Have You Got a Minute?
By Donella Meadows
–December 31, 1987–
I read somewhere that 8500 McDonald’s hamburgers are sold every minute. How on earth could they know that? I wondered. What, if anything, does that number mean?
Of course it can’t mean that precisely 8500 hamburgers — no more, and not one Big Mac less — are sold each and every minute. The actual numbers each minute, [...]
What Would the World Be if There Were No Hunger?
By Donella Meadows
–December 17, 1987–
About one out of every eight persons on earth is chronically hungry. The daily death toll from hunger is around 35,000 people, equivalent to 100 fully-loaded jumbo jets crashing EVERY DAY. Most of the victims are children.
Suppose we put a stop to that devastation. What would happen? I don’t mean what process would we go through [...]
Hunger and Surplus Rise and Fall Together
By Donella Meadows
–May 7, 1987–
The simultaneous occurrence of hunger and of mountains of surplus food is obscene. It’s also expensive. And it’s persistent, in spite of hunger-reduction and surplus-reduction policies of many governments the world over.
Last year the United States, Japan, and Europe spent $100 billion to protect their farmers against low prices caused by agricultural overproduction. Half that amount [...]
All the Nations Can’t Feed Themselves, but All the People Can Be Fed
By Donella Meadows
–April 9, 1987–
In the “developing countries” there were 1.7 billion people in 1950. Now there are 3.6 billion. There will be 4.9 billion by the year 2000 and 8.8 billion by 2100, according to U.N. projections.
Can all these people be fed? Are the soils and waters of the earth sufficient to provide for them? Or are overpopulation and [...]
Three Million Pounds of Food a Month
By Donella Meadows
–March 5, 1987–
Four years ago Lee Stuart was in San Diego working on her Ph.D. in systems ecology. Now Dr. Lee Stuart lives in the Bronx, where she helps distribute 360,000 pounds of food a month to 8,000 families. That’s not where she thought her doctorate would take her.
While Lee was writing her thesis, she was also a [...]
