Your Money or Your Life
By Donella Meadows
–December 23, 1993–
There’s a subversive little book on the best-seller list, a how-to book with the normal upbeat, chatty, you-can-do-it, here-are-the-stories-of-folks-who-did, how-to tone. If everyone followed this book’s advice, economic life as we know it would be transformed. The nation would be swept by an almost unacceptable wave of happiness. And the world would go a long way [...]
Dear Folks: October 24, 1993
Dear Folks,
It’s a glorious Sunday morning. Everything was coated with frost when the sun came up, but the air is warming fast, and we’re predicted to reach the 60s this afternoon. The maples are bare, but the oaks are still glowing orange and red. John is out front with his chainsaw, attacking the last of our log-length wood. Yorinde is [...]
Resisting the Advent of Ads
By Donella Meadows
–October 14, 1993–
In the Western world we’ve built up resistance to the visual, aural, and mental pollution of advertising. We doubt, we laugh, we turn off. The advertisers counter with brighter colors, louder noises, wilder images. We close down our senses.
Eastern Europeans had no chance to harden up before their ideological wall fell and multinational advertisers rolled over [...]
There Are Limits to Growth, But No Limits to Love
By Donella Meadows
–April 30, 1992–
From corporate boardrooms to primary classrooms to the World Bank to the poorest villages, people know that the human economy is taking too great a toll on nature, growing beyond sustainable limits. We know that, and we mourn the disappearing forests, soils, clear streams, clean air — and we worry. Some retreat into denial, but most [...]
Grosscon Versus Defendus for the Third World
By Donella Meadows
–June 6, 1991–
Amulya Reddy, a soft-spoken, urbane professor at the Indian Institute of Science, calls his government’s energy policy GROSSCON — growth-oriented, supply-sided, consumption directed. According to the Oxford Dictionary, Reddy says, “gross” means “flagrant” and “con” means “confidence trick.” The Indian energy policy is not different from the policies of most other nations of the world. That [...]
