Farming Nature in Holland
by Marleen van den Top, Anton Stortelder, and Hal Hamilton
— July 19, 2002 —
We can glimpse one future for agriculture by taking a trip to the land of tulips and Gouda cheese.
Holland is one of the densest populated agricultural countries in the world, and the Dutch people place a premium on nature. They created a government fund to support what [...]
Two Mindsets, Two Visions of Sustainable Agriculture
by Donella Meadows
— July 29, 1999 —
“I guess you must be in favor of pesticides,” concluded a Monsanto public relations guy, after I objected to his company’s genetically engineered potato.
“I guess it’s OK with you if people starve,” said a botanist I deeply respect, with whom I have carried out a fervent argument about genetic engineering.
Accusations like these astonish me. [...]
Sand County Almanac Fifty Years Later
by Donella Meadows
— January 21, 1999 —
In 1949 a small book was published shortly after its author, Aldo Leopold, died of a heart attack while fighting a forest fire near his homestead in rural Wisconsin. The book was a collection of his nature writings, crotchety writings, lyrical writings, praise for nature and manifestos for people from a man who spent [...]
Eating into Resilience Saves Money — in the Short Run
By Donella Meadows
–July 16, 1998–
I’m told there are two million programmers working full time to get the Y2K “millennium bug” out of our computers. Judging from my email, I’d guess there are another two million discussing the problem, warning about it, hyperventilating about it.
Not that there isn’t a problem. To save time and computer memory, early programmers wrote only the [...]
How Much Is Nature Worth? Who Says? Who Cares?
By Donella Meadows
–May 22, 1997–
Well, folks, now we know. Nature is worth $33 trillion dollars a year. That’s a medium estimate. The real value could be as low as $16 trillion or as high as $54 trillion.
To put those numbers in perspective, the value of the entire output of the world economy each year is $18 trillion. That comes to [...]
