Whatever Happened to the Greenhouse Effect?
By Donella Meadows
–July 16, 1992–
For 20 years I’ve recorded the date of every first frost, first robin, first apple blossom, first sweet corn on my farm. My records show clearly that springs have been coming sooner and frosts later. I’ve come to count on a growing season almost a month longer than when I first moved here.
What happens on one [...]
Hope And Ozone
What is the basis for hope – and action – in the face of climatic catastrophe? A “multilogue” among the editors of IN CONTEXT
–Summer 1992–
At the end of 1991, In Context executive editor Alan AtKisson sent out a brief electronic mail message to several contributing editors. The message – about a small news item mailed in by IC readers and computer [...]
Should Real Environmentalists Eat Beef?
By Donella Meadows
–May 14, 1992–
I became a vegetarian in the 1970s in India, because the people around me lived that way. I stayed a vegetarian when I came home, because young idealists back then were inspired by Frances Moore Lappe’s book Diet for a Small Planet. She convinced us that meat-eating was equivalent to taking grain out of the mouths [...]
Accelerating with a Foggy Window on an Icy Road
By Donella Meadows
–April 16, 1992–
The human population grows by 95 million people a year and degrades its fertile land by 64 million acres a year. Any moderately intelligent Martian could take one look at those numbers and conclude, “That can’t go on very long.”
Each year 40 million acres of tropical forest fall to chainsaws and cattle. Overfishing has reduced the [...]
An Outrageous Proposal in Preparation for UNCED
By Donella Meadows
–June 20, 1991–
Next June fifty thousand people will assemble in Brazil for the biggest environmental conference the world has ever seen. About ten thousand of those people will be heads of state from 160 nations and their entourages, there to make official international policy. The rest will be representatives from nearly every environmental group on the planet. They [...]
