Impacting Nature — The Damage Isn’t Always Near at Hand
By Donella Meadows
–August 18, 1994–
As they trawl the seafloor for groundfish in the Gulf of Maine, fishing vessels scrape up everything on the bottom, including sponges. Sponges are nursery habitats for young cod. Therefore one fishery is destroying another. That same fishery is overfishing, so it’s also destroying itself.
Hunting whales, says a new report, may do more than eliminate whales. [...]
How to Fight Superstore Sprawl
By Donella Meadows
–August 4, 1994–
The Wal-Mart battle around here has simmered down for awhile. The planning board turned down the company’s application on the grounds that the store (plus another proposed discount store) would bring at peak shopping times 1300 more cars an hour to an already jammed area. Expanding access roads to handle that traffic would cost 3-4 million [...]
First Campaign Reform, Then Health Reform
By Donella Meadows
–July 28, 1994–
Last week, through a stroke of luck, I signed onto a $50-deductible health care plan and discovered how the other half lives — the folks with good health insurance.
Imagine! I don’t have to walk around for months with an ache or lump wondering if I can afford to take it to a doctor! I don’t have [...]
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 [...]
A Compulsive Compromiser Makes a Bad President
By Donella Meadows
–July 21, 1994–
Say there’s something you really want — environmental quality, for example — but you make a compromise. You sacrifice 30 percent in order to get 70 percent.
If you do that twice, you’ve lost half of what you wanted. Do it ten times and you end up with less than 3 percent.
That calculation applies to anything you [...]
