Stories by Donella H. Meadows
is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College.
Few people realize how important it is to use less water. Even the environmentally conscience among us don't think about tracing tap water back to the source to see just how harmful wasting water can be. If we thought about it more, Meadows writes, "we'd treat water with as much reverence as our own blood, because that's actually what it is -- the lifeblood of the planet and of all the creatures that live here, including ourselves."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows takes a look at the continuous dumbing-down of television, lamenting the loss of ABC's resident geographer, Harm de Blij. She writes, "De Blij was ready with his maps when Operation Desert Storm moved into the Persian Gulf. In fact he saw the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait coming, just by watching maps. 'Iraq had been publishing maps for years showing Kuwait as Iraq's 19th province,' he says. 'I call it cartographic aggression. U.S. embassies used to have geographic attaches looking for that sort of thing. If they still had such people, they'd see that the Chinese are doing maps right now showing parts of Russia as Chinese.' One can speculate that ABC's sudden loss of interest in geography is just one more shift in the short attention span of television; as quirky and accidental as the shift eight years ago that put de Blij on the screen in the first place."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Mount Graham is a 10,000 foot "sky island" in the middle of the Arizona dessert, a refuge for endangered species and virgin forest. Now the University of Arizona wants to build a telescope on Mount Graham, and Clinton has given the go-ahead as a small concession to Republicans. Franklin Stanley, a San Carlos Apache spiritual leader says, "Why do you come and try to take my church away and treat the mountain as if it was about money instead of respect? Nowhere else in the world stands another mountain like the mountain you are trying to disturb. On this mountain is a great life-giving force. You have no knowledge of the place you are about to destroy."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows looks at the federal budget battle and the politicians who measure wealth in monetary terms. "When one side takes a narrow, absolute stand -- wealth is money, period -- and the other side is broad and mushy -- well, yes, wealth is money, but wealth is other things that don't necessarily have prices -- compromise can move only one direction, toward the absolute. The open question in the budget negotiation was how much non-monetary wealth would be lost. The answer turned out to be: not as much as could have been, but still way too much. But here's the question I really want to ask. Why do we hand so much power to the Scroogish world view that measures wealth only in money? How have we managed to arrange things so that a few prideful men, paid by us, meet in luxurious rooms, paid for by us, and fight for their own pitifully cramped values, using our values, our national wealth, our children, our communities, our forests, and the creatures of nature as bargaining chips?"
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
A little known rider written by logging lobbyists is creating environmental mayhem to our national forests, writes Donella Meadows. "The rider stipulates that the Forest Service MUST sell off 4-6 billion board feet of lumber over the next two years. It is supposed to be salvage lumber, trees damaged by fire or infested with insects. We are supposed to be suffering from a forest health crisis. If we don't get those dead and dying trees out of the woods, we will be consumed by forest fires. However, the salvage rider had nothing to do with reason or even with salvage. 'Salvage' is an Open Sesame chant by which forest companies can tread where they would otherwise be forbidden. Salvage sales are clearly not about jobs, not about forest health, not about balancing the budget, and not about states' rights, either. What they are about is a private grab of public resources, leaving behind lands and waters that will be damaged and unproductive for generations to come."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
In honor of National TV-Turnoff Week, Donella Meadows offers some alarming American TV watching statistics. She offers a Harper's-style round-up of TV fodder, including the fact that the average person spends 12 years, or nearly one-quarter, of her life in front of the tube.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
TV-Free America held its first National TV-Turnoff Week last year. Organizer Henry Labalme expected the idea of life without television to be met with resistance. Instead he found himself riding a wave of enthusiasm. "I can't believe you exist," people told him. "We thought we were the only ones who were disgusted by TV." This year TV-Turnoff Week is April 24-30. Donella Meadows writes, "TV-Turnoff Week gives us a chance to step away from our addiction -- or fail to and thus realize how badly addicted we are. Hundreds of studies have linked TV watching to 1) violence, 2) diminished brain development in children, 3) obesity and other eating disorders, 4) lack of physical fitness, 5) breakdown of community, 6) materialism, 7) excess consumer debt and 8) negative social norms, gender roles and patterns of conflict resolution. Many of us are angry with ourselves for watching too much and for letting our children watch too much. But, like addicts, we don't stop. So here's a chance to stop, just for a week."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Picture a city, with skyscrapers, roads, cars, towers, lights all jammed together. Now picture a huge, bare human foot reaching down from the city, stepping on the earth, crushing daisies. That's the image William Rees, professor of planning at the University of British Columbia, instills in the minds of his students. He calls it the Ecological Footprint, the amount of land the city actually uses, considering where its food is grown, where its water and energy and materials come from and where its wastes flow. Rees writes, "Acknowledging that nature has a finite capacity is not pessimistic. Just realistic. It makes room for wise decisions.... Ecological Footprint analysis starts from the premise that humanity must live within global carrying capacity. It also maintains that if we choose wisely it might even be possible to increase our quality of life."