What is a Wild Tomato Worth?
By Donella Meadows
–May 23, 1991–
The field botanist Hugh Iltis is best known as the discoverer of teosinte — the wild ancestor of the modern corn that feeds much of the world. Iltis, the Director of the University of Wisconsin Herbarium, has many more botanical discoveries to his credit, each of them, in his eyes, an argument for thinking hard about [...]
East Europe’s Agriculture in Ferment
By Donella Meadows
–September 6, 1990–
Seven hundred people are crowded into the central hall of the Budapest University of Economics (called until a few months ago the Karl Marx University of Economics). Just outside flows the Danube, brown and slightly toxic. The hall throbs with human energy, though it’s hard for anyone to take a breath. The air is hot, heavy, [...]
The Family Farm and Sustainable Agriculture Act of 1995
By Donella Meadows
–June 7, 1990–
BOONE, IOWA, SEPTEMBER 15, 1995: In Dick Thompson’s farmyard, big red barn on one side, classic white farmhouse on the other, President Barbara Bush signed into law today the most revolutionary Farm Bill in U.S. history. “For sixty years this nation’s agricultural policy has been getting more expensive, more complex, and more unjust. At the same [...]
The Cave-Man Approach to Cancer, Pests, and Noriega
By Donella Meadows
–January 18, 1990–
When modern doctors want to eliminate rogue cells that have formed a cancer, they bombard them with lethal radiation. They use linear accelerators, marvelous instruments that provide steady, reproducible streams of radiation from any angle at any dose.
Inevitably most of the radiation does not hit cancer cells. It hits healthy cells, killing them, deranging normal body [...]
Overdue Thanks to the Soil Bugs
By Donella Meadows
–November 16, 1989–
With a Thanksgiving feast spread before you, it’s easy to be thankful — for the food, for those who produced it from the farmers to the cooks, for all the blessings of life, including the unexplainable gift of life itself.
I bet it has never occurred to you, though, to be thankful for the most invisible contributors [...]
