Donella Meadows’s Posts

• Growth Me Out to the Max

  The state of the planet is grim. Should we give up hope? 0

  Posted 8 years, 6 months ago

  Note: Donella Meadows died on 20 Feb. 2001. The following is excerpted from her story about writing The Limits to Growth in 1972. Limits was translated into 26 languages and sold more than 9 million copies.

   

  COMPUTER PREDICTS WORLD COLLAPSE

   

  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. Within a few months we were reading headlines like the one above with complete astonishment.

  

  We didn't think we had written a… Read More

• Polar Bare Naked

  Climate change is threatening Arctic critters 0

  Posted 8 years, 9 months ago

  The place to watch for global warming -- the sensitive point, the canary in the coal mine -- is the Arctic. If the planet as a whole warms by one degree, the poles will warm by about three degrees. Which is just what is happening.

  

  Polar bears are walking on thin ice.

  Ice now covers 15 percent less of the Arctic Ocean than it did 20 years ago. In the 1950s that ice averaged 10-feet thick; now it's less than six-feet thick. At the current rate of melting, in 50 years the… Read More

• The Milky Way

  Are we losing touch with good, simple things? 0

  Posted 8 years, 9 months ago

  Years ago, when I went out to my new chicken house and found the very first freshly laid egg, I stared at it in awe. "How did that hen do that?" I wondered. She takes in grain and bugs and kitchen scraps and turns them into an egg. Shell on the outside, white and yolk on the inside, all proper and perfect. Under the right conditions (or hen) that egg could even become a chick. Just amazing!

  

  I still think every egg is a miracle, though they appear on our farm by the dozen… Read More

• Electric Slide

  Deregulation in California didn't help consumers, or the environment 0

  Posted 8 years, 9 months ago

  As blackouts roll through California, the New Hampshire Supreme Court cleared the way for electrical restructuring, while a Vermont utility assured legislators that what is happening out West can't happen here.

  Why not?

  

  The powers that don't have to be.

  As I hear people try to explain California's electricity problem, I wonder whether anyone really understands the market system. We discuss it endlessly, we have whole university departments to study it, we nearly worship it. But when we say things like "competition will bring down rates," I wonder if we know what… Read More

• Feeling Bushed

  Let's hope campaign finance reform saves the day 0

  Posted 8 years, 9 months ago

  I will never believe he won. I'll always think he got a minority of both the popular and the electoral vote. To me he'll always be President-Under-False-Pretense.

  

  The president-elect prepares to step up to the plate.

  Well, but you know, the Rs would feel the same way if a few hundred Florida votes had tipped the other way. Only worse. If the tables were turned, the Rs would be whipping up their talk radio attack dogs, organizing more threatening mobs, turning over rocks looking for grounds for the next impeachment. At least… Read More

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