We Have The Money: But the budget doesn’t reflect our real needs
By Donella Meadows
–Autumn 1988–
Dana Meadows is a well-known pioneer in the field of sustainability. She is a Dartmouth educator, a co-author of the ground-breaking Limits to Growth, and now a principal organizer of the Balaton Group. She writes a column called The Global Citizen which should be carried by your local newspaper. If not, write to your editor – and to Dana at [...]
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 [...]
The New American Scarcity
By Donella Medows
April 7, 1988
We can’t afford to keep the post offices open full time. We can’t fix the roads or educate our children properly. Whenever a political candidate proposes to fight drugs or shelter the homeless, the other candidates respond in a chorus, “But where are you going to get the money?”, as if money has suddenly become scarce.
In [...]
A Crack in the Mindset of Nuclear Madness
By Donella Meadows
–November 26, 1987–
You could welcome the Reagan-Gorbachev summit as a historic breakthrough. The Intermediate Nuclear Force agreement, the first ever to reduce the nuclear arsenal, may mark a permanent reversal of the arms race, the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons.
Or you could say that the whole business is just a show, a meaningless reduction of a [...]
Incinerator Blues, Part 4: Why Not Recycling?
By Donella Meadows
–September 24, 1987–
Most everyone involved in the Great National Garbage Problem would agree on the following propositions:
Landfills are better (and more expensive) than open dumps; they reduce smell, rats, and pollution of air and surface water. But landfills take up space and pollute groundwater.
Mass-burn incinerators are better (and much more expensive) than landfills; they take less land and [...]
