Stories by Donella H. Meadows
is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College.
Donella Meadows doesn't think anyone in a corporate office sets out to be counterproductive or destructive. Businessmen don't sit around plotting how to poison rivers or subvert democracy. They don't conspire to locate polluting plants in poor communities, emit greenhouse gases, or whittle down employees' compensation while raising their own to obscene levels. But these things happen so regularly, so massively, that we can't dismiss them as accidents. They're systematic.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
An endangered species story that does not show a mindless bureaucracy squashing an honest entrepreneur just to save some slimy creature no one ever heard of. In this case the creature is a cuddly squirrel. It is threatened not by a greedy developer but by a public university. What gets squashed is the Endangered Species Act.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
The myth prevails that renewable, solar kinds of energy are exotic, unworkable, expensive and undependable. Meanwhile people across the country are banding together and breaking the fossil-fuel habit by using working, affordable, and renewable energy systems. Seventy of these systems are described in a new book by Nancy Cole and P.J. Skerrett called Renewables are Ready.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows writes an open letter to the veterans of America honoring their struggle but urging that they not support an Amendment which would ban flag burning.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
"It's unsettling to run into someone who is truly free. It makes you see all the ways in which you yourself are bound." That's what's been happening to Donella Meadows since Marcia Meyer, a woman who has achieved financial independance through wise "life energy" management, came to live on Donella's farm.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows doesn't believe that the voters who put the Newtsies in power last fall intended to sell off our national lands and gut our environmental laws. She can't remember any politician running on a promise to devastate the natural assets of the nation. So we better wake up, folks, because that's what's happening.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Suppose we all woke up one fine morning and decided, as a nation, to solve our problems instead of beating each other up over them. Suppose we quit twisting ourselves into knots trying to put all blame on one party and all credit on the other. What if we chose instead to move forward together?
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Meadows critiques the criticisms of her book The Limits to Growth. "Why do people repeat, decades later, fables about things we never said? The problem can't be plain bad scholarship. There's a bias at work here...The myths live on, because we don't care whether they're true. We WANT them to be true."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
Donella Meadows shares some thoughts of life on her farm: "In the month of June on this organic farm where we try to work with the forces of nature, we expend all the energy and cleverness we can summon, trying to keep things from eating things. And nature laughs."
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
A thoughtful debunking of the rosy "facts" found in
Gregg Easterbrook's trendy book about the environment, A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
There's a [more] serious reason to be wary of block grants. Problems aren't better solved at a local level if local governments have no interest in solving them. That's how many programs got federalized in the first place. Whether it was hunger in Appalachia, toxic emissions in Louisiana, or segregation in the South, people were unwilling to live with festering social or environmental wounds, even if those wounds happened to lie on the other side of a state boundary -- because problems don't stay within state boundaries.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
They are not "elitists," certainly not "anti-American environmentalist wackos." They're too busy living their lives and admiring the spring to pay attention to the resource grab going on in Washington. If they knew, they'd wonder how people ever got so sour-minded and money-obsessed.
Posted on Apr 26, 2000, Source: deleted
"Last time I bought a new car -- a 1987 Honda Civic wagon that got 35 mpg at its best -- I swore I'd keep it until I could double its mileage. Little did I know how close I'd have to cut it. The first car to claim 70 mpg arrived in the showrooms two months ago, just before my old Civic succumbed to terminal rust."
Posted on Apr 1, 2000, Source: AlterNet
"If, in the thirty Earth Day celebrations we have held since 1970, the human population and economy have become any more respectful of the Earth, the Earth hasn't noticed. Because the planet is not impressed by fancy speeches, good intentions, future inventions or high hopes."
Posted on Apr 1, 2000, Source: AlterNet
"Unilever, a $45 billion megacompany, has gobbled up Ben & Jerry's, the outrageous little Vermont-based ice cream maker. I try hard not to be a cynic, but it looks like the end of the company's socially responsible side."
Posted on Apr 1, 2000, Source: AlterNet
"Catalogs flood into our lives too often, too thick, too glossy. They are just successful enough at seducing us to buy things we otherwise never would want to keep the mail order business going. However only two to four percent of catalogs mailed produce an order. Catalog sales must be one of the world's most wasteful endeavors."
Posted on Apr 1, 2000, Source: AlterNet
"Now that soaring gas prices have caught our attention, it's time to ask, Why is our government the only one in the civilized world with a stupid, short-term energy policy? Why do our elected officials consider a European or Japanese-type energy tax not only unpassable but undiscussable?"
Posted on Apr 1, 2000, Source: AlterNet
"If alarms you that private investors can patent and keep secret and sell something that sits within every cell of your body, you ought to pay much closer attention to the new, jaw-dropping biotech industry."
Posted on Apr 1, 2000, Source: AlterNet
"A recent attack against organic foods accelerated when ABC's John Stossel interviewed Dennis Avery, 'a leading critic of organic produce.' Before I get into speculating about why anyone would want to be a 'leading critic of organic produce,' let me quickly dispose of Avery's claims."
Posted on Apr 1, 2000, Source: AlterNet
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