uncomfortable ones, to accept them, share them, and couple them with knowledge of what is wrong and how it might be fixed, then feelings and knowledge together are motors for change. The feelings make the doings of a technological, cultural, economic and political revolution inevitable.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes on the implications of becoming part of the "cultural creatives" crowd: "According to anthropologist Paul Ray, who seems to have named us, 'this group has no established leaders, no professed ideology and no cohesive sense of community. Its members loosely adhere to humanistic/spiritual ideals and life-styles that are eco-friendly.' ... Our numbers have grown from less than 5 percent of the population a generation ago to nearly 25 percent now. Well, it's nice to feel part of a crowd. Hard to get used to, though."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "This country will be out of oil in 30 years. By 2030 we will pump dry much of the groundwater of the Southwest. We don't hear a peep from our leaders about these problems. But they're in a panic over the possibility that 30 years from now Social Security will go broke. Social Security is the least of our problems."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "Retaining ethically challenged Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House makes little difference to the environment. Much more important were the congressional committee chairmanships handed out last month. Despite Republican assurances to the contrary, those appointments indicate an ongoing disdain for the natural resources of our nation and the people who care about them."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "We are finally getting it. The politicians don't serve us, they serve whoever gives them money. Money screens what we learn about candidates. We are losing our democracy. The only way to get it back is campaign reform. Even the politicians are saying it, which is dangerous. Any 'reform' invented by those who gained power in the present system will be a sham. We should know; we've been through this before."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "I believe there is a real moral majority in this country that is alarmed by the widening gap between the rich and the poor. The moral majority is silenced by the politicians, the corporate leaders, the loud and savvy, who have developed many clever ways to scoff at the compassionate. Magnified by microphones and satellite beams, they perpetuate new scriptures, which assert that the rich deserve every penny they accumulate and the poor deserve despair."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes about case of human suffering induced by government stupidity. The sufferers in this case are Sid and Ruth Lowry of Marshfield, Vermont. The stupidity is in Vermont's fuel assistance program. She writes, "There are plenty of people who want to help other people. In the long run a program based on humanity and creativity would save money. On the neighborly scale of Vermont, just over half a million people, one can imagine it working. With a little less bureaucratic rigidity and a little more funding, it's close to working now. And what about the rest of the country, 260 million people? Well, that's nothing more than 520 groups of half a million each."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "The first commandment of economics is: grow. Grow forever. Companies must get bigger. National economies need to swell by a certain percent each year. People should want more -- make more, earn more, spend more, ever more. The first commandment of the Earth is: enough. Just so much and no more. Just so much soil. Just so much water. Just so much sunshine. Everything born of the earth grows to its appropriate size and then stops."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows on Paul Hawken's book, "The Ecology of Commerce." She writes, "Hawken's book opens with a description of the night he stood up to receive an award for his own company's environmental excellence. Looking at the impact of his business on the earth, Hawken realized that he deserved no such award -- and no company did. The book goes on to list the many ways in which the human economy violates the laws of the planet."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "Is there any kind of ad that CBS, NBC and ABC won't run? Presumably yes -- obscene ads, violent ads, ads for cigarettes and other lethal drugs. And, as Kalle Lasn discovered when he tried to buy 30 seconds of air time, there's another kind of unacceptable ad: one promoting Buy Nothing Day on Nov. 29. CNN, it turns out, will run the ad just before Thanksgiving. No other network will touch it, and Lasn is talking legal action to claim his free speech rights.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "Those of us who think the world needs saving keep busy crusading for our favorite remedies. School vouchers. Campaign finance reform. Strong regulation. No regulation. That long list of mutually inconsistent Holy Grails with which we like to hit each other over the head. There's one solution to the world's problems, however, that I never hear the frenzied activists suggest. Slowing down. Slowing down could be the single most effective solution to the particular save-the-world struggle I immerse myself in -- the struggle for sustainability, for living harmoniously and well within the limits and laws of the earth."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "Everyone breathes a sigh of relief when an election is over. This year my sigh is more heartfelt than usual. While one presidential contender was ranting about 'character' and the other was studiously ignoring the subject, I was teaching an ethics course. The daily contradiction between real ethics and the rhetoric of the politicians was hard to take."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "You have to be well trained by a forestry school or well paid by a lumber company to see beauty in a clearcut. If you haven't been so trained or paid, if you're just an ordinary bloke looking at an expanse of slashed, rutted ground where recently a forest stood, you feel slightly sick. You know violence has been done. Whatever your logical mind tells you about jobs and profits and cheap wood, your conscience whispers that this is no way to treat a forest."