The Richest Ten Percent, The Poorest Forty Percent
By Donella Meadows
–July 6, 1989–
The 1989 World Bank Development Report came out last month, an event that created excitement nowhere except in the hearts of statistics freaks like me. No sooner had my copy arrived than I turned to my favorite table — Table 30, Income Distribution. I like to keep up with how the top 10 percent lives.
To my [...]
A Decade Lost, When There Isn’t a Decade to Lose
By Donella Meadows
–April 20, 1989–
It has been possible to accept, temporarily, the grinding poverty of Third World nations because we think of those nations as developing, following in our footsteps, just a bit behind.
It has been possible to contemplate without despair the rapid expansion of Third World populations, in the belief that as they get richer they will stop growing [...]
Being Homeless is More Than Being Without Shelter
By Donella Meadows
–December 22, 1988–
Last Christmas I was homeless, in a way, for awhile. I FELT homeless anyway, and the pain was sharp enough to give me a small insight — perhaps as much as we who have never really lacked a home can have — of what homelessness means and why it demands a larger response than building shelters.
In [...]
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 [...]
The War Between the Eco-Freaks and the Techno-Twits
By Donella Meadows
–June 26, 1986–
The population of the world in 1900 was 1.6 billion. By 1950 it was 2.5 billion. Now it is 5 billion. By the year 2000 the earth will mostly likely have 6.1 billion people.
Some people — let us call them eco-freaks — consider population growth the world’s worst problem. It exacerbates poverty, they say, and degrades [...]
