Accelerating with a Foggy Window on an Icy Road
By Donella Meadows
–April 16, 1992–
The human population grows by 95 million people a year and degrades its fertile land by 64 million acres a year. Any moderately intelligent Martian could take one look at those numbers and conclude, “That can’t go on very long.”
Each year 40 million acres of tropical forest fall to chainsaws and cattle. Overfishing has reduced the [...]
We Can’t Go On Growing This Way
By Donella Meadows
–April 2, 1992–
Twenty years ago there were 3.6 billion people in the world. Now there are 5.5 billion. In another twenty years, according to United Nations projection, there will be 7.5 and by the end of the next century 12.5 billion.
In 1970 the world had 250 million automobiles. In 1990 there were 560 million. Still only about 10 [...]
Hair of the Dog That Bit You
By Donella Meadows
–January 23, 1992–
“Growth!” promised the president when he showed up in depressed New Hampshire last week and posed for a photo-op with a cow.
“Growth!” commands Alan Greenspan, as he cranks interest rates down by a whole percent at a time, hoping the economy will turn around before he hits zero.
“Growth!” chants every Congressperson, CEO, and business publication, offering [...]
Twenty Years of Destruction and Progress
By Donella Meadows
–December 5, 1991–
Twenty years ago I would have been writing this column on a manual typewriter. Today I’m writing it on a laptop computer that fits inside my briefcase with room to spare. The computing power of this little laptop would have occupied a space as large as my office 20 years ago.
I’ve been using the computer to [...]
When All Nature Flows Through Human Hands
By Donella Meadows
–July 18, 1991–
In 1986 a group of ecologists at Stanford published a paper in the journal Bioscience that made scientists’ hair stand on end. They calculated that human beings now control 40 percent of the planet’s land-based net primary productivity.
That number would have hit the front pages, if more people had understood what it meant.
The “net primary productivity” [...]
