The Big Squeeze
By Donella Meadows
–July 17, 1997–
I don’t travel by air all that often, so I can’t get used to the squeezed-in seats. Every time I get in a plane it seems they’ve shaved another half-inch from the seat width, and the rows are an inch closer together. When the person in front of you leans back nowadays, his or her head [...]
The Ads Tell the Story of the Universe
By Donella Meadows
–May 1, 1997–
You don’t expect an unsettling indictment of modern advertising to crop up in a book about the birth of the universe. But there it is, right in the middle of the second chapter of physicist Brian Swimme’s new book “The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos.”
Swimme describes how children have historically learned their place in the world. [...]
A Week to Kick the TV Habit
By Donella Meadows
–April 17, 1997–
I can just see, ten or twenty years from now, a series of lawsuits that finally force executives of a few immensely profitable companies to admit that their product is addictive. They have always known that their business damages people and society. They manipulate its content to make it even more habit-forming and destructive. And they [...]
Don’t be a Turkey on the Day After Thanksgiving
By Donella Meadows
–November 21, 1996–
Is there any kind of ad that CBS, NBC, and ABC won’t run?
Presumably yes — obscene ads, violent ads, ads for cigarettes and other lethal drugs. And, Kalle Lasn discovered when he tried to buy 30 seconds of air time, there’s another kind of unacceptable ad.
Open on a pink plastic pig, wiggling, grinning, and belching. The [...]
Corporations Already Rule the World
By Donella Meadows
–February 8, 1996–
The title of David Korten’s new book — When Corporations Rule the World — does not refer to some theoretical future state. Korten’s point is that corporations already rule much of the world, and that the consequences aren’t good, not even for corporations.
His book is a detailed documentation — names, cases, numbers — of dysfunctional corporate [...]
