Tools for the Transition to Sustainability
Chapter 8 of Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004)
By Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows
We must be careful not to succumb to despair, for there is still the odd glimmer of hope.
-Edouard Saouma, 1993
Can we move nations and people in the direction of sustainability? Such a move would be a modification of society comparable in scale [...]
Dear Folks: September 25, 1994
August 30, 1994
Logan Airport
Dear Folks,
It’s early to start a letter to you — I just finished sending out the last one. But I know what happens in September. There’s the Balaton meeting. Then there’s the accelerating pace of fall on the farm, and when it comes time to write your monthly letter, I get overwhelmed. So I’ll get ahead this [...]
Dear Folks: July 24, 1994
Dear Folks,
I’m somewhere over the Midwest, returning home from Colorado — the longest journey I’ve taken in six months, which is some kind of a travel-abstinence record for me. It’s been a lightning trip. Got on a plane in Lebanon NH Friday morning, arrived in Aspen at noon (their time), spent the afternoon and evening with a bunch of Monsanto [...]
On Getting a “MacArthur”
By Donella Meadows
–June 16, 1994–
This is how it happens. Out of the blue on a bright June morning you get a phone call from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, saying you have just been named a MacArthur Fellow.
You say, “This is a joke, right?”
They assure you it isn’t.
If you work in a field favored by the MacArthur [...]
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and Trust Your Common Sense
By Donella Meadows
–March 3, 1994–
Out there in readerland some folks live at an amazingly high level of environmental consciousness. For example, here’s part of a letter I got recently from a concerned Vermonter named Gretchen.
“I live on a steep hillside that no one wants to mow, and I’m using sheep to keep the land open. They fertilize the land as [...]
