The Strength of the Nation Is in Its Two-Headed Nails
By Donella Meadows
–June 23, 1988–
I am proud of my country in many ways, but it never occurred to me to be proud of its two-headed staging nails, until Dmitry Kavtaradze identified them as a secret of our national success.
Dmitry is visiting as part of a USA-USSR exchange program in environmental education. At home he is a professor of biology and [...]
Trading Debt for Nature Instead of Nature for Debt
By Donella Meadows
–April 14, 1988–
It is a tragedy, but not an accident, that the world’s most threatened tropical forests are in some of the world’s poorest and most indebted countries. The very poverty of those countries destroys the forests. Governments, to pay at least the interest on their debts, encourage logging companies to take timber. Forests are turned into pasture [...]
Problems are Interconnected — And so are Solutions
By Donella Meadows
–February 18, 1988–
One of the favorite maxims of environmentalists is that Everything is Connected to Everything Else. That idea is usually delivered with a heavy charge of negativity — if you do something stupid in one place, it will lead to bigger problems somewhere else, or horrible disasters sometime in the future. Your ecological misdemeanors will come back [...]
The Stock Market Crash — Layers of Causes
By Donella Meadows
–November 12, 1987–
By now we’ve heard hundreds of theories about The Cause of the stock market crash. It was the greed of the yuppies that did it, or the German mark, or the August trade balance. It was program trading. It was the government deficit.
We love single, simple causes, though we know that in this complex world causation [...]
Prophets of Depression Are Without Honor in Any Country
By Donella Meadows
–October 22, 1987–
Back in the booming 1920s, when Wall Street was the glamor capital of the world, when the rich were getting much richer and the poor were invisible, when a conservative government was cutting taxes, when people were inventing ingenious ways to spend money they didn’t have, and when the only conceivable direction was up, one person [...]