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows doesn't know how any parent could stand to send his or her child off to a crumbling, dirty school with underpaid teachers and hostile, possibly armed, classmates. She writes, "If it were my kid, rather than do that, I'd exert some "school choice," whether the government sanctioned it or not. That's why the push toward state-supported school choice is so insidious. The 'choice' it gives every parent -- do what's best for society in the long term or for my kid right now -- can only be made one way. My kid right now. But school choice promoters don't realize they're creating that dilemma."Ê This practice an example of the trend of "success to the successful" and it can destroy the educational system, lesson market competition and even hinder the democratic process.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Human ingenuity produces a thousand or so new molecules of commercial value every year. Companies that hope to profit from them say, essentially, "Let us make them by the ton. We've tested them. They're OK. Trust us." We should not trust them, because neither they nor we can predict the fates or effects of their products. Planet Earth carries on enormously complex chemistry of its own. Dump strange substances into the mix, or increase the rate at which old ones move around, and the real surprise would be NOT to experience a continuous stream of surprises, as we turn nature and ourselves into guinea pigs for thousands of experiments running all at once.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
The book Our Stolen Future pulls together an astounding number of research findings about industrial chemicals that act like hormones. Called "endocrine disrupters," they can either block or falsely stimulate cell-wall receptors, turning secretion, metabolism or replication on or off. The evidence suggests that endocrine disrupters are the cause of falling human sperm counts, female birds that act like males, male alligators with shrunken penises, and birth defects or reproductive failures in everything from polar bears to Great Lakes fish.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Some say that environmentalists are too gloomy. That they invent catastrophes to attract attention and money. Bugs and trees are what they care about, not people. They want to lock up resources. They're elitist city folk who care about nature only as a place to go backpacking. Donella Meadows responds to these myths, "The caricature of environmentalists has never fit the environmentalists I know -- and I know a lot of them. But, bathed in constant repetitions of carefully crafted accusations, even I began to think that there must be people-hating, unscientific, extremist Greenies out there somewhere. And probably there are. Which does not mean that the millions of responsible people who care about the environment should accept that characterization."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
According to a report on last year's Congress just put out by the League of Conservation Voters, the first Congress in decades with Republican majorities in both houses could not be assessed by its pro-environment votes -- it created NO pro-environment measures to vote on. Rather, there was a steady stream of attempts to tear down environmental laws. The LCV could rate members only by the extent to which they refused to go along with the pillaging and sacking. By this standard about one-fourth of the members -- 111 in the House and 24 in the Senate -- achieved an LCV rating of zero -- a perfect anti-environmental record.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows writes, "I had to endure many New Hampshire presidential primaries before I thought of lying to the pollsters. In the week or two before the primary they call almost every night. You can tell immediately that it's a poll by the bored voice. 'Hello, Ms. Meadows?,' they drone. 'Would you say you are very likely, fairly likely, or not at all likely to vote in the coming Republican primary?' When I was new to this game I felt honored, as most of us do when our opinion is solicited. 'Hey, they're calling ME! They want to know what I think! When they report this tomorrow on TV, they'll be reporting on ME!' Let me tell you, that thrill wears off real fast."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
The title of David Korten's new book -- When Corporations Rule the World -- does not refer to some theoretical future state. Korten's point is that corporations already rule much of the world, and that the consequences aren't good, not even for corporations. Donella Meadows lists some of Korten's measures to keep corporate activity in its place. She writes, "I have heard people warn him never to put out the whole list at once, because any single item is shocking, and all together are simply unthinkable."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
There are four question to ask about any new tax proposal. Will it be simple? Will it be fair? Will it raise enough money for the government? Will it be good for the economy? The flat tax promoted by presidential candidate Steve Forbes fails on all four counts. But so does our present tax system. Forbes's contribution is not his specific proposal, but his general call to rethink the tax system entirely. People who are bold enough to do that are coming up with three alternatives -- the flat tax, the VAT (value-added) tax, and what, for purposes of alliteration, we might call the splat tax, to be levied on pollution and resource consumption. Let's look at all three in terms of "the four questions."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Over the past two generations sperm counts in many parts of the world have fallen by half, and a higher percent of sperm are deformed and unfunctional. Testicular cancer is on the rise, as are birth defects such as undescended testicles. Many kinds of animals are suffering from hormone derangements that produce -- how could the media resist this one? -- masculinized females and feminized males. These unsettling phenomena are caused by chemicals we throw into the environment, quite a few different kinds of them, which happen, so it seems, to behave like hormones.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows on the mood of America: "The voices of intolerance, cruelty, and greed are increasingly fashionable. The voices of community and compassion grow quieter and quieter. It takes courage to face the ridicule that comes with speaking in public of reason, sharing, love and trust. In such a time, for the sake of civilization, we need not only leaders, but ordinary folks by the millions to keep speaking in public of reason, sharing, love and trust -- and meaning it, and acting on it."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
