The Donella Meadows Archive

Events Aren't Important to the Environment

The most important environmental event of the 1980s? There's such a rich list to choose from, mostly disasters. Chernobyl? Certainly high on the list...

score:9, 12/26/1989, ,

Is the Future Our Choice or Fate?

I was one of the team of people at MIT who wrote a book that created a worldwide burst of media foreboding. It began as a small report to the Club of Rome....

score:9, 12/31/1969, ,

Eco-Fascism or Eco-Solidarity

The 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) seems to be discussed actively in nearly every country of the world except...

score:9, 10/30/1989, ,

Cory Aquino -- a New Kind of Leader

"Why have the media in your country started saying negative things about Cory Aquino?" asked my friend Maria, visiting from the Philippines. "They say she...

score:9, 07/31/1986, ,

Three Million Pounds of Food a Month

Four years ago Lee Stuart was in San Diego working on her Ph.D. in systems ecology. Now Dr. Lee Stuart lives in the Bronx...

score:9, 03/05/1987, ,

The Philippines After the Revolution -- One Step at a Time

This year we're celebrating the 200th anniversary of our constitution a full eleven years after the 200th anniversary of our revolution. It took the...

score:9, 07/23/1987, ,

Freedom Stories, Freedom Songs

Hundreds of women paraded down the streets of Johannesberg, South Africa, a few weeks ago, singing freedom songs to protest their government's suppression of...

score:9, 03/24/1988, ,

Silent Spring and the Population Bomb -- Can Books or Lives

For middle-aged environmentalists like me this month marks the transition between 1987, the year we celebrated the 25th anniversary of Rachel Carson's Silent...

score:9, 01/07/1988, ,

Who Needs Florida, Anyway?

"The accelerating overheating of the earth has already begun," says a Toles cartoon showing a semi-alert Ordinary Guy in his armchair watching the TV...

score:9, 01/14/1988, ,

Real Change -- Good or Bad -- Takes Longer Than We Think

After three years of perestroika, the Soviet people still live with shortages of consumer goods. The grain harvest is still inadequate, the meat supply is...

score:9, 08/18/1988, ,

Small Miracles in the Philippines

One could interpret the recent shooting of an American serviceman near Manila as one more example of how things are falling apart in the Philippines...

score:9, 04/27/1989, ,

The Third Great Revolution

Earth Day is at its best at the neighborhood level with nature hikes and trash pickups -- but it's bigger than that. It features resounding...

score:9, 04/12/1990, ,

There Are Limits to Growth, but No Limits to Love

From corporate boardrooms to primary classrooms to the World Bank to the poorest villages, people know that the human economy is taking too great a...

score:9, 04/30/1992, ,

How to Talk About Changing a System

Most of what government does makes little long-term difference, thank goodness. Spend more money here and less there; strengthen a regulation here, weaken one...

score:9, 12/01/1994, ,

Hands Around the Capitol

The Democrats took campaign money from an Indonesian trader and the Republicans from an Australian publisher. Tobacco companies made the biggest contributions to both parties...

score:9, 01/02/1997, ,

So What Can We Do -- Really Do -- About Sprawl?

In my mind St. Louis is the poster city for sprawl. It has a glittering, high-rise center where fashionable people work, shop and party...

score:9, 03/11/1999, ,

A Farm That Thrives Without Chemicals

Wouldn't it be nice to hear, for a change, about a Midwest family farm that is not in trouble? Meet Dick and Sharon Thompson...

score:8, 09/04/1986, ,

The State of the World As Revealed by a Month of Mail

Normally I can handle the glut of paper I find in my mailbox each day. Computer-generated stuff gets chucked out unopened. The rest I...

score:6, 05/12/1988, ,

Hands Around the Capitol

This idea was put into my head by Peter G. Brown of the School of Public Affairs of the University of Maryland, and it won...

score:6, 03/23/1995, ,