The Donella Meadows Archive

A Neighborhood Controls Its Own Development

A few days after Christmas, neighbors from 11 rural households in Lyme, New Hampshire, gathered at Hank and Freda Swan's house for an easement...

score:9, 01/08/1987, ,

Land Protection is More Than Champagne and Quiche

Some people here in New England say that land protection is a "champagne and quiche" issue. They clearly doesn't understand land economics. Land protection...

score:9, 04/16/1987, ,

Land Trusts Provide a New Tool for Growth Control

There is a land trust explosion in the United States. More than 500 private land trusts have appeared over the past 20 years. They are...

score:9, 04/21/1988, ,

Controlling Growth by Controlling Attractiveness

In Woodstock, Vermont, everyone's mad about a highway. In other places the issue is a sewer system or a school. The real issue, of...

score:9, 01/26/1989, ,

Pick-Your-Own Land Use Planning

This morning about 100 neighbors and I swarmed like bright-colored locusts over a strawberry field, gleaning fat red berries. Babies snoozed in the shade...

score:9, 06/27/1991, ,

How Do You Stop a $44 Billion Gorilla?

The company didn't even identify itself in its first negotiations with city officials. For months we only knew that a "giant retail project" might...

score:9, 06/10/1993, ,

The Land and Water Conservation Fund Needs to Be Spent

At the edge of my town there's an open field, kept mowed by a bunch of neighbors who play softball on it. At one...

score:9, 07/09/1994, ,

How to Fight Superstore Sprawl

The Wal-Mart battle around here has simmered down for awhile. The planning board turned down the company's application on the grounds that the...

score:9, 08/04/1994, ,

The Real Costs of Growth in Oregon

The myth persists. Growth is good for us. Development will bring in more tax money. The only way to get our property taxes down is...

score:9, 06/05/1997, ,

Sprawl by Any Other Name is Still out of Control

The hot term this time around is "sprawl." During previous outbreaks of concern about America's urbanization pattern it was called "strip development" or simply...

score:9, 02/18/1999, ,

Urban Growth Means Lower Taxes -- and Other Myths

We need to bring in business to bring down taxes. This development will give us jobs. Environmental protection will hurt the economy. Growth is good...

score:9, 02/25/1999, ,

If We Don't Like Sprawl, Why Do We Go on Sprawling?

We have planning boards. We have zoning regulations. We have urban growth boundaries and "smart growth" and sprawl conferences. And we still have sprawl. Between...

score:9, 03/04/1999, ,

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, ,

Clustering -- Good Idea, Hard to Do

"Our city is considering cluster zoning. Is this a good idea or isn't it?" came a question from a friend the other day. I...

score:9, 06/10/1999, ,

Who Has a Right to Do What with the Land?

Last week the Vermont Environmental Board denied a permit to a developer for a project in Hartland. It was a typical interstate-exit gas/food...

score:8, 03/02/2000, ,

You Can't Live on the Pond and Have the Pond

Les Kaufman called me from the Boston University Marine Program, sputtering about Title Five. "How do you get people to care about little brown fish...

score:7, 07/06/1996, ,

An Environmentalist Encounters an Environmental Law

Now that I've suffered under one firsthand, I can understand why people hate environmental laws. On a map of our farm filed away at...

score:6, 09/14/2000, ,