How much would it cost to save all the endangered species in America? Representative Don Young (R-Alaska) the chairman of the House Committee on Resources recently assigned the General Accounting Office (GAO) to answer that question, not because he cares about species, but because he wants to rub out the Endangered Species Act. He expected the tab to run into trillions, so he could show us that preserving species is simply unaffordable. The GAO has just issued the report he asked for, sort of. Here are some considerations to keep in mind when reading the report.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows on the limits of the free market: "The market is not a cure-all, not a religion, not endowed with wisdom or a conscience or a soul. It's just a social tool, good for limited purposes -- choosing, in the short term, the most efficient way of doing some things, stimulating entrepreneurial creativity in certain directions, rewarding those who do what people with money are willing to pay for. It is not good for -- it is, I submit, actively bad for -- ensuring fairness, transmitting culture, maintaining community, reinforcing values, protecting the environment, or making long-term choices."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
All the progress we've seen and all we're promised for the future -- to what is it progressing? Most of the year we're so busy turning the wheels of progress that we never step back to ask that question. But come a new year, just four years away from a new millennium, and the thought does arise, where in the world are we going? That question got lodged in Donella Meadows brain with a report by her friend, Professor Hartmut Bossel of the University of Kassel in Germany, on two possible futures.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Back a decade or two ago when we weren't paying much attention, the advertising industry took over American politics, reducing debates to soundbites, using polls to tell politicians what to say, polishing image while banishing ideas. Worst of all, advertisers taught government leaders their central trick. Say any fool thing over and over and over, and it will start sounding plausible, or at least comfortably familiar. Repetition eats into peoples' brains. "You deserve a break today. No new taxes. Progress is our most important product. We stand for family values.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
At stake in Washington as the President and Congress go to the mat is more than the deficit, more than Medicare, more than shut-downs of "non-essential" parts of the government. Large chunks of the nation's natural wealth are also hanging in the balance. So, perhaps, is the disgusting practice of legislative riders.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
The holiday shopping season has gotten off to a bad start, they say. They don't say it, actually, they moan it, as if no worse tragedy can be imagined. The problem is, they say, that too many of us have maxed out our credit cards. The solution is to send out more credit cards. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that a description of mass insanity? We take a holiday that celebrates the birth of one of the gentlest spirits ever known, one who told us to store up treasure not on earth but in heaven, and we turn the occasion into an orgy of eating, drinking, and buying gifts people don't need with money we don't have.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows writes, "Those lobbyists never sleep, I fumed. This Congress knows no shame when it comes to cutting services to the weak and taxes of the powerful. And this president will sign just about anything. It's hard, waking up every morning to news that makes my soul sick. Especially when I have fallen asleep, as I have been doing lately, to the soul-stirring writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
When you fly a plane, you need an instrument panel in front of you, with lights and dials telling you how well the parts are working, what direction you're headed, whether there are obstacles ahead, and how much fuel you have. If you're guiding a complex social mechanism like a city, you need even more lights and dials. But for a city what should they measure? Five years ago several hundred citizens of Seattle asked themselves that question. Last week they came out with an answer -- a book of 40 "indicators of sustainability" for their city.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Let's face it. The precious national lands, God's creation, nature's magnificence, our common birthright, have to be managed by human beings, who are fallible alone or in any combination. The management job gets ever harder, because the world is filling up. The human population is huge, still growing, full of honest aspiration and greedy schemes. On all sorts of lands forests are disappearing, mines are depleting, grasslands are overgrazed, nature is disappearing. Our national lands contain some of the few remnants of intact ecosystems in the world. Those remnants depend on us -- not to manage them, but to manage ourselves so we keep them glorious and productive and whole.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
At some point the busy human economy will have to stop expanding into wilderness, either because we decide to leave some bit of nature untouched, or because there will be no untouched nature left. In the United States we can still stop short of stamping our imprint on 100 percent of our land. How much should we leave alone? Ten percent? Two percent? Zero? If we choose ten percent, we're already too late, unless we pull back somewhere and let nature recover. If we pick zero, all we have to do is wait awhile, because that's where our economy and our super-active Congress are heading.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows writes: "We the American people are the most generous landowners in the world. We sell gold mines for $5 per acre. We pay people to take from our national forests 800-year-old trees worth $5000 each. And we subsidize ranchers to overgraze our rangelands....If you'd like fair, rational, sustainable, and economic land management -- you and I have the immediate job of stopping the works of people like Hansen and Domenici and stiffening the rubbery backbones of Babbitt and Clinton. Then we have the long-term job of electing managers who aren't so eager to give our resources away to whoever waves the biggest gun or biggest check.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