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "It's tempting to refuse to dignify the polluted game of modern politics with either our attention or our vote. 'Don't vote, it just encourages them,' some folks say, and more and more of us follow that advice. But I can't bring myself to do it. I rarely get to vote for someone I really admire or something I deeply believe in, but my vote and yours still does make a difference too important to walk away from, especially in the arenas they're not talking about."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "I've recently read John Wargo's book, Our Children's Toxic Legacy, and I'm worried about what pesticides may be doing to people. The book says that of the 325 pesticides that are legally allowed to remain as residues in food, one-third are suspected of causing cancer. One-third are known to disrupt the nervous system. A bunch [are] under investigation for disrupting hormonal signals that guide the development of fetuses, the growth of children, and the ability to reproduce. The damage they do may not show up until the next generation."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "If you are a purist who would just as soon not have any harmful chemicals in your food, you will not feel protected by the new 'Food Quality Protection Act of 1996.' If you're a political realist, though, you might say, 'Well, heck, it's better than the law we had before. It's probably the best we're gonna get, given the crew we've got in Washington.' In some ways, the new law may indeed turn out to be an improvement."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows writes, "The current Congress and president were just the combination needed to do away at last with the Delaney clause. It expired quietly this summer, when the president signed the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996. Its demise was a symbolic victory for industry, which had actually won the war against zero tolerance long ago. It's probably just as well that the clear, brave language of Delaney no longer stands to deceive us into thinking that our food supply is risk-free."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows writes, "When we started farming in this valley in the 1970s, the first killing frost came like clockwork during the third week of September. Our year was adjusted to that date. It determined when we started the pepper seeds indoors in February and when we thought we could get away with the last corn planting in June. Lately though, global warming or something is playing havoc with the schedule. "
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows writes, "We have a heavy responsibility to the Bosnians who are being asked to endorse that dangerous apartheid with their votes. Maass wants us to see that responsibility. He doesn't want to blame Milosevic alone; he wants us to see that a Hitler can go nowhere without a Chamberlain. A genocidal dictator needs appeasing leaders around him, and those leaders need a disinterested, uninvolved public. You can't have a Slobodan Milosevic without a Bush, a Clinton, a Kohl, a Mitterand, a Yeltsin."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows explains why corporations should not help fund our national parks. She writes, "Generations of Americans poorer than we are somehow managed to maintain the parks, commonly owned, commonly supported."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows writes, "I've stopped listening to what people in power say about labor. I think they knowingly use "jobs" as a code word, meaning 'money for me, but I'm pretending it's money for you.' I suspect that they haven't any idea how to put to use the energy and talents of the people of America so we can produce work we can be proud of, while earning enough to support ourselves and our families."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows writes, "Congress is in recess till after Labor Day so our representatives can attend conventions and take a break from the muggy Washington summer. It's a good time to collar them at home and tell them what we think of their assault on our natural resources. After negative public reaction last year, the politicians are talking nice and green. But their actions are as dirty and brown as ever."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows thinks that two parties are not nearly enough choices for 263 billion Americans to express their beliefs. She writes, "What meaning, underneath the heated rhetoric, does either party have? What is there to get enthusiastic about? Both parties are riddled with corruption. They have no principles; they huddle as close as they can get to what they think is the middle of the political spectrum. They deceive and double cross us. They are for sale to the highest bidder. The media report political campaigns as if they were ball games. I wish they'd quit doing that and remind us that what we cheer and vote for is supposed to have something to do with the way we want to be governed. Whichever party we elect DOES determine how we are governed, but it has little to do with how we WANT to be governed, mainly, I think, because the two huge, meaningless parties offer us no true choices."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Now that natural resources such as forests and fuel are running out, companies are trying to come up with alternatives. However, Donella Meadows is skeptical. She writes, "I have no doubt that we can increase crop yields, make fish and fiber plantations, turn almost any plant into fiberboard or paper, recycle massively, run cars on biofuels, and use the earth's resources with much higher efficiency and more careful stewardship. I hope we will. I just don't see how we'll get there, if the managers of every resource plow heedlessly through it, assuming they can turn to some other resource when theirs is gone. Maybe we should set up a simple rule: before you try to impress us with your brilliant plans for invading some other resource base, please show us how efficiently and sustainably you can manage your own."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
The Queen Charlotte Islands, off the Pacific coast of Canada, are a heavily forested archipelago -- or were. The controversy over jobs versus trees is one that has pitted natives of the island (the Haida) and small businesses against the larger logging companies. Massive amounts of timber were being collected, leaving the islands bare; so a group called Global Links formed and brought loggers, timber companies, the Haida, sharecroppers, enviros and others together and asked them the question: What do you want the future of these islands to be? With the answer, a series of resolutions were made including the reduction of logging.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
