The Donella Meadows Archive

Singapore: a Mirror That Reflects the American Dream

Singapore doesn't intend to be a place that makes you think. It would rather make you spend. From its splendid airport shops to its...

score:9, 05/18/1988, ,

Tax Reform: More Questions Than Answers

It takes political courage to reform a tax system. The deepest, most difficult questions of democracy get raised. What is government really for? How much...

score:9, 08/14/1986, ,

Beyond Divestment and Sanctions

"I can't decide whether to go to crew practice or to the anti-apartheid rally," one of the freshmen in my class sighed, very...

score:9, 08/14/1986, ,

Why Would Anyone Want to Play Starpower?

When leaders in socialist countries wonder why their people are disaffected, when my conservative friends tell me how lazy and undeserving the poor are, when...

score:9, 12/04/1986, ,

We Don't Need Leadership to Know Right from Wrong

"Assaulted by sleaze, scandals, and hypocrisy, America searches for its moral bearings," the cover of the May 25 Time magazine says. The essay inside describes...

score:9, 06/04/1987, ,

Why Should We Be Glad when the Gnp Goes Up?

With that special, kindly sparkle in his eyes the President said in his news conference that there would be good economic tidings the next day...

score:9, 03/03/1988, ,

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, ,

Bring Back the Fairness Doctrine

The Fairness Doctrine is gone. Most people don't even know for sure what the Fairness Doctrine was, much less that it has been repealed...

score:9, 11/12/1987, ,

Freedman Speaks out Against Evil

Nothing tests a community's dedication to democracy and freedom more than the presence of a loud minority that sows hatred and dissension in the...

score:9, 03/31/1988, ,

Election Year Lessons About Right and Wrong

A Supreme Court Justice should not be a former pot smoker. That's what some outraged people said last fall, as they demanded that nominee...

score:9, 09/01/1988, ,

We're Not Choosing Values, We're Choosing Assumptions

"This election is about values," says George Bush, without mentioning which values. He can't mention them, because in fact the election is not about...

score:9, 10/27/1988, ,

The Richest Ten Percent, the Poorest Forty Percent

The 1989 World Bank Development Report came out last month, an event that created excitement nowhere except in the hearts of statistics freaks like me...

score:9, 07/06/1989, ,

What Are We Really Fighting About?

Twenty years ago I was legally forbidden, as a married woman living in Massachusetts, to have an abortion or to use contraceptives. I was a...

score:9, 07/20/1989, ,

Is There Such a Thing As Too Much Glasnost?

The outbreak of freedom in Eastern Europe can be traced directly to just one cause: glasnost, truth-telling. A new openness about the activities of...

score:9, 12/28/1989, ,

Many Opinions on Whether Wilderness Matters

How much of the earth's surface would you guess is still wilderness? According to a Sierra Club survey, about one-third of the earth...

score:9, 01/04/1990, ,

Kindergarten Resolutions for Living Together

"All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten," says Robert Fulghum...

score:9, 12/27/1990, ,

The Grass Doesn't Pay the Clouds for the Rain

"In the current vocabulary of condemnation there are few words as final and conclusive as the word 'uneconomic'," wrote E.F. Schumacher in Small is...

score:9, 03/22/1990, ,

What Does It Mean to Be Green?

The trouble with being politically Green is that you don't fit on the left-right spectrum. You intersect that spectrum from an angle, agreeing...

score:9, 12/13/1990, ,

Names, Faces, and Families

A weeping Iraqi man approached a BBC reporter outside the bombed bunker in Baghdad and handed him six identity cards. "My wife and children were...

score:9, 02/28/1991, ,

What is a Wild Tomato Worth?

The field botanist Hugh Iltis is best known as the discoverer of teosinte -- the wild ancestor of the modern corn that feeds much of the...

score:9, 05/23/1991, ,

Let's Have Some Hugs for John Sununu

Much as I favor recycling and writing to Congress, deep down I know that's not enough to end our environmental problems. Even if we...

score:9, 08/22/1991, ,

A Letter to a Great Teacher

Professor Anita Hill University of Oklahoma Law School Norman, Oklahoma Dear Professor Hill, The fuss has died down and you have gone back to whatever...

score:9, 10/31/1991, ,

Nature is More Than a Commodity

One of the main problems of the market system, every economist knows, is that it doesn't put a price on nature. Brazilian cattle barons...

score:9, 11/21/1991, ,

Nothing Left but the DNA

Just before chainsaws and bulldozers roar in to bring...

score:9, 12/31/1969, ,

The Bank of Crooks, Criminals, and Counterfeit Spirituality

In 1972 a group of people ... had a vision of a multinational, multilingual bank with a philosophy that would accommodate all nationalities, all races, all...

score:9, 01/16/1992, ,