Wage a Quiet War Against War
By Donella Meadows
–January 3, 1991–
“Why aren’t you writing columns to oppose this war?” my peace-activist friends are asking me.
Because this is a time of rampant misinformation and great danger. The world is magnifying signals in strange and perverse ways. It’s possible that a loud anti-war noise could help bring on the war.
I do not want my country to go to [...]
Kindergarten Resolutions for Living Together
By Donella Meadows
–December 27, 1990–
“All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten,” says Robert Fulghum in an essay that is posted on bulletin boards all across America. “Share everything. Play fair. Clean up your own mess. Put things back where you found them.”
Those are obvious rules [...]
Dear Folks: December 23, 1990
Dear Folks, It’s two days before Christmas, it’s fifty degrees, it’s drizzling, the grass is green, and I’m depressed. I know that one can’t really ask for “normal” weather in variable New England, but this is ridiculous.
A week ago I thought the greenhouse curse had finally been lifted from us. It snowed all Sunday, a luxuriant, beneficent snow of the sort [...]
Letters from Africa, Help from America
By Donella Meadows
–December 20, 1990–
“The sheer brutality of the poverty is the hardest for us to get used to. It takes them so much energy just to live a day, it leaves me humble and in awe. Most Ugandans we have met are warm and friendly, quick to smile. Nothing short of a miracle to us that this is so.”
Charlotte [...]
What Does it Mean to be Green?
By Donella Medaows
December 13, 1990
The trouble with being politically Green is that you don’t fit on the left-right spectrum. You intersect that spectrum from an angle, agreeing with parts of both the conservative and the liberal agendas and objecting to other parts. “Not left, not right, but in front,” say the Greens. Since the traditional left and right have a [...]