"Get out the cut" has been the Forest Service obsession since Ronald Reagan appointed a timber company executive as its head in 1981. Some regional administrators were sickened at the looting of the forest, objected, and were transferred or fired. The Clinton administration made a start in cleaning up the corruption by appointing Jack Ward Thomas, a biologist, to head the Service. Since then Clinton has melted under the heat of logging companies and their friends on both sides of the aisle in Congress.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Want to buy a gold mine for five bucks an acre? Actually you don't need to buy it. You and I already own it as part of our citizens' legacy of public land. We're the ones offering the land at that price, and we're getting lots of takers. We recently sold a gold deposit in northeast Nevada worth an estimated $10 billion to American Barrick Resources (a Canadian company) for $9,765. Why are we selling off fabulous resources at ridiculous prices? Because of a law written in 1872, intended to promote the settlement and enrichment of a poor and sparsely populated country.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
There's a virulent movement in the West and now in the Congress to give federal lands "back" to the states -- as if the states had ever owned them. Our lands are being managed more for the good of a few people over the short term than for the good of all the people over the long term. As with other issues, the Congress has done the right thing to bring this problem to public attention. As with other issues, most of the solutions Congress is coming up with will make the problem not just a little worse, but much worse.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows thinks she should be writing about how the grinches in Congress are trying to eviscerate the Endangered Species Act, or about their latest tricks for stomping on the poor while handing the nation's resources to the rich, or about their lack of interest in hearing public comment on these depredations. Instead, she looked around and found in the pile of new books on her desk one called Choosing our Future: Visions of a Sustainable World. It's a collection of short statements by people from many countries, describing how they would like things to be in the year 2050. After the panderings of power-crazed politicians, she was encouraged by the hopes of ordinary humanity. Here she offers a few short excerpts of what they see, when they look into a future they really want.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows writes, "Every time I write about campaign reform, I get a flood of letters, some from experts who have thought hard about how to do it, and some from furious citizens who have come up with wonderful, radical, mostly impossible ideas.
One of my favorites is the suggestion that we just send our tax payments to the agencies we want to fund."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
There is so much skullduggery going on in Washington these days that no one can keep track of it. One bill would give away to the states the federal lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management. This legacy of 270 million acres, mostly in the West, includes 5.3 million acres of wilderness, vast expanses of grazing land, deposits of metal ores, oil, uranium, and one-third of the nation's coal. Why we should divest ourselves of $500 billion worth of land to is hard to fathom. You have to watch this Congress every minute.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Whether our main concern is environment, civil rights, taxes, jobs, farms, labor, health, science, or the deficit, what we need first is democracy. We can argue later about our other problems; first we need a fair arena within which to argue, an arena without an admission charge.
We need to define campaign reform for ourselves, so the politicians don't define it for themselves. Donella Meadows offers a simple, strong agenda, taken from David Korten's new book, When Corporations Rule the World.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Will Social Security be there for you? Most young Americans don't believe it will. Even our leaders, normally oblivious to any problem with a longer time horizon than the next election, regularly stir up alarm that in 2025 or 2005 the Social Security system will go bankrupt. What Donella Meadows sees is a problem not of bankruptcy some day, but of duplicity and injustice right now.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
David Orr, professor of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, likes to tell the story of the entrance exam for the insane asylum. Candidates are led into a cement-lined room with a row of faucets on one wall, fully open, gushing water. Leaning against the opposite wall are dozens of buckets and mops. The insane run frantically for the buckets and mops. The sane turn off the faucets. If that's the test, we live in a land that's certifiably crazy. Name a problem. With astounding consistency we go for the mop-and-bucket solution.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
The atrocity in the Balkans is often blamed on the violent history of the area. Donella Meadows offers an explanation, and a solution, based on the four men who lead the various factions in the conflict.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
"In spite of the horrors that assault us in the news each day, there are people all over the world who still have faith in the humanness of humanity. They have not lost contact with the specifically human sanity at their core." This statement comes from the Anti-Barbaric Coalition, which asked Donella Meadows, among others, for a simple, from the heart statement about what it means to be human.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
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