Donella for Climate Action

In September 21, 2014, we attended the largest climate march in history.

Advertising poster for the climate marchWhile world leaders gathered in NYC for a UN summit on the climate crisis, where UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon  implored governments to support ambitious new climate policy, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in a powerful call to action.
Below are pieces written by Donella Meadows that gave us inspiration at the time of the march and are helping us now in the daily individual and organized actions on climate.

The Greenhouse Effect Meets the Press 6/30/1988
The public tends to approach the future asking what will be, not what can be created. How bad will the warming be? What will we have to endure? But the crucial message is not about what will happen, but about what we can do to head off disaster.

Dana urges us to shift the way we think and talk about climate change; we should spend less time speculating about possible impacts and more time envisioning the planet that we want to live in; we should not let the potential and inconveniences of preventing climate change paralyze us from learning how to live in harmony with our planet when the alternative is full-blown climate change.

The People Should Do It, the Government Should Do It 2/9/1989
The people nearly always lead first. When perfectly fine folks get into big government and big corporations, they become timid and unimaginative…If I were responsible for billions of dollars or millions of people, I’d be conservative too…But individuals can be adventurers…They’re also the ones who put the pressure on, so the Powers That Be WILL follow. 

On the fence about attending the People’s Climate March? This might be just the nudge you need. Your actions matter, and this is a perfect opportunity to pressure the great powers of the world to make changes.

The Planet Is Not in Danger, Our Ideas Are 8/24/1989
I think we wildly overstate the case because we would rather talk about Planetary Doom than about the real threat, which is much closer to home and much more unthinkable — unthinkable, because it is a threat to our very thoughts. What is in danger is not the planet, not life on earth, not even human life, but some ideas that are dear to us.

The planet will keep orbiting the sun no matter what. However, it seems easier to talk about planetary doom than to contemplate that many of our recent social and economic experiments are not working. Dana calls upon us to dream up ideas that will are compatible with the planet.

101 Things you can do About the Greenhouse Effect 10/26/1989
I’m not willing to be that fatalistic. I believe in good old self-serving human rationality. I think that anyone, however lazy or greedy, who looks at the full costs and benefits of preventing climate change, as opposed to enduring it, will see that there is no better payoff on the planet than greenhouse prevention.

Preventing full-blown climate change need not be so daunting! We do not have to save the world, “instead we have an opportunity to build a better one.” There are so many not-very-glamorous but effective things we can do to restore our world, and Dana lists a number of ideas here.

Greenhouse Extremists- On Both Sides 2/22/1990
The Do-Something crowd would advocate negotiating — the sooner the better — a fair compensation scheme to distribute the minimal costs and the enormous benefits of avoiding a wasteful, polluted, crowded, unforested, overheated world.

Let us be clear that doing nothing about climate change does not reflect neutrality, it reflects a commitment to the tiny number of extremists who believe that climate change may not be occurring. Dana wrote this piece during a time when the facts of climate change were still hotly debated, but her message and encouragement to do something remain timeless.

A Scientific Consensus on Global Warming 10/11/1990
A few weeks ago I was in a meeting at which strategic planners from multinational corporations — many of them oil and car companies — were discussing these results. One of them said that the evidence was quite sufficient to justify taking action to prevent further global warming. We took a straw vote to see how many agreed. With the businessmen, as with the scientists, it was nearly unanimous.

This was 24 years ago. The evidence is there, the individual will is there. It is time for us to take serious action on a systems level.

The Laws of the Earth and the Laws of Economics 12/12/1996
We don’t get to choose which laws, those of the economy or those of the Earth, will ultimately prevail.  We can choose which ones we will personally live under — and whether to make our economic laws consistent with planetary ones or to find out what happens if we don’t.

The People’s Climate March was about demanding “a world with an economy that works for people and the planet.” Dana sheds light on what that more humane, ecological form of economics may look like in this piece that demonstrates the inconsistencies between human economics and the laws of planet Earth.

 

Quotes:

As you prepare t-shirts, posters, and more for your climate action, feel free to draw upon the poignant words of forever-activist Donella Meadows!

“Challenging a paradigm is not part-time work. It is not sufficient to make your point once and then blame the world for not getting it. The world has a vested interest in not getting it; the point has to be made patiently and repeatedly, day after day after day.”

  • “The environment is not one player on the field; it IS the field. It holds up, or fails to hold up, the whole economy and all of life, whether the spotlight is on it or not.”
  • “Humanity cannot triumph in the adven­ture of reducing the human footprint to a sustainable level if that adventure is not under­taken in a spirit of global partnership.”
  • “Freedom means the right to protect all the most precious aspects of one’s life — including the air, the waters, the soils, and the forests —against all who would assault them — even one’s own government.”
  • “The question is not: how much will it cost to avoid global climate change? It is: how much will it cost to SUFFER global climate change, and who says, and how do they know, and to what interest groups are they beholden?”
  • “Sustainability need not mean sacrifice. It could mean a better world.”
  • “As important as it is to understand that there’s collapse ahead, it’s as important to understand that there’s possibility of a sustainable world ahead.”
  • “This is the question that will be foremost in a sustainable world: to ask where are we going? Really? What is this progress for? What is this growth for? What is this economy for? What is this planet for and what is our purpose on it?”
  • “The economic game, as currently structured, focuses on symbols instead of life.”
 

 

 

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About The Donella Meadows Project

The mission of the Donella Meadows Project is to preserve Donella (Dana) H. Meadows’s legacy as an inspiring leader, scholar, writer, and teacher; to manage the intellectual property rights related to Dana’s published work; to provide and maintain a comprehensive and easily accessible archive of her work online, including articles, columns, and letters; to develop new resources and programs that apply her ideas to current issues and make them available to an ever-larger network of students, practitioners, and leaders in social change.  Read More

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