Dear Folks: December 22, 1991
Dear Folks, It’s 3:00 Sunday afternoon on the day of the solstice, the shortest day of the year. The house is quiet, momentarily. John and Brenna are away for a week at the homes of various relatives. Don is at work. He’s a house-painter and wall-paperer, and he has a rush job to be done by Christmas, so he’s working this [...]
Twenty Years of Destruction and Progress
By Donella Meadows
–December 5, 1991–
Twenty years ago I would have been writing this column on a manual typewriter. Today I’m writing it on a laptop computer that fits inside my briefcase with room to spare. The computing power of this little laptop would have occupied a space as large as my office 20 years ago.
I’ve been using the computer to [...]
The Question Of Leadership: A good leader sets the right goals, gets things moving, and helps us discover that we already know what to do
By Donella H. Meadows
–Fall/Winter 1991–
In case you’ve given up looking, you’ll be happy to know that there is a newspaper column that goes beyond the cynical bickering that passes for political criticism. Since 1985 Donella H. Meadows – known to many as the coauthor of The Limits to Growth, to some as an adjunct professor at Dartmouth in environmental studies, and to friends [...]
Things Fall Apart; The Center Cannot Hold
By Donella Meadows
–November 28, 1991–
Every now and then I hear something in the news that reminds me of the chilling poem “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats. Usually the triggering event is a period of utter chaos in some distant part of the world:
Vietnam, Cambodia, Uganda, the Middle East.
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the [...]
Dear Folks: November 23, 1991
Dear Folks, It’s early morning on a Sunday that’s much warmer than we would expect for late November. There’s not a woodstove going anywhere in the house. (There could be six, if we were fully fired up). Heather and I are up, and so is Heather’s grandma, Joyce Long, who has driven up from Long Island, as she often does, to [...]
