A World Food Production Quiz
by Donella Meadows
— August 10, 2000 —
In some ways the world food situation hasn’t changed for decades. There are still millions of starving people. There are still places where so much food is grown that it has to be thrown away. Fertilizers and pesticides pollute the countryside; soil erodes; groundwater tables drop. Every year when the new statistics come out, [...]
Mad Cows, Mad Sheep, Mad Elk, Mad People
by Donella Meadows
— July 27, 2000 —
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (known familiarly as CJD) is something you do not want to get. Your brain degenerates, piece by piece. First you feel depressed, then you have trouble coordinating. You lose sight, speech, motor control, as the disease travels through the brain. When it reaches the control centers for breathing or heartbeat, you die.
Medical [...]
Le Monde n’est pas une Marchandise. Moi Non Plus. (The World is not For Sale. Me Neither.)
By Hal Hamilton and Donella Meadows
–July 13, 2000–
Jose Bove milks 250 sheep in the Larzac region of France, a rocky, windswept place where you would think no farmer could produce anything. But Bove turns sheep milk into one of the gastronomical treasures of the world, Roquefort cheese. Bove is a leader of the local Roquefort producers association and of the [...]
Dear Folks: June 25, 2000
Dear Folks,
Warm, breezy summer afternoon, clouds coming up, severe thunderstorm warning. That’ll be par for the course; it has rained nearly every day this month, wonderful for the veggies, disaster for the hay.
Farmers are never satisfied. Dear God, dear Universe, dear Weathermaker, it would be so simple. Four days of bright, warm, breezy sunshine followed by an overnight inch of [...]
Dear Folks: May 28, 2000
Hello, Dear Folks!
It’s Memorial Day Monday, early morning, cool and beautiful outside. I wouldn’t be inside except that I’ve been out the last two days solid, I’ve put this letter off too long, and I have a minute before Marsha calls me for chicken-coop building.
We have our nice gypsy-mobile chicken house for the layers, but our brood of this year’s [...]
