A Lament from the Countryside
By Donella Meadows
–July 7, 1988–
As I write, the sun, low in the west, is just shining out from beneath storm clouds. This is the third bank of clouds to come over this month, drop ten minutes of soft rain, and pass on. A few minutes ago I went out and scratched in the garden with a hoe. Under the damp [...]
The Greenhouse Effect Meets the Press
By Donella Meadows
–June 30, 1988–
Thanks to the Midwest drought, reporters have caught on to the greenhouse effect. The phones of climatologists and environmentalists have been ringing off the hook. Experts on long-term climate change are quoted on the front page of the paper, asked to testify before Congress, interviewed on the “Today” show. Is the drought the first sign of [...]
Dear Folks: June 26, 1988
Dear Folks, It’s Sunday morning and the smell of Pine-Sol is wafting upstairs — Ruth must be washing the kitchen floor. Helen is running the vacuum cleaner in the living room, and in awhile I’ll quit writing and clean the upstairs bathroom. It’s busy-bee day around here.
Outside it’s gray and cool, which is a hopeful sign, because, like much of the [...]
The Strength of the Nation Is in Its Two-Headed Nails
By Donella Meadows
–June 23, 1988–
I am proud of my country in many ways, but it never occurred to me to be proud of its two-headed staging nails, until Dmitry Kavtaradze identified them as a secret of our national success.
Dmitry is visiting as part of a USA-USSR exchange program in environmental education. At home he is a professor of biology and [...]
The Earth and the Nation Do Not Need More Plutonium
By Donella Meadows
–June 16, 1988–
The element called plutonium did not exist on earth until 1941, when Glenn T. Seaborg made the first measurable amounts of it by bombarding uranium with neutrons. Soon the government was working feverishly to accumulate enough plutonium for an atomic bomb.
It took just 13 pounds of plutonium to level the city of Nagasaki.
Plutonium is deadly not [...]
