Urban Growth Means Lower Taxes – And Other Myths
by Donella Meadows
— February 25, 1999 —
We need to bring in business to bring down taxes. This development will give us jobs. Environmental protection will hurt the economy. Growth is good for us.
If we’ve heard those arguments once, we’ve heard them a thousand times, stated with utmost certainty and without the slightest evidence. That’s because there is no evidence. Or [...]
Sand County Almanac Fifty Years Later
by Donella Meadows
— January 21, 1999 —
In 1949 a small book was published shortly after its author, Aldo Leopold, died of a heart attack while fighting a forest fire near his homestead in rural Wisconsin. The book was a collection of his nature writings, crotchety writings, lyrical writings, praise for nature and manifestos for people from a man who spent [...]
How Environmentalists Ought to Talk
By Donella Meadows
–February 29, 1996–
Environmentalists are too gloomy. They invent catastrophes to attract attention and money. Bugs and trees are what they care about, not people. They want to lock up resources. They use long words, like “biodiversity” and “endocrine disrupters.” They’re elitist city folk who care about nature only as a place to go backpacking.
Accusations like these used to [...]
On This Day We Examine the Failed Environmental Movement
By Donella Meadows
–April 20, 1995–
The journalistic attention cycle has arrived at the point where we talk about the environment only on one obligatory day per year — Earth Day — and then we declare it a defunct issue.
The cycle will turn, of course. The environment will be hot again, This is the way of the media. First they discover something [...]
Turtles, Eagles, Whales, Love, and Power
By Donella Meadows
–March 10, 1994–
“Why I Am An Environmentalist,” was the title of a paper handed in by one of my students — the kind of title that makes my heart sink. There may not be a whole lot of folks out there waiting breathlessly to hear why you’re an environmentalist, I told him. That’s true, he said, but you [...]
