The Donella Meadows Archive

Super-Tractors, Super-Cows, Super-Farms

The super-tractor of the future will have sensor beams, sweeping out 20 yards ahead as the tractor moves forward. The beams will detect soil...

score:9, 07/03/1986, ,

Handling Wastes the Way the Creator Intended

Suppose someone came along with a new invention that could 1) cut the nation's garbage problem in half, 2) help clean up polluted waters...

score:9, 05/16/1991, ,

Is a Bioengineered Potato Organic?

It's way too tempting for someone who has grown a bunch of carrots any old way to slap the label "organic" on them, claim...

score:9, 07/31/1997, ,

Monsanto Gets Pie in the Face

Poor Monsanto. Only one other company to my knowledge has managed to get itself so hated that its CEO has been hit in the face...

score:9, 03/18/1999, ,

Genetic Engineering is Not Just More of the Same

Genetic engineering is nothing new. People have been messing with genes since the first farmers selected the biggest wild grass seeds and began to breed...

score:9, 03/25/1999, ,

Amory Lovins Sees the Future and It is Hydrogen

For 25 years energy guru Amory Lovins has been seeing farther and farther into the energy future. He has been labeled a dreamer, but by...

score:9, 05/05/1999, ,

Two Mindsets, Two Visions of Sustainable Agriculture

"I guess you must be in favor of pesticides," concluded a Monsanto public relations guy, after I objected to his company's genetically engineered potato...

score:9, 07/29/1999, ,

Seven-Plus Wonders of Sustainability

A couple of years ago, while I was doing something else, I heard snatches of a radio program in which Alan Durning, the director of...

score:9, 08/26/1999, ,

Americans Are the World's Guinea Pigs for Bioengineered Foods

News about genetically engineered crops breaks so fast that it's hard to keep up. For those who look upon biotech foods with suspicion, most...

score:9, 10/21/1999, ,

Moments of Shocked Silence About Biotech

Biotech stocks plummeted this week as President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair requested that companies make their data on the human genome public...

score:9, 03/16/2000, ,

Japan Beats America to the Twenty-First Century Car

Well, there she is. Sleek and silver, dealer plates still on, got her two days ago. Seventy miles per gallon, seven hundred miles a fill...

score:9, 04/06/2000, ,

How It Happened That We Don't Regulate Biotech

Back in the 1970s, when scientists got their first inkling that they might actually be able to redesign genes, that awesome possibility started an ethical...

score:9, 08/17/2000, ,

Taking over from God on the Seventh Day

"If I gamble, I usually gamble at high-stakes, high-payoff games." That's a boast not from James Bond, but from a chemist speaking...

score:9, 08/24/2000, ,

The War Between the Eco-Freaks and the Techno-Twits

The population of the world in 1900 was 1.6 billion. By 1950 it was 2.5 billion. Now it is 5 billion. By the...

score:8, 06/26/1986, ,

Who Causes Environmental Problems?

To a small but influential bunch of global thinkers the abbreviation "IPAT" (pronounced "eye-pat") says volumes. It summarizes all the causes of our environmental...

score:8, 01/12/1995, ,

Two Approaches to Sewage Treatment -- and to the World

Down the slope from the condominiums at the Sugarbush ski resort near Warren, Vermont, are two sewage treatment plants, side by side. They are so...

score:7, 05/21/1987, ,

The World's First Electronic Magazine

Once every two weeks the computer in my office gives me a beep to say the ESD News has arrived. When I click back, the...

score:6, 07/05/1990, ,