Farming Can Be Both High-Yield and Sustainable
by Hal Hamilton
— June 17, 2002 —
Dennis Avery is the leading challenger of sustainable agriculture, and he sets up “high-yield” agriculture as its opposite. Why can’t high-yield agriculture also be sustainable?
Unfortunately, Avery seems less interested in exploring the future of farming than in selling industrial agriculture. He claims that industrial methods are the best way to preserve nature and feed [...]
Financial Meltdown — Many Theories, Many Futures
By Donella Meadows
–October 1, 1998–
There’s a small upside to the big downside of the global financial implosion. We get to be amused by theories about why it is happening.
Scandals in Washington. Allen Greenspan. Panic about the turn of the millennium and the Y2K computer bug. The too-tight relationship between Japanese banks and the Japanese government. The Russian mafia, the coming [...]
A New Society for a New Economics
By Donella Meadows
–November 3, 1994–
When economist Herman Daly convened the first meeting of the International Society for Ecological Economics in Washington in 1990, he expected 60 or so people to show up, few of them economists. Traditional economists thought of ecological economics, insofar as they thought of it at all, as distinctly daffy.
To Daly’s surprise, that first ISEE conference drew [...]
The Silence About GATT
By Donella Meadows
–October 20, 1994–
If NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) was controversial, GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) should be inflammatory. NAFTA linked the economies of Canada, the United States, and Mexico in a “free trade” zone; GATT links the world. NAFTA had weak agreements to protect labor and the environment; GATT has none.
But the nation [...]
A Farewell Address by the World Bank’s Most Outrageous Economist
By Donella Meadows
–February 3, 1994–
Six years ago, when the World Bank hired Herman Daly, those who knew his work were amazed. Daly is, depending on your point of view, either the most dangerous economist in the world, or the most visionary. For years he taught economics at Louisiana State and quietly wrote articles that stood much of economics on its [...]
