What is This Thing Called Leadership?
By Donella Meadows
–February 11, 1988–
“Leadership,” the Presidential candidates are saying again and again and again. “You can count on me for strong leadership.”
Leadership is a perfect word for a campaign. It sounds wonderful, it requires no concrete promises, and no one is quite sure what it means. Whatever it is, we are supposed to want it, and to want it [...]
A Week in the Nation’s Capital – Who Will Win?
By Donella Meadows
–February 4, 1988–
It was six whole days before Superbowl Sunday, but in the capital city of the most powerful nation on earth minds, eyes, and television cameras were already turned toward San Diego. The evening news broadcast was devoted to a rock-video montage of cheerleaders, players, and fans chanting, “Go ‘Skins!”
Downtown the National Geographic Society was celebrating its [...]
Dear Folks: January 31, 1988 – February 20,1988
Dear Folks, As they say about New England, if you don’t like the weather, just wait a few hours and it will change. Two weeks ago we had wicked cold, now we have unbelievable January thaw. It’s nearly 60 out today and a beneficent sun is shining. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was March and load up the [...]
Call Off the Campaign, Our Minds are Made Up
By Donella Meadows
–January 28, 1988–
Scientific advances have a way of changing the world sneakily, while we’re all off paying attention to something else.
When the first paper on radioactive chain reactions appeared quietly in a German journal in the 1930s, no one could have foreseen the resulting energy systems, the weapons, the trillion-dollar expenditures, the lives lived in terror and lives [...]
Dear Folks: January 17, 1988
Dear Folks, “Home,” wrote my friend Bert DeVries from Holland when I moved away from Foundation Farm. “What does that mean to you now?” And recently my father wrote from Illinois, “it sounds like you have two homes now instead of one.”
Sometimes it feels like two homes and sometimes it feels like none. I have started thinking a lot about “home”, [...]
