Practical Visionaries
by Elizabeth R. Sawin
— May 25, 2007 —
This year my nine-year-old daughter has been studying inventions and inventors, and I’ve been learning about them through her. She particularly likes the stories about accidental inventors who were trying to do one thing, made a mistake, and recognized, sometimes years later, the usefulness of what they had done. She finds something very [...]
Electricity Restructuring and Faith in the Market
By Donella Meadows
–January 18, 2001—-
As blackouts roll through California, the New Hampshire Supreme Court just cleared the way for electrical restructuring, while a Vermont utility assures legislators that what is happening out west can’t happen here.
Why not?
As I hear people try to explain California’s electricity problem, I wonder whether anyone really understands the market system. We discuss it endlessly, we [...]
Closing the Barn Door on POPs
by Donella Meadows
— December 14, 2000 —
However environmentally permissive a Republican-controlled United States may be, other parts of the world are pioneering attitudes, technologies, and laws that could carry us safely through the 21st Century. As this week’s happy example, I offer the new global agreement on POPs, plus Sweden’s even better policy on the same topic.
POPs is the hot [...]
A Climate-Protection Technology But Not a Magic Bullet
by Donella Meadows
— February 24, 2000 —
The February issue of Scientific American tells of a new technology that makes me both rejoice and worry. It looks so great, so likely to relieve a massive environmental problem that there’s no way I could oppose it. But on second, third, and fourth thought, I have some doubts.
The technology is called carbon sequestration. [...]
Y No Y2K Disaster?
By Donella Meadows
–January 27, 2000—-
Civilization did not collapse into computational confusion on New Year’s Eve. The worst Y2K glitch I experienced was finding all my email files suddenly dated 1944, and that was easily fixed.
What happened? Or rather, what didn’t happen?
There is a self-congratulatory answer to that question: we were clever and fast and rich enough to stave off disaster. [...]