The loss of Czech environmentalist, Josef Vavrousek last year was a loss felt by many. Donella Meadows exerpts his writing in this piece.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella H. Meadows heard Don Imus' radio show for the first time in her own back yard. As painters were working on her house, the radio blared for their entertainment. From out of the speakers came a catchy folksy tune, spewing anti-Semitism. She writes, "My jaw dropped. They can't really broadcast stuff like this, can they? Apparently they can," and she's none too happy about it.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
In the second part of her discussion about clean water, Donella Meadows writes, "Water quality and water creatures continue to decline not because we lack protective laws, but because the laws are tepidly enforced. A recent report from the Environmental Defense Fund blames "inadequate authority, funding limitations, and bureaucratic timidity." Within that bad news, however, there is a bit of good news. Where government fails, caring citizens are stepping in. I uncovered a wealth of citizen efforts to monitor, protect, and restore local lakes and rivers. They're scattered, they're vastly underfunded, but they demonstrate how public and private efforts could join to clean up our water."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
The demise of a little known East Coast fish, the bridle shiner, is a result of a bigger problem, pond pollution. Title Five, a Massachusetts regulation intended to keep development from overtaxing the waste treatment facilities of a community is being ignored. Meadows writes, "If it were strictly enforced, and if the nutrification of ponds were considered a serious problem, houses couldn't be built right on the shores of ponds. Drainage from lawns and septic tanks wouldn't be allowed to flow directly into the water -- there would have to be buffer zones of vegetation to absorb nutrients, or full-scale sewage systems to divert wastes entirely. Pondside developments would be more regulated, less dense, more expensive. Clear ponds. The very asset that makes building projects worth a million dollars. The goose that lays the golden eggs."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
In the recent past, airlines, phone companies, and health care systems have been deregulated and privatized creating competition, overall lower rates and lower standards. Now, market competition is coming to electricity. As we are bombarded with glorious promises of more choices and lower rates the big players will have the wherewithal to grab the best deals. But, if anything good trickles down to us little guys, it will have to come from guarantees built in as the laws of the new system are written. On this latest utility reform, Donella Meadows writes,"the worst problem in a competitive electric system will be that at least for major users in the short term, it will work. Competition will force downsizing and outsourcing and regulation weakening. Costs will be shifted to workers, the environment, the society, and the future. Price will drop, removing incentive to conserve electricity. Companies will swallow up companies until, as in telecommunications and health care and airlines, competition -- the point of the reform -- will effectively disappear."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
After reading an article explaining why the European Community is sure to fall apart, Donella Meadows contemplates the difficulties of building and keeping communities togethger. "Community is hard. Maybe Europe can't hold together, nor our cities, our families, our nation. And yet most of us, surrounded by increasing material wealth and failing human relationships, spend our lives longing for community. Being responsible, managing our differences, being committed, that all seems like a huge burden, unless you think about the benefits as well the costs. And unless you consider the alternatives."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
While out in her garden, Donella Meadows begins wondering what it would be like if all politicians in the coming election began telling the truth. Addressing the politicians, she writes, "Maybe if you let go of that graspiness, that combativeness, that fear, maybe if all you Washington folk of both parties, stopped walling yourself from the world with piles of money and power, maybe you'd discover that out here things are more kindly than you think. Maybe there's even enough for everyone."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
t's hard enough staying on top of political
comings and goings without having to decipher the propaganda
we are fed daily by politicians over the airwaves. But
Donella Meadows has found a new source that offers straight
up facts in a timely manner: The Internet. You can subscribe
for free to a number of email services that deliver to your
desktop daily, weekly or whenever important votes are taken,
information about what our elected leaders do, as opposed to
what they say. Siting examples from reports and listing the
email addresses or phone numbers of the various
organizations, this article is a good reference for
environmentalists in the computer age.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Many people, including the New York Times, are deriding the book, Our Stolen Future, which is fast becoming known as the book on sperm. However, opponents of the book are missing the authors' main point: That chemicals in our environment are possibly having a negative effect on our health. Meadows writes, "It would be amazing if those chemicals, individually or acting together, do no harm. Therefore the important questions are not about scientific doubt but about risk and ethics. Given some sobering evidence here, while we do more studies, while we argue about sperm, while we malign the authors of Our Stolen Future, should we, or should we not, go on releasing hormone-mimicking chemicals with abandon into our environment?"
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
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