Nature is More than a Commodity
By Donella Meadows
November 21, 1991
One of the main problems of the market system, every economist knows, is that it doesn’t put a price on nature.
Brazilian cattle barons who burn down tropical forest for temporary pasture never compare the value of beef exports to the full value of the standing forest. U.S. developers can pick up a swamp for a song; [...]
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” [...]
What Does it Mean to be Green?
By Donella Medaows
December 13, 1990
The trouble with being politically Green is that you don’t fit on the left-right spectrum. You intersect that spectrum from an angle, agreeing with parts of both the conservative and the liberal agendas and objecting to other parts. “Not left, not right, but in front,” say the Greens. Since the traditional left and right have a [...]
Many Creation Stories, None of them Plausible
By Donella Meadows
–November 7, 1990–
“We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story,” says cultural historian Thomas Berry. “The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it is no longer effective.
“Our traditional story … shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purposes, and energized action. [...]
The Grass Doesn’t Pay the Clouds for the Rain
By Donella Meadows
–March 22, 1990–
“In the current vocabulary of condemnation there are few words as final and conclusive as the word ‘uneconomic’,” wrote E.F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful. “Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you [...]
