A Speech I’d Like to Hear from President Clinton
By Donella Meadows
–June 17, 1993–
Here’s a speech I dream of hearing from President Bill Clinton, given on the day he discovers his backbone and starts to fight for his ideas….
My fellow Americans,
I have just informed the leaders of the Congress that I will veto the budget bill we all have worked so hard to shape. I must do that, because [...]
How Do You Stop a $44 Billion Gorilla?
By Donella Meadows
–June 10, 1993–
The company didn’t even identify itself in its first negotiations with city officials. For months we only knew that a “giant retail project” might come to our already overbuilt, traffic-jammed, edge-of-town commercial strip.
Despite the company’s coyness, we guessed it was Wal-Mart, which is spreading out of the South like kudzu vine. In just 10 years Wal-Mart [...]
Who Will Tell the People
By Donella Meadows
–June 3, 1993–
Whatever you do, don’t read the book Who Will Tell the People by William Greider. Especially not now, while the powers-that-be are putting up such spectacular resistance to balancing the budget, helping the economy, or reducing their own privileges. You’ll get too mad.
Innocent citizens like me can watch the short-sightedness and greed of our leaders year [...]
Slowly Silencing Spring
By Donella Meadows
–May 27, 1993–
“There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example — where had they gone? The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted…. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices, there was now no sound; [...]
Dear Folks: May 22, 1993
Dear Folks,
Every year I remember, too late, my vow from the past year never, ever to leave this farm in May — or in the month between mid-September and mid-October. Those are the times of rapid change, the times when we wake up every morning to something new. In May the daily newness is in the arriving voices of the [...]
