The Hottest Year Yet
by Donella Meadows
— January 28, 1999 —
OK, all you movers and shakers and impeachers in Washington, here’s a hypothetical scenario that I hope might shift your attention to something important.
Suppose the stock market starts to sink, slowly, subtly, with ups and downs, but the dominant direction is down. Suppose over an extended, agonizing time the Dow-Jones drops by 30 percent. [...]
Weeping for the Shrimp and the Zambians and the Macaques
by Donella Meadows
— January 7, 1999 —
By nature I’m an optimist; to me all glasses are half-full. Though I spend my days with news about the global environment — news that is rarely uplifting — I can usually spot a light at the end of the tunnel, a silver lining, a way out of trouble.
But every now and then I [...]
Eating into Resilience Saves Money — in the Short Run
By Donella Meadows
–July 16, 1998–
I’m told there are two million programmers working full time to get the Y2K “millennium bug” out of our computers. Judging from my email, I’d guess there are another two million discussing the problem, warning about it, hyperventilating about it.
Not that there isn’t a problem. To save time and computer memory, early programmers wrote only the [...]
As Individuals We Learn, As Organizations We Resist
By Donella Meadows
–March 20, 1997–
Though we humans grandly call ourselves Homo sapiens, “man the wise,” we also carry on a constant debate about how smart we really are. The argument goes on, because the answer isn’t obvious. There’s plenty of evidence of our brilliance and of our enduring foolishness.
The ultimate intelligence test is coming from the environment. Are we smart [...]
The Laws of the Earth and the Laws of Economics
By Donella Meadows
–December 12, 1996–
The first commandment of economics is: grow. Grow forever. Companies must get bigger. National economies need to swell by a certain percent each year. People should want more, make more, earn more, spend more, ever more.
The first commandment of the Earth is: enough. Just so much and no more. Just so much soil. Just so much [...]